FFXIhealer wrote:

Look, because I come from the single-core Windows XP crowd, I'd be supremely happy with a Pentium Dual-Core running around 3GHz for a Windows XP gaming rig. I think it would fit right in with that era's games, as long as the graphics card was up to snuff. I ran my XP laptop for 6 years without real issues on a single-core with no hyper-threading. Even my 2010 gaming rig's i7-860 ran at 2.8GHz for years with Windows 7. Core 2 Duo was "Windows Vista" territory to me, because I never stepped into the multi-Core arena until I was building a Vista system. I didn't hit 4GHz until I got my Skylake i7-6700K in 2015. I never did game on Vista, though. I built an every-day system and in that, I completely succeeded.

Hmmmm. Maybe I'll actually re-built a Vista gaming rig appropriate for the 2008/9 year. I did find my original Vista install disk, but it's Home Premium 32-bit. Anyone here have a 64-bit image? I'm sure the activation code doesn't care if it's 32- or 64-bit.

I have the Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit image. Do you have somewhere I could upload it to? My Google Drive doesn't have enough space left on it. The image is about 4GB. License key doesn't care if you use 32-bit or 64-bit as you guessed.

I guess I could try out Google Drive? It says the first 15GB are free.

maxwell GeForce GTX TITAN X with moded drivershttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63omFhP ... x=12&t=4s is the fastest gpu.
x79 asus rampage iv extreme black for motherboard
cpu i dont no what is the fastest or fastest oced
ram no idea...
m.2 to sata im guessing...
the gtx 960 ti 4gb is the last official gpu

dont no about sli 3 way or 4 way might be an evga bored.

dont no about amd stuff thow they had duel gpu cards. but i think the titan x stumps it.

full video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEEuUZkqsCk&t=526s

buckeye wrote on 2019-05-06, 19:58:

Azarien wrote:

I'm using Radeon HD7850 on my XP machine. I believe the last Radeon with XP support is HD7870, but I chose 7850 because it was significantly cheaper and not that much slower in benchmarks.

How far back does the game compatibility go with that card?

All the way. I'm currently using an i7 950 + HD 7970 for my XP rig. It's wired up to the same monitor as my modern PC, so I expect the XP rig to be able to run games at 2k 60FPS - hence the 7970. The i7 used to have a GTX 580 installed, but it struggled with Black and White 2 @ 2k - possibly because it only has 1.5GB of ram. The 7970 is silky smooth. So far the oldest game I've ran on it Sacrifice - more of a Win 2000 game I guess. I've also tried Black and White 1 (2001), GTA3, Red Faction and Max Payne - they all run well - but it's not what I use XP bulds for, as all these games run flawlessly on windows 98 and much older hardware. On XP I usually play Homeworld 2, Warhammer 40k Dawn of War, Black and White 2, Command and Conquer 3, UT2004, Chronicles of Riddick, STALKER and so on.

thrasher565 wrote on 2023-01-31, 18:59:

x79 asus rampage iv extreme black for motherboard
the gtx 960 ti 4gb is the last official gpu

not sure why the 960 is considered the highest official model, I have a gtx 980 and currently running the september 2014 winXP driver (launch date for the 980) version 344.11, and that has inf entries for the 980 by default so it straight up picked the card and just works, no need to edit anything... that seems pretty official... true they dont offer any XP driver downloads for anything above 960 currently, but I guess they once did and for some reason removed them later?

p.s. my asus p9x79 WS should give that rampage a good run for its money, feels better built and more stable and was also more expensive new... doesn't have the looks but it's certainly not losing in capability

Most of the "XP era hardware" here plays on a level that I couldn't even remotely afford to own in the Vista/7 days. 😕

i wanted to experiment with whats newest AMD Radeon that would work on XP somehow. All GCN 1 cards up to and including HD 7970 / 7990 and their rebrands such as the R9 280x work fine, thats well known, so, going further ahead, I bought a R7 260X, which is a GCN 2 card, and that works fine on XP with official 14.4 Pack 3 driver, out of the box no modding required, tested and confirmed.
Then I bought R9 290X which came out a few months after the 260X and is same GCN 2 architecture, however I cannot get this to work on XP. I tried adding lines for it in the inf file of the 260X driver, but device failed to start.
I also tried using the chinese iCafe driver, added lines in the inf file of that for the 290x, same thing, device failed to start. On another forum I see some guy was able to run a R9 Fury on XP, which is even newer GCN 3 card, by inf modding the iCafe driver, I wonder how he did that if I cannot make the 290X to work.... that said he never provided any screenshots for proof so I wonder if he was lying, or he's just editing something additional in the inf file that Im not?

Near the top where all the device IDs are listed I add:
"%AMD67B0.1%" = ati2mtag_R505, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_67B0

Then near the bottom where the card names are listed I add:
AMD67B0.1 = "AMD Radeon R9 290X"

Is there anything else I need to add/change in the inf file? Im under the impression that this is all thats needed? However with just this the 290x says device failed to start, so, yeah, Im either missing something or the 290X will not work on XP period

Massively powerful is ivy bridge xeon. E3-1280 V2 One core 4GHZ. All 4 core 3.7GHz. Or spend more E3-1290 V2; 4.1GHz one core, all cores 3.8GHz, you are limited to DDR3 1600 with or without ECC.
8 core E5-2667 v2 with faster memory DDR3-1866 ECC or registered. One core 4GHz, all 8 core 3.6GHz.

HP Z220 and Z420 still have windows XP drivers for these and either this processor too.

Cheers,

God Of Gaming wrote on 2023-02-01, 15:29:

thrasher565 wrote on 2023-01-31, 18:59:

x79 asus rampage iv extreme black for motherboard
the gtx 960 ti 4gb is the last official gpu

not sure why the 960 is considered the highest official model, I have a gtx 980 and currently running the september 2014 winXP driver (launch date for the 980) version 344.11, and that has inf entries for the 980 by default so it straight up picked the card and just works, no need to edit anything... that seems pretty official... true they dont offer any XP driver downloads for anything above 960 currently, but I guess they once did and for some reason removed them later?

p.s. my asus p9x79 WS should give that rampage a good run for its money, feels better built and more stable and was also more expensive new... doesn't have the looks but it's certainly not losing in capability

I have a Quadro M6000 running under XP .. its the Titan Maxwell, it works fine, also have a M4000 which is the GTX970 that also works fine under XP, they both require the INF modded drivers. (The M5000 is the GTX 980 so I see little reason why that shouldn't also should run fine under XP)

XP is a 1-2 CPU licence. Nothing less than 2 CPUs could be considered "fastest XP system"

however dual cpu motherboards usually cannot overclock, so an overclocked single cpu system can and will be faster than a non-overclocked dual cpu system

God Of Gaming wrote on 2023-08-02, 18:57:

however dual cpu motherboards usually cannot overclock, so an overclocked single cpu system can and will be faster than a non-overclocked dual cpu system

Only if he plans to overclock it.

Officially supported hardware ends somewhere around sandy bridge. Haswell boards are known to reliably support legacy boot, but sometime around skylake it switched to AHCI only.

It's possible to get at least a 9900k to install XP if you slipstream drivers. Ryzen 3000 is known to work as well. I wouldn't be surprised if you could get windows XP installed on just about any platform actually.

Somehow that makes it less fun 😒.

Vista released mid 2007, so if you consider XP hardware to be anything before that date it would be 65nm core2duo and maybe sli 8800gtx.

you can probably always install XP on anything newer including ryzen 7800x3d and i9-13900kf and newer, by just having a linux host os and setting up a winXP VM with real hardware pass-trough for graphics card and sound card and whatever else is needed, so really the main limit for XP would be the graphics card, as you just cannot go over a hd 7970 or a 980ti/titanX

Linux hosts and Windows VMs are so de rigueur these days.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-08-03, 09:34:

Linux hosts and Windows VMs are so de rigueur these days.

No? Not experiencing the real bare metal, having the feel of real GPUs like 7900GTX, GTX 285 or GTX 580, to play with in turn? 😀 You get the idea.

Emulation has their places but will not address all the hard ware you intended to emulate and "lacks" the hardware compatibility you wanted to investigate to fix the old issues..

Plus, performance is not there if you are trying to have performance equivalent of for example Xeon E3-1290 V2 or overclocked i7-3770K? Even the gen 12 i9 will not able to emulate that fast.

Cheers,

mothergoose729 wrote on 2023-08-03, 03:37:

Officially supported hardware ends somewhere around sandy bridge. Haswell boards are known to reliably support legacy boot, but […]
Show full quote

Officially supported hardware ends somewhere around sandy bridge. Haswell boards are known to reliably support legacy boot, but sometime around skylake it switched to AHCI only.

It's possible to get at least a 9900k to install XP if you slipstream drivers. Ryzen 3000 is known to work as well. I wouldn't be surprised if you could get windows XP installed on just about any platform actually.

Somehow that makes it less fun 😒.

Vista released mid 2007, so if you consider XP hardware to be anything before that date it would be 65nm core2duo and maybe sli 8800gtx.

So will a Haswell based system with a Intel Q87 Express chipset support XP?

Ive got a E3-1225 v5 (Skylake) on a C236 chipset thats running Windows Server 2012 R2 thats coming up for a rebuild in the coming weeks.
I think its UEFI does support booting in legacy mode but Ive not tried to install WinXP onto it...
I might give it a go to see if there are drivers that late on... SDI can usually come up with drivers for most things.

Couple of hours later**
I had a go at installing XP from a USB stick using Easy2Boot, XP SP2 MSDN ISO.
Installer gets into loading drivers in the text portion but blue screens telling me the BIOS isnt ACPI compliant and I should press F7 when it displays the F6 drivers message and it will disable ACPI etc etc.
Pressing F7 on boot then prevents any drivers from being loaded and it fails to find the hard disk because there are no controller drivers.
Ive got no USB floppy disk, and no onboard FDD controller to install it the old fashioned way.
I might be able to come up with a Haswell system too... But that will have to be on another day.

I have not read most of this thread. The Intel s5000 server chipset can boot Windows 2000. So I have to imagine XP also. No AGP though. But different boards have different pci-e slots. There's a gaggle of Supermicro dual socket 771 boards on eBay right now. New. The board is only a little wider then atx (10" iirc), so look your case over.

Generally speaking the fastest cpus such a board will support is an x5470. But with a 60 or 70 you need copper heatsink. The x5450 runs at 3.0 ghz. I used to have an Intel board with 2 x5450s. I had to leave the case open an blow a desk fan at it. The heatsinks I had didn't have integral fans. There are stock Intel copper ones with fans. Mine were aluminum. The ram gets HOT. I wanted to wrestle with the cooling issues and shut the door, but never got around to it. Sold it. Going the server route is a lot cheaper then going with core2quad extreme board, if you could find 1. The SM boards are 18$.

Problem with Haswell is it never officially supported XP so none of the Haswell motherboards have XP drivers listed on their official websites. Besides, Sandy and Ivy Bridge are just as good, ipc somewhat lower but they overclock better to make up for it. Haswell also has notoriously weak memory controller so you can get better ram speed and timings on ivy and especially sandy bridge. Main thing with Haswell is new avx instructions which provide performance boost in modern software, but likely wont be of much use on XP

BTW, from my experience, the mainstream platform for sandy/ivy, socket 1155 motherboards, have 100% full compatility for XP 32bit with all drivers available from the manufacturers, however the HEDT platform socket 2011 chipset intel x79 boards, which are still pretty relevant today as with 6 or 8 core overclockable cpu and quad channel memory they can rival some modern-ish systems... I found to be lacking in some things for XP 32bit, for example no AHCI driver for the intel sata controller. Nothing major and can be worked around, but its still not the 100% support that 1155 boards up to Z77 have. BTW X79 does seem to have full support for XP 64bit, just not for 32bit

Everything beyond Sandy Bridge in mainstream may require scalping at this point, because Intel used thermal paste.