But quad is cooler.

Not, it's not. Quad is objectively hotter!

Multi core CPU shouldn't be necessary in Windows XP, perhaps not even desirable as many old games you would be running on it are not designed for multi core CPUs. Fast multi core CPUs can expose concurrency bugs in games and cause random crashes. That's why I went with socket 754 for Windows XP as it's single core. It's good enough until 2007 when Windows Visa was released. Windows Vista came out at time multi core CPUs were the norm but was unpopular. Games benefiting from multi core CPUs will be from Windows Vista era. You could run them on Windows XP, but I believe you will be much better off running them on Windows 7 and later hardware.

The bottom line is use Windows 7 for quad core CPUs along with 8-16GB RAM and a decent PCIe 2x/3x graphics card.

Win XP 32bit only supports 2 cores/cpus and most gamers use that 32bit to play. I dont see the benefit to add more cores.

Win XP 32bit only supports 2 cores/cpus

Windows XP has no limitation on logical threads (Core/SMP = logical thread) and will work with 2 physical CPUs.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-09-11, 08:35:

Win XP 32bit only supports 2 cores/cpus

Windows XP has no limitation on logical threads (Core/SMP = logical thread) and will work with 2 physical CPUs.

I was kinda figuring some kinda exotic version of xp was on the table. Apparently it isn’t unheard of to game on server 2003.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-09-11, 05:34:

But quad is cooler.

Not, it's not. Quad is objectively hotter!

Ba dun tssst!

I can share you some of my experiences with 1 core, 2 core and 4 core cpus.
I am now in the process of transferring/digitizing whatever you want to call it several VHS tapes and audio cassettes. Initially I tried to do it on my Pentium III 1 Ghz computer.
For audio cassettes is ok but for video capturing (through the TV Tuner card) the system is not fast enough. I tried with a Pentium4 and with a E8200 but it is still having lags.
Afterwards I tried with a Q9650 at stock speed and it works amazing! No lags, no problems, no interruptions. However it seems that the TV Tuner card doesn't like Windows 10 or anything above Windows XP. Besides Audacity doesn't want to record anything on Windows 10 but works flawlessly on Windows XP. I am using a Sound Blaster X-Fi and the sound is excellent but it needs Windows XP to be able to record from the audio cassette player. Both the TV Tuner card and the Sound Blaster are completely functional but they don't like newer version of Windows beyond Windows XP for capturing video and audio (even with their latest or oldest drivers, including DanielK's drivers for SB).
So for me Yorkfield is a perfect match for Windows XP in what I am doing.

My fave XP system was a Q6600 (4-core/4-thread) system that I later carried into Vista and 7, so I will always choose 4-core CPUs over a dual-one, but a properly equipped dual-core system can be perfect for pretty much anything that isn't core-dependent, when using appropriate RAM and SSD options.

I have Windows XP Professional running on a Core i7-4790k (Devil's Canyon, 4GHz, 4-cores, 8-threads). Windows XP correctly identifies the processor and reflects the 8 virtual processors in Device Manager. I can honestly say that the presence of multiple processor cores causes no issues with any of the applications and games (ranging from late-90s to early-2010s) I use. On the flip-side, I doubt that the extra cores help all that much.

Still, I think it's a pretty awesome build.

Quad core is unnecessary for XP. The OS itself "can" use it, but isn't really good at effectively allocating tasks to more than 2 cores and XP era software themselves generally also top out at 2 cores leaving the other 2 idle. For XP 2 fast cores are better. Unless you dual boot something more modern, like Windows 7. I think id Tech4 games, GTA IV and Codemasters racing games were said to scale well up to 4 cores, but my personal experiences say otherwise.

Though manually allocating unaccelerated screen recording to the otherwise idle cores might be beneficial. I never tried that.

fosterwj03 wrote on 2022-09-11, 16:07:

I have Windows XP Professional running on a Core i7-4790k (Devil's Canyon, 4GHz, 4-cores, 8-threads). Windows XP correctly identifies the processor and reflects the 8 virtual processors in Device Manager. I can honestly say that the presence of multiple processor cores causes no issues with any of the applications and games (ranging from late-90s to early-2010s) I use. On the flip-side, I doubt that the extra cores help all that much.

Still, I think it's a pretty awesome build.

Can you take a screenshot of this

Windows XP correctly identifies the processor and reflects the 8 virtual processors in Device Manager

? I worked for Sony back when multicore processors and Windows XP interoperability was new discussion. The information given to us by Sony's engineers was Windows XP cannot make use of more than a single core. It may run fine on a quad core CPU and show cores/threads in device manager, but it simply can't address more than a single core. Can you show in any way that there is actual activity on more than one core?

XP has no problem with multi-core cpu's and you can set the "affinity" (cores that a process can use) in Task manager > Processes. right-click the process and choose 'set affinity' (same as in Win7). The default is to use all cores.
Will post some pictures in a bit, am currently on my winderz 7 box.
Ok here is a compiled picture re-encoding (Xmedia Recode 3.2.7.1 one of the last versions that supports XP) a small video in 4 core and single core modes....and yes using all 4 core the time is 1/4 of using single core. My XP box has a Intel Q9650..... As you can see there are 4 "cpu usage.." in task manager, when I had the e8400 there were only 2.....so not only does XP see all the cores it can use them too.
There is a two CPU limit with XP but there is no "core" limit with one cpu AFAIK.

For games of this era more core are likely to cause problems not help.

kolderman wrote on 2023-09-21, 02:09:

For games of this era more core are likely to cause problems not help.

What era ? The games mentioned by others are much newer than what I play on it and have never had an issue.. I guess if I played early Win95 games on it then I could but I also have run old Aldus PageMaker 4 and other old apps on that box recently w/o a problem ( I run 32bit which is more backward compatible (64bit versions are not))....

amartinx@live.com wrote on 2023-09-21, 00:04:

fosterwj03 wrote on 2022-09-11, 16:07:

I have Windows XP Professional running on a Core i7-4790k (Devil's Canyon, 4GHz, 4-cores, 8-threads). Windows XP correctly identifies the processor and reflects the 8 virtual processors in Device Manager. I can honestly say that the presence of multiple processor cores causes no issues with any of the applications and games (ranging from late-90s to early-2010s) I use. On the flip-side, I doubt that the extra cores help all that much.

Still, I think it's a pretty awesome build.

Can you take a screenshot of this

No Problem. Here's a screenshot of the 8 virtual processors in action with Task Manager along with the Device Manager displaying all processors.

I also included a screenshot of Sandra 2001's CPU benchmark which executes multiple threads. As you can see, the Devil's canyon runs more than 8 times faster than dual Pentium IIIs at 1GHz. Windows XP is using all of the processing cycles available.

I've also run CPU-Z's multi-thread benchmark (not shown) in Windows XP, and this i7-4790K runs about the same as CPU-Z's reference for the same processor.

Edit: I did some bad math. The i7-4790K should be more than 16x faster than dual 1GHz Pentium IIIs (theoretically). It's only a bit more than 14x faster in this case.

A few things come to mind with XP:
-its scheduler doesn't know about core parking or whatever it's called with CPUs that independently clock cores. Phenom for example can see major speed loss because threads bounce to cores running 800-1000 MHz. This can be worked around in a few ways. My fav was PhenomMSRTweaker's custom Cool'n'Quiet.
-Dual core K8 has errata with timestamp counter which causes performance issues with some software. This is why AMD released the Dual Core Optimizer.
-hyperthreading is usually slower with games on the P4 but the OS itself and multitasking is noticeably smoother with it.

For old game multi core compatibility the main workaround is setting the executable to single core affinity with for example imagecfg.exe. Doing a web search for games that this helps with would be illuminating.

Anyway my opinion is I always like 2+ cores for using the OS in general, but with games from 2001-2005 it isn't of much value really. I think it took the Xbox 360 and PS3 to really get that ball rolling out of necessity for acceptable performance.

swaaye wrote on 2023-09-21, 02:54:

A couple things come to mind with XP: -its scheduler doesn't know about core parking or whatever it's called with CPUs that inde […]
Show full quote

A couple things come to mind with XP:
-its scheduler doesn't know about core parking or whatever it's called with CPUs that independently clock cores. Phenom for example can see major speed loss because threads bounce to cores running 800-1000 MHz. This can be worked around in a few ways.
-Dual core K8 has errata with timestamp counter which causes performance issues with some software. This is why AMD released the Dual Core Optimizer.
-hyperthreading is usually slower with games on the P4 but the OS itself and regular multitasking is noticeably smoother with it.

For old game multi core compatibility the main workaround is setting the executable to single core affinity with for example imagecfg.exe. Doing a web search for games that this helps with would be illuminating.

Anyway my opinion is I always like 2+ cores for using the OS in general, but with games from 2001-2005 it isn't of much value really. I think it took the Xbox 360 and PS3 to really get that ball rolling out of necessity for acceptable performance.

I don't think that's an issue in this case. I'm not running XP in any sort of power saving mode. The BIOS has all of the cores running at 4.2GHz all the time (Full Turbo for the processor).

swaaye wrote on 2023-09-21, 02:54:

A couple things come to mind with XP: -its scheduler doesn't know about core parking or whatever it's called with CPUs that inde […]
Show full quote

A couple things come to mind with XP:
-its scheduler doesn't know about core parking or whatever it's called with CPUs that independently clock cores. Phenom for example can see major speed loss because threads bounce to cores running 800-1000 MHz. This can be worked around in a few ways.
-Dual core K8 has errata with timestamp counter which causes performance issues with some software. This is why AMD released the Dual Core Optimizer.
-hyperthreading is usually slower with games on the P4 but the OS itself and regular multitasking is noticeably smoother with it.

For old game multi core compatibility the main workaround is setting the executable to single core affinity with for example imagecfg.exe. Doing a web search for games that this helps with would be illuminating.

Anyway my opinion is I always like 2+ cores for using the OS in general, but with games from 2001-2005 it isn't of much value really. I think it took the Xbox 360 and PS3 to really get that ball rolling out of necessity for acceptable performance.

I don't think that's an issue in this case. I'm not running XP in any sort of power saving mode. The BIOS has all of the cores running at 4.2GHz all the time (Full Turbo for the processor).

fosterwj03 wrote on 2023-09-21, 03:06:

I don't think that's an issue in this case. I'm not running XP in any sort of power saving mode. The BIOS has all of the cores running at 4.2GHz all the time (Full Turbo for the processor).

Yeah that would be a way to avoid problems with power management.

Sorry about the double post.

Horun wrote on 2023-09-21, 02:22:

kolderman wrote on 2023-09-21, 02:09:

For games of this era more core are likely to cause problems not help.

What era ? The games mentioned by others are much newer than what I play on it and have never had an issue.. I guess if I played early Win95 games on it then I could but I also have run old Aldus PageMaker 4 and other old apps on that box recently w/o a problem ( I run 32bit which is more backward compatible (64bit versions are not))....

The XP era. Lots of games crash with out affinity.