My idea of an XP rig goes along the lines of LGA775 quad core / AM2 Phenom II X4 + 8800GTX / 2900XT - go big or go home right? But if you have to chose one machine out of the two listed above, I guess the Optiplex 745 would be the best choice... The i865 rig would make a great top-end Win98 gaming rig provided you replace that 3850 with a win98 friendly video card like a 6800 or 5900XT.

Late XP games can be demanding especially if you want to run them with full eye candy. I personally run 2004-2008 DX9 titles trough Steam on my XP rig (Q6600@3GHz, nforce 780i, 2x Leadtek 8800GTS SLi, 128GB SSD, 500GB HDD). I built the machine after noticing some DX9 games act up on my windows 10 machine (Early Warhammer 40k games, Freelancer, etc).

In contrast, if you're building an XP machine for browsing and light gaming, any of the two will do, but I guess you know all this already 😀

Thanks for the reply...
I agree with the go big statement but as I don't gather hardware on a frequent basis, I work with what I have acquired. I have a few other AGP cards floating around, mostly ATI I think, but the 3850 was the card to have when I got it. Crysis was a nice game to see on that card, atleast til the final fight and the card just couldn't keep up. It may have been the setup I had it in as well, Athlon XP 3000+ on a MSI K7N2 Delta2 board. I still have that board too come to think of it, maybe that can be one of those top-end 98SE builds.

There's a ridiculously huge range of hardware you can use for a windows xp machine, literally more than a decades worth of hardware.

Bullmecha wrote:

Thanks for the reply...
I agree with the go big statement but as I don't gather hardware on a frequent basis, I work with what I have acquired. I have a few other AGP cards floating around, mostly ATI I think, but the 3850 was the card to have when I got it. Crysis was a nice game to see on that card, atleast til the final fight and the card just couldn't keep up. It may have been the setup I had it in as well, Athlon XP 3000+ on a MSI K7N2 Delta2 board. I still have that board too come to think of it, maybe that can be one of those top-end 98SE builds.

I've found Athlon XP boards to be great for windows 98se builds, got an ASUS A7N8X-X with a 3000+ and a 9800XT and it runs beautifully(can use nglide for 3DFX support too)

for my XP machines I've currently got two:

AMD Athlon XP 3200+
2GB DDR400 Corsair XMS
ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe motherboard
Jeantech 480w PSU
Nvidia Geforce 6600LE 256mb AGP gfx card (to be replaced)
Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty Platinum PCI sound card
a few SATA hdds and 2 dvd drives + floppy disk drive
AKASA Clear Acrylic UV reactive case (my own original from back in the day Athlon 64 3500+ build)

The other system is:
AMD 64 FX55
4GB DDR400
550w XFX PSU
ATI Radeon HD5830 1GB gfx card
Creative X-Fi extreme Music sound card
and again a few SATA hdds and 2 dvd drives + floppy disk drive
Xigmatek Midguard case.

But way newer hardware can be used Also have a Phenom II x6 1090T system I could put XP on if I wanted 🤣. All depends on what you're going to do with it and what your target games are.
All the hardware i got pretty cheap, The problem with the Dell and other prebuilds is normally sucky power supplies or sucky motherboards or sucky form factors limiting hardware choice

For XP I am a fan of OEM systems as long as it is the right OEM system which usually means no systems designed for home use but the business models instead... usually.

I played with a custom XP box and swapped a dual core Celeron 2.6 GHz out for an i5 quad core 2500 and honestly it wasn't worth it to me. Quad cores were great for XP when it came to productivity but I just didn't see any reason for games. That's my experience. Late DirectX 9 games were better in Windows 7 from my experience as well (Grand Theft Auto IV, for instance). Of course I'm not using SLI or anything more powerful than a GTX 285 in XP either. I'm going more for compatibility and I think a fast dual core, 4GB RAM and a single GPU is the way to go. Your mileage may vary and hell... what do I know.

squareguy wrote:

For XP I am a fan of OEM systems as long as it is the right OEM system which usually means no systems designed for home use but the business models instead... usually.

The only OEM machines I like are 90's pentium, 486, 386 builds and so on. Lots of post 2000 OEM boxes have limited upgradeability / modding possibilities - especially in the video card department.

squareguy wrote:

I played with a custom XP box and swapped a dual core Celeron 2.6 GHz out for an i5 quad core 2500 and honestly it wasn't worth it to me. Quad cores were great for XP when it came to productivity but I just didn't see any reason for games. That's my experience. Late DirectX 9 games were better in Windows 7 from my experience as well (Grand Theft Auto IV, for instance). Of course I'm not using SLI or anything more powerful than a GTX 285 in XP either. I'm going more for compatibility and I think a fast dual core, 4GB RAM and a single GPU is the way to go. Your mileage may vary and hell... what do I know.

you're right of course but I had a Q6600 / P35 / 8800GTX rig back in the day (2007?) so that's what I'm going with 😜

That definitely looks like a tough choice between those two systems on the surface, but one of them is definitely better suited to late-XP era gaming.

I assume you meant Core 2 Duo E6400 in the Optiplex. This CPU will be several times faster than the Pentium 4, despite the huge clock speed difference. Its really amazing just how bad the P4s were in comparison to their later competition and successors (Athlon 64, Core 2). If it weren't for the P4's SSE2 instructions becoming useful as time went on, even the Athlon XP would still be more useful today.

Also, that Optiplex board may only be PCI-E 1.0a compliant (I looked it up) but it should still provide full x16 speed for your card, which would be more than enough for your needs.

There's really no question here if you plan on playing later XP-era games. The P4 system is cool in that it has an AGP slot and what is one of the more powerful AGP cards you can get... but the P4 just kills it and is way too limiting for the games that the HD3850 would allow you to play. It'd be like running a GTX 1070 on a Core 2 Duo.

Also, the 4670 is actually very similar in speed, and often times faster than the 3850, so you won't be losing graphics performance in most situations... you'll just be gaining a massive amount of CPU performance and efficiency.

AGP comparison chart :

Both 3850 and 4670 used for this test were HIS IceQ/IceQ3 versions.
Platforms :
LGA 775 - LINK
PGA 478 - LINK

Hope it helps 😀

The Asus P4P800 is one of the best Socket 478 boards, although I wouldn't consider 478/P4 being the best socket for a XP build, Id probably go for something later. I've got one put aside for a "super fast Win98 / WinXP duel build system.

I'm also in a similar position child wise (Kinda scary isn't it! but in a good way) I'd just mess around with hardware and find out what combination works best for your games and get it out of your system, I'm thinking 1 month for now having computers in bits may not be possible but at least I may? have time for a quick game of something?

agent_x007 wrote:

AGP comparison chart : http://i.imgur.com/WlErADZ.png […]
Show full quote

AGP comparison chart :

Both 3850 and 4670 used for this test were HIS IceQ/IceQ3 versions.
Platforms :
LGA 775 - LINK
PGA 478 - LINK

Hope it helps 😀

Interesting chart just keep in mind that the 775 system has a CPU that is several times faster than the 478 system.

Thanks for the extra replies....

Played with both the boards today and got an OC on the P4 3.2, currently on the Asus at 3.51 with stock volts and cooler, RAM is at 433. Will get to the long tests soon just poking around on the BIOS and such for now to see what will or won't boot.

Is that chart for the AGP versions of the cards? My 4670 is PCIe so I'm not sure if that chart shows the differences if it is for AGP versions. Good bit of info though, thanks 😀

Yes, it's for AGP cards only 😀
But AGP vs. PCI-e isn't that important in HD 4670's case.
I recommend checking GPU and VRAM clocks before comparing your results to mine tho.
Oh, and I used Crysis Benchmark Tool "gpu_benchmark" test.

PS. LGA 775 CPU is about ~2.2 times faster in single thread situation and about 4.5 times faster in multi thread than PGA 478 one 😉.
Still, CPU bottleneck in P4EE isn't that bad up to 4670/3850 😁 (at least in Crysis...)

Well, I don't own the EE but I see your point on the 775. Think I'll do some more testing as I have more to do on them as far as OC. After that I'll run that crysis bench to see exactly how they match up. I'll get some pics of the cpuz and such for the "play Crysis" thread after that.

Got way too many things to do around here along with all the hardware fun, my GF is gonna kill me 🤣 Oh well, hardware was made to be tinkered with and I shall endeavor to do just that. Until next time...