Must i use such a higher clocked XP? I would rather stay within the Athlon XP 2000. Is that a bad choice? I sort of don't want to go so far. I figure that will be completely fine for games from 2002 and down. I plan to run Windows ME on this build. And take my current P3 build and use 98se on it.

I doubt you'll find many Win32 titles that are highly speed sensitive. If you're worried, get an XP-M and downclock it as necessary.

Trank wrote:

Must i use such a higher clocked XP? I would rather stay within the Athlon XP 2000. Is that a bad choice? I sort of don't want to go so far. I figure that will be completely fine for games from 2002 and down. I plan to run Windows ME on this build. And take my current P3 build and use 98se on it.

If your motherboard has the KT400 or KT400A chipset, then it supports a maximum FSB of 333MHZ, which means you can go up to a Barton 3000+ (333 MHz FSB) CPU. I'm now referring to the standard desktop CPU's. Apparently, there was also an Athlon XP 3200+ (333 MHz FSB) version, but according to my motherboard's BIOS updates, it doesn't support this CPU (I think this was a very rare CPU).

AMD actually released up to 2800+ versions of the Thoroughbred core in 2002. So, going higher than an XP 2000+ would probably benefit you more (in terms of maximising performance for games that were released in late 2002 or early 2003).

Yeah im not worried about playing games that are time sensitive. Ill mainly be playing DOS games like Dark Forces 1, or Windows stuff like Dark Forces 2, X-Wing Alliance, Quake 3, Elite Force. (I could go on all day) I just want to be a bit conservative with the speed. I think ill shoot for a XP 2400+.

Most of those are Windows games 😀

Anyway, Athlon XP-M CPUs have to be unlocked so they can throttle. You can take advantage of that to tune your system as necessary. Alternately, all K8 CPUs allow downclocking by multiplier. so a S754/AGP system might work very well.

Thats cool actually. But ill be building a AMD5x86 and a K6-3 soon i hope. I wont need to worry about speed sensitive stuff for too long. And my Pentium 3 will go back to using a Quadro4 which works great for games that have Texel Alignment issues.

Well, then, might as well turn the dial to 11.

I have used also a KT400 board back in the day. It was my XP maschine for a long time. 😀

It's only a matter of time that i'll rebuild it. The only two open points are, to recap the board cause it's capacitor quality is not good anymore after 13 years 😵

I had a XP 2100+ (T-Bred B) and i was very satisfied with it.
Due to it's manufacture week (03/03), i was able to select the multiplier from 10 x (133Mhz) = XP1500+ (1333MHz) up to 13 x (166MHz) = XP2700+ (2166MHz).
Every setting inside the PCI / AGP specifications and also with default 1.65V.

So with an XP-M or XP with unlocked multiplier you can also have a wide range of frequencies.

My only reasoning for a faster cpu is why not max out the potential of your motherboard. It's why my NForce2 400 Ultra board runs an XP 2500 that is stable @ 1.65V @200mhz so its a 3200

Yeah i guess thats makes sense. Why not go all out.