Ozzuneoj wrote:

Though I guess if we're talking about building one system to cover a huge range of XP games, one of AsRock's Socket 775 boards that had AGP and PCI-E would probably be the closest thing to having the best of everything.

nVidia's drivers make it hard to use multiple video cards under 98SE, doubt things are much better with the GeForce4 under XP, unfortunately.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

To me using a 64 Bit processor is a waste XP will never use it unless you the 64 Bit version, but we know how well supported that got.

You don't want to use 64-bit CPU because Win XP [x86 editions], can't use 64-bit instructions ?
...
(no comment)

OK. Try to beat those scores using 32-bit only CPU (Gallatin or Barton) or Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quad :
LINK
LINK
LINK
And I used Win XP x86 (OS type is on the bottom o the page),
Since XP can't use "full power" of Core i7 it should be easy - Good luck 😉

FYI : 64-bit capable CPU vs. Win XP x86
1) No 4GB RAM support (~3,5GB is max. what Win XP can do "out of the BOX").
2) 64-bit only programs will not work (they are usually optimised for Win 7 or later either way).

With a "pure" 32-bit CPU, you basicly are limited to Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (PGA 478) + few Prescott's on Intel side, and Athlon XP's on AMD's side - they all are simply not worth it when you can get Phenom II's or Core i5's (with Core 2 Duo's as perf/$ champ).

Like @firage said earlier, you go either game specific (and build hardware around certain game), or pure performance (taking budget or power/temps into consideration).
Performance/$ is also good way to go - but that depends on budget you got.

Core 2 type CPU's, can go as low as *1200MHz and even **800MHz (with x6 multi, and FSB must be downclocked to *800MHz [**533MHz FSB is possible on some Conroe motherboards]).
Core iX's... well my i7 3820 can do x12 multiplier (minimum), and with 100MHz base (or BCLK), that's 1200MHz.

@up
Core 2 Duo + GF 6800 Ultra (or 7900 GS with unofficial drivers 😉), in AGP slot, and you have top notch Win 98/Win XP combo PC 😀
MB examples : 4CoreDual-SATA2, 775Dual-VSTA, etc.
I DO NOT recommend going dual GPU (AGP + PCI-e) on ASRock boards for Win 98/Win XP dual boot.

As agent_x007 said you can get as low as 800MHz. My C2Q Q6600 could be underclocked to 800MHz on an Asus P5K-E motherboard.

One legitimate but uncommon reason to use a quad core under Windows XP would be multiboxing a game. For example I used to run 2+ copies of Dark Age of Camelot back in the day and having a multi-core CPU would have been a great help.

Yea I know that xp will work on 64 bit processors like c2d and higher, but it just seems wasteful to me, but thats just me. Most game well run good under a p4 + GF6800 and if it dosnt then most likely the game will still run on windows 8.1 even.

But like every one else was saying c2d or cheap to find and almost free even.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

Yea I know that xp will work on 64 bit processors like c2d and higher, but it just seems wasteful to me, but thats just me. Most game well run good under a p4 + GF6800 and if it dosnt then most likely the game will still run on windows 8.1 even.

Like I said on the first page of this thread, if you plan on doing any web browsing on this XP machine (or photo/audio editing), then multiple cores will definitely provide a noticeable improvement.

re: BioShock, I'd play it with DX9 + no-hassle EAX on XP instead. No ALchemy workaround needed. Another example would be Mass Effect 1, and some other ca 2007 games.

re: Splinter Cell, iirc GF4Ti/FX5800 (but not FX5900+) would be the choice for that game (with the fanciest-looking shadows), and they're something you can use for BOTH Win98 AND XP, so why not dual boot that instead. If the game can run under 98 all the easier.

re: CPU speed, as has been pointed out -- you can adjust the CPU speed via several means (tried ThrottleStop?), the most flexible would be with unlocked multiplier chips (though not necessary).

And just because 64-bit capability is a "waste" on XP 32-bit doesn't mean a Pentium 4 is justified!
Because... back to the above late EAX games -- if you can make EAX work perfectly on Vista/7+ then that's good. Otherwise... you'll want a fast XP rig. Also to play in higher res maxed up than you could with "period-correct" hardware.

So, my take -- XP "final" rig, not-so-overkill edition:

* Core2 X6800 (but E8500s are so damn cheap) or Athlon64 X2
* P35/P45 board if you go Core2 (should be cheap enough to get now, name brand included)
* 4GB RAM or more esp. if dual/multi-booting into other 64-bit OS
* SSD with a TRIM tool for XP
* SB X-Fi or at least Audigy 2/2ZS
* GTX 750 Ti (low watt and much much more powerful than a 6800) (btw, anyone tried 950?)
otherwise there are a lot of choice of GPUs for DX9 games

@Shagittarius
If you don't have any other use for the i7 920 & 580, why not? And even if you do, you can still dual/multi boot it.
SSD will still be a major performance/experience upgrade either way though.

All Core 2 based desktop CPU's (Celerons [DC's], Pentium DC's, Core 2 Duo's and Core 2 Quad's), have unlocked LOWER than stock multis ("unlocking" them only requires switching off SpeedStep/C1E).

So, a C2E X6800 is pointless if you only need lower than standard CPU multipliers.

I would add P965 chipset tho, because it has more-less the same features as P35, and may be cheaper and/or less in demand than P35/P45 (better quality MB for the same price).

^ That's why I said "adjust" and "most flexible" and "not necessary" 😉
The X6800 is my own target spec because I wanted to explore the higher multis as well using standard FSB and lower FSB (for use with ASRock Conroe865PE but that's another subject).

P965 looks good indeed. And sometimes a good 975X board can be found for pretty cheap as well. X38/X48 are a bit rarer/more expensive unfortunately.

firage wrote:

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Though I guess if we're talking about building one system to cover a huge range of XP games, one of AsRock's Socket 775 boards that had AGP and PCI-E would probably be the closest thing to having the best of everything.

nVidia's drivers make it hard to use multiple video cards under 98SE, doubt things are much better with the GeForce4 under XP, unfortunately.

I guess worst case scenario, dual booting two installations of XP on one rig is still better than having two systems simply to run some newer XP-era games and some older ones. That's probably the way I'd go if I were doing this kind of thing and there were multiple games I wanted to play that required a specific piece of hardware that was not up to par for other games.

Thankfully, I can barely think of any XP era games that I'd go out of my way to try to play on a period-correct system at this point, so I don't have to actually get into this mess myself. I do have the components for a pretty decent 98\XP system (Athlon X2 4200+, EpoX nforce 3 Ultra, 6800GT AGP, X-Fi) but you can certainly get a system that'd run many XP games much faster than this would.

I've actually considered just putting XP on a separate hard drive on my main system running a 2500K at 4.2Ghz with a GTX 970... throw in one of my old X-Fi cards (disable it in Windows 10) and it'd probably work great for anything that didn't require very specific hardware (like the Geforce 4 Ti shadow effects you mentioned... thankfully I'm not a Splinter Cell fan).

@archsan
Here are few things a C2E X6800 user should know before buying/playing with it :

1) Conroe rev. B2 (chip inside C2E X6800) - isn't good OC'er.
You should reach 3,6GHz quite easily (~1,5V Vcore), but anything higher requires massive Vcore increases.
1,6V may not be enough to stabilise it @ 3,7GHz (+ you will need a proper cooler to do it).

2) Since 3,7GHz is hard to do, "max." multi is also limited (266MHz x 14 = 3,73GHz).
Sure, you can lower FSB (200 x 19 = 3,8GHz), but that way you are limiting memory bandwidth available to CPU (and that is not exacly the best thing to do, when OC'ing to >3,7GHz).

Basic trade off :
Higher FSB + Lower Multi,
Lower FSB + Higher Multi,
Former is faster in most cases (if CPU Frequency is similar), but requires better board.

PS. My ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2, could do 3,2GHz on stock Vcore with X6800, it even booted on 3,46GHz, but Windows wasn't stable enough to login (higher Vcore required).

Good luck with your tests 😀

@agent_x007
Thanks for the info! I'll look more into the different steppings. The lower FSB is somewhat a necessity for the 865PE board to run on spec for best stability, so that x16 multi for even just a 3.2GHz Core 2 is already reeally nice for this other [rather pointless but hey] Win9x/XP "transition" AGP rig. 😀

Ozzuneoj wrote:

I've actually considered just putting XP on a separate hard drive on my main system running a 2500K at 4.2Ghz with a GTX 970

I haven't really searched, but has anyone with 970/980 found/tried a stable/working XP driver?
Some mentions here of 344.11 and (modded) 347.xx drivers: https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/7833 … ows-xp-drivers/

Perfect XP machine?

I dunno, I'd probably prefer XP over 7 in the case the system uses DDR instead of DDR2 (unless the system has only like 2GB or less)
So far, all the few systems with a multicore CPU got 7 and all the singlecore systems ended up getting XP. But to me it's mostly the RAM.
7 is nice because it's easier to access the net and if a system has only like 2GB RAM, it's not really suitable for me to use for lots of internet browsing anyway.

It kinda comes down to personal preference. I happen to like XP, so I will probably keep using it.

archsan wrote:

I haven't really searched, but has anyone with 970/980 found/tried a stable/working XP driver?
Some mentions here of 344.11 and (modded) 347.xx drivers: https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/7833 … ows-xp-drivers/

I use modded 347.xx drivers (or whatever version they are exactly, relatively recent anyway) on my 970. It 'works', but I cannot use 4k resolutions for some reason. When I set it to 2560x1440 or 1920x1080 or such, it works, and I get OpenGL and D3D support. Some things are a bit buggy though, such as Google Chrome. When i start it, I don't get a window. If I then go to the lock screen and back, the window shows.

Google Chrome drop support for Win XP/Vista in April 2016 (no updates/security fixes) : LINK

Scali wrote:

I use modded 347.xx drivers (or whatever version they are exactly, relatively recent anyway) on my 970. It 'works', but I cannot use 4k resolutions for some reason. When I set it to 2560x1440 or 1920x1080 or such, it works, and I get OpenGL and D3D support. Some things are a bit buggy though, such as Google Chrome. When i start it, I don't get a window. If I then go to the lock screen and back, the window shows.

Thanks! So it seems that the 900 series are a contender, though only the GTX 950 and 960 are officially supported on XP, looking from their specs page on geforce.com.

GeForce drivers for XP as late as July 2016 (!) (Fermi, Kepler & *some* Maxwell models):
http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/105040
release note
(only GTX 950 is listed in the pdf, 960 isn't but they're based on the same GM206 chip and search result for 960 / XP pointed to the above driver)
(just in case anyone else is interested: a simple inf mod could/might make the driver work for 970/980/980Ti, see this example)

Btw, the 4K/UHD issue is still mentioned in there, under "Unsupported Features Under Windows XP".

- DisplayPort 1.2 functionality is not supported, including increased bandwidth (HBR2 mode) and multi-display streaming. - 4k × […]
Show full quote

- DisplayPort 1.2 functionality is not supported, including increased bandwidth (HBR2 mode) and multi-display streaming.
- 4k × 2k @ 60 Hz tiled displays are not supported.
- G-SYNC technology
- NVIDIA Surround

Don't know about HDMI 2.0 though.

The standout thing about Maxwell cards is that they are much more efficient and run cooler as well (compared to previous gens), which should positively affect longevity. So it's good to know that we have more choices in addition to 750/750Ti.

My XP "rig"

AsRock A330ION with the max supported 4 gb ram (which becomes 3 after the mobo takes 0.5 for something and another 0.5 for the integrated Geforce 9). Runs super cool and super quiet. Pre 2005 games run like a dream.