mattw wrote on 2023-12-04, 07:11:

BTW, in my 8th series system running WinXP, I have even 256GB of AHCI M2 fast solid-state installed in the PCIe slot, 8th series supports even that, not just regular SATA. it doesn't support PCIe NVMe thought (only PCIe AHCI M2). PCIe NVMe is supported by the 9th series or newer. I even think people with some hacks are able to install WinXP on newer systems, i.e. 9th series and above, but it's much harder, because with 8th series, you can still find the drivers that Intel deleted, i.e. it is still, you can say, unofficially -officially-supported and thus it's very easy to install and use WinXP on it.

I have PCIe NVMe SSD on my Asus P9X79 WS system. No modded bios or anything like that, works out of the box. It's working fine on win7, getting the full advertised performance. Doesn't show up under XP

@God of Gaming

Did any of the community made XP NVMe drivers work for you?

Duffman wrote on 2023-12-04, 15:03:

@God of Gaming

Did any of the community made XP NVMe drivers work for you?

I haven't tried, in fact I didn't know there were any, or where they're available... then again I guess they're not exactly necessary anyways, none of the winXP games need storage that fast, its more of a recent trend in the latest games with heavy emphasis on mid-level asset streaming, like, unreal engine 5 games for example

GodsPetMonkey wrote on 2023-12-03, 23:48:

God of Gaming covered it well - X58 and X79 boards tended to target either workstation buyers, cashed up high-end PC users and o […]
Show full quote

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-03, 07:33:

Cheers to you for the post, @GodsPetMonkey!

Bearing in mind that the PC I mentioned in the OP is the first PC I've built in over 20 years, would you mind elaborating on what an "X58" and an "X79" is? I'm assuming that they're Intel chipsets, but would you kindly give me an example of a good mobo for each of these chipset series?

God of Gaming covered it well - X58 and X79 boards tended to target either workstation buyers, cashed up high-end PC users and overclocking nuts. X79 for example is the chipset (and is the HEDT equivalent to Z77). The platforms came with a premium cost, and generally that meant good quality boards with good quality components. Given how old everything with proper XP support is, that's going to be a big plus. For a production system where the users don't want downtime, you're better bet would be going for workstation focus/marketed components and probably steering clear of overclocking enthusiast gear; nothing wrong with the overclocking boards (they are well made units), but you don't know how hard it's been driven. Workstation gear is far more likely to have been left stock and well within safe voltages/temperatures.

For X58 (LGA 1366), I own a Asus P6T Deluxe V2. Very solid board. Most boards from the major manufacturers (ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI... I'd probably avoid Asrock as X58's time was when they were in the middle of their transition out of cheap-and-whacky). You can also look for anything in Asus's 'WS' line (WS will be in the board name) as these were their workstation focused motherboards.
For X79 (LGA 2011), I own an Asus Rampage IV, which is an overclocking focused board (and a very good one). Again, the majors are fine, though my personal experience is that Gigabyte was less reliable in the Sandy/Ivy Bridge and Haswell eras. On the other hand, Asrock became a solid choice. Again, Asus 'WS' boards make it easy to find their workstation line.

All take DDR3. If you are using a Xeon in X58 or X79 (and you should... way more options with more cores and much more cache than i7s) you can use ECC DDR3, which is both cheap and... well... ECC, which may be important to you.

SATA3 drives should be backwards compatible with SATA2 controllers (unless it's a really crappy controller/chipset... which isn't the case for any Intel chipset we are looking at here). If the increased speed of SATA3 is absolutely a requirement, I'd suggest you look for a SATA3 PCI-E add-in card that has known good Windows XP drivers. That frees you up as far as a motherboard is concerned, and gives you more flexibility.

Cheers for the words about what X58 and X79 represent, @GodsPetMonkey! Although it seems like a cool thing to experiment with, I've never tried overclocking, so ignorance just may turn out to be bliss in this case ... and the words in this thread about possible reliability issues due to taxing a mobo seem to make sense to me.

As I wrote in a recent post, I've gotten great information and suggestions via this thread, so I really hesitate to complicate things ... but we also have another audio authoring utility (with some different capabilities) that was written for Windows 7. Initially, I was thinking that we should get a 32-bit Win XP machine up and running, make use of the older audio authoring (XP) utility and, once that's been accomplished, shift the focus to a separate Win 7 machine, but my research is indicating that a "dual-boot" or "dual-OS" system might be possible ... and by "Dual-OS," I mean two separate system drives in one machine - one drive for Win XP and the other for Win 7. This is why some of the suggestions for newer hardware in this thread - newer than Ivy Bridge - has really got me thinking.

Regardless, your words about ECC RAM really caught my eye. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what the advantages of EEC RAM are, so would you mind elaborating about that? The size of the multichannel (MC) audio tracks involved with these future audio authoring projects are very large [read: some greater than 700MB], especially by Win XP standards, so anything related to improved transfer speeds is of special interest to me, which segues nicely to my next subject.

Your thoughts about SATA 2 and SATA 3 make perfect sense to me. If there's an add-in card that can deliver SATA 3 transfer speeds - and will work with both Win XP and Win 7 - it seems like an extremely important piece of hardware to consider. Do you happen to know of a specific SATA 3 add-on card that fits this description?

Bancho wrote on 2023-12-03, 22:01:

I'm just finishing up a build for XP. Asus Gyphon Z87 and a I7 4770k. I'm just waiting for the GTX 780ti to turn up I picked up off eBay (Hopefully tomorrow). I've installed XP SP3 32-bit on it. Never intended to build this machine but its turning out quite nice and should rip through XP stuff. Just need to pick up a PCI-E X-Fi card and it will be complete. Will also install Win 7 on it at some point.

Man, @Bancho, that is one really sweet looking machine you've got there!

As my continuing research is telling me that a dual-boot or dual-drive/OS system might be possible, your words about a Z87 mobo and a Haswell CPU are very attractive. We also have a second audio authoring utility that was written for Win 7, so the fact that you mentioned installing Win 7 (see the quote above) in the future is really interesting.

When you installed Win XP SP3 x86 (32-bit), did you have to use a "slip-streamed" or doctored to installation disc to get all of your hardware functioning properly?

I'm not sure, but the photo of your very cool looking new XP machine seems to show HDDs for storage. In the likely case that I'm wrong, have you employed any SATA 3 SSDs in your system? Given the obvious transfer speed benefits, employing an SSD (or SSDs) for our machine is fairly essential.

By the way, we've already purchased a big Fractal Design case, so I really liked seeing their logo on your case! Having that integrated/internal ROM drive plugged into your machine a sweet touch, too! My hat's off to you, my friend.

Duffman wrote on 2023-12-03, 08:10:

I run XP on my Ryzen 5950x system.

Only thing I don't have a driver for is the 2.5Gbit ethernet, but I got around that with USB 1gbit ethernet.

Hi @Duffman!

I don't seem to have PM privileges just yet. I don't want to create any chaos by turning a great Intel thread into an AMD thread, so having a private conversation with you about the AMD XP and/or Win 7 options makes good sense. Once I have the ability to employ the forum's PM function, I will reach out to you.

Please don't get too excited about running on newer hardware. For your specialized software, you don't want to to get complicated especially trying to get semi-supported hardware drivers working. And I don't like the thought of making do with stuff without driver and full of exclamations in the device manager.

Keep to Ivy bridge or older and get all the items fully supported using drivers. You don't know what other things that can be strange with the old software you are trying to get working correctly and reliable.

If you want compatibility, new hardware (likely new old stock, at least in part, I would guess) with a warranty and piece of mind, buying a prebuilt from these folks might be an option.

https://nixsys.com/legacy-computers/windows-xp-computers

Disclaimer: I cannot vouch for them or endorse them in any way (never interacted with them), but they have been there for a while, AFAICT.

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-04, 20:37:

As I wrote in a recent post, I've gotten great information and suggestions via this thread, so I really hesitate to complicate things ... but we also have another audio authoring utility (with some different capabilities) that was written for Windows 7. Initially, I was thinking that we should get a 32-bit Win XP machine up and running, make use of the older audio authoring (XP) utility and, once that's been accomplished, shift the focus to a separate Win 7 machine, but my research is indicating that a "dual-boot" or "dual-OS" system might be possible ... and by "Dual-OS," I mean two separate system drives in one machine - one drive for Win XP and the other for Win 7. This is why some of the suggestions for newer hardware in this thread - newer than Ivy Bridge - has really got me thinking.

Regardless, your words about ECC RAM really caught my eye. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what the advantages of EEC RAM are, so would you mind elaborating about that? The size of the multichannel (MC) audio tracks involved with these future audio authoring projects are very large [read: some greater than 700MB], especially by Win XP standards, so anything related to improved transfer speeds is of special interest to me, which segues nicely to my next subject.

Your thoughts about SATA 2 and SATA 3 make perfect sense to me. If there's an add-in card that can deliver SATA 3 transfer speeds - and will work with both Win XP and Win 7 - it seems like an extremely important piece of hardware to consider. Do you happen to know of a specific SATA 3 add0in card that fits this description?

Two things:
1. Ivy Bridge will make for a stellar Windows 7 machine. Really, Ivy Bridge should have marked the beginning of the end of the Windows 7 era except... Windows 8... and so 7 stuck around for a long time. If anything, on the laptop side, Ivy Bridge marked a slowing down - whereas there were lots of mobile Sandy Bridge quad-cores, by Ivy Bridge, the U-series dual-cores were taking over on everything other than a mobile workstation, a gaming laptop, or a 15" MacBook Pro. Not that that matters for a desktop, obviously, but my point is that a Broadwell laptop running Win7 might quite easily have been slower than a quad-core Sandy Bridge.
2. I would be inclined to discourage the add-in SATA card. Why complicate things, require additional drivers, etc (especially if you wanted to use this as a boot drive) when the Ivy Bridge chipsets have two SATA III ports with XP support sitting right there?

haswell is not much of an improvement over ivy bridge, and ivy bridge is not much of an improvement over sandy bridge, there really isn't much benefit of building a winXP system on a haswell motherboard, sandy bridge can be just as fast. Yeah IPC is a just a little bit lower, but it more than makes up for it with better OC potential. The first cpu that it made sense for sandy bridge owners to upgrade to was broadwell-c, but winXP probably not gonna work well on that (though Im very interested in experimenting with it)

p.s. far as I see it haswell has one single benefit over sandy/ivy, and that is AVX2 instructions. Any games/software written to take advantage of AVX2 will see a noticable uplift on a haswell. Sadly I don't have a list of what both uses AVX2 and can run on XP, if there's anything like that. Anyone here know of any examples of software or a game that can use AVX2 and can run on XP?

God Of Gaming wrote on 2023-12-05, 00:27:

haswell is not much of an improvement over ivy bridge, and ivy bridge is not much of an improvement over sandy bridge, there really isn't much benefit of building a winXP system on a haswell motherboard, sandy bridge can be just as fast. Yeah IPC is a just a little bit lower, but it more than makes up for it with better OC potential. The first cpu that it made sense for sandy bridge owners to upgrade to was broadwell-c, but winXP probably not gonna work well on that (though Im very interested in experimenting with it)

p.s. far as I see it haswell has one single benefit over sandy/ivy, and that is AVX2 instructions. Any games/software written to take advantage of AVX2 will see a noticable uplift on a haswell. Sadly I don't have a list of what both uses AVX2 and can run on XP, if there's anything like that. Anyone here know of any examples of software or a game that can use AVX2 and can run on XP?

Haswell has more efficient cache circuits and much higher stock speeds (up to 4GHz base, 4.4Ghz turbo).

On a separate note, I wonder if the subject audio authoring software would benefit from Broadwell's L4 cache using a 90-series chipset.

VivienM wrote on 2023-12-05, 00:09:

Two things:
1. Ivy Bridge will make for a stellar Windows 7 machine. Really, Ivy Bridge should have marked the beginning of the end of the Windows 7 era except... Windows 8... and so 7 stuck around for a long time. If anything, on the laptop side, Ivy Bridge marked a slowing down - whereas there were lots of mobile Sandy Bridge quad-cores, by Ivy Bridge, the U-series dual-cores were taking over on everything other than a mobile workstation, a gaming laptop, or a 15" MacBook Pro. Not that that matters for a desktop, obviously, but my point is that a Broadwell laptop running Win7 might quite easily have been slower than a quad-core Sandy Bridge.
2. I would be inclined to discourage the add-in SATA card. Why complicate things, require additional drivers, etc (especially if you wanted to use this as a boot drive) when the Ivy Bridge chipsets have two SATA III ports with XP support sitting right there?

It's funny you should mention it, @VivienM, but guess which CPU is in the mid-2015 MBP 15 that I'm typing to you with? A Haswell/Crystalwell i7-4980HQ. Although it can get choked a bit when I have a very-high number of web pages open at once, this Intel CPU and 16GB of DDR3 1600 usually performs very well in our Mactop. Just out of curiosity, would the desktop version of such a CPU work a bit faster on an appropriate high-quality ATX mobo?

Your thoughts about employing Ivy Bridge hardware for our audio authoring project(s) are well-taken. I'm simply trying to keep an open mind and learn as much as I can from this productive thread. Your words about adding a card that could be unnecessary are very helpful as well. No sense utilizing main board resources if they're not actually required, right?

Any thoughts about my new dual-drive, dual (x86) OS system specification (Win XP/Win 7)? Would this impact the hardware required for using these two great old operating systems? I understand that Win 7 x86 has the same sort of RAM utilization limitations as Win XP x86, so I'm thinking that they could potentially make a good "team" in our audio authoring machine. What do you think?

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-05, 03:06:

VivienM wrote on 2023-12-05, 00:09:

Two things:
1. Ivy Bridge will make for a stellar Windows 7 machine. Really, Ivy Bridge should have marked the beginning of the end of the Windows 7 era except... Windows 8... and so 7 stuck around for a long time. If anything, on the laptop side, Ivy Bridge marked a slowing down - whereas there were lots of mobile Sandy Bridge quad-cores, by Ivy Bridge, the U-series dual-cores were taking over on everything other than a mobile workstation, a gaming laptop, or a 15" MacBook Pro. Not that that matters for a desktop, obviously, but my point is that a Broadwell laptop running Win7 might quite easily have been slower than a quad-core Sandy Bridge.
2. I would be inclined to discourage the add-in SATA card. Why complicate things, require additional drivers, etc (especially if you wanted to use this as a boot drive) when the Ivy Bridge chipsets have two SATA III ports with XP support sitting right there?

It's funny you should mention it, @VivienM, but guess which CPU is in the mid-2015 MBP 15 that I'm typing to you with? A Haswell/Crystalwell i7-4980HQ. Although it can get choked a bit when I have a very-high number of web pages open at once, this Intel CPU and 16GB of DDR3 1600 usually performs very well in our Mactop. Just out of curiosity, would the desktop version of such a CPU work a bit faster on an appropriate high-quality ATX mobo?

A little, but... hmm... the i7-4980HQ turbos at 4GHz, the i7-4790k starts at a base clock of 4GHz and turbos up to 4.4. That's a tricky one, I think it will depend a lot on how long the MBP can sustain the turbo speed.

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-05, 03:06:

Your thoughts about employing Ivy Bridge hardware for our audio authoring project(s) are well-taken. I'm simply trying to keep an open mind and learn as much as I can from this productive thread. Your words about adding a card that could be unnecessary are very helpful as well. No sense utilizing main board resources if they're not actually required, right?

My view is that you should go for simple and foolproof. You're not a YouTube star trying to run Win98 SE on a processor from 2022. You're trying to get an older, specialized piece of software going.

You could take a board like my Asus Z77 board, make a slipstreamed XP CD with the AHCI drivers, download all the drivers from Asus' web site, and get a screamingly fast XP system with no exclamation points in device manager in an hour or two. Install Legacy Update, get all your patches installed in another hour or two, and boom, you're done, mission accomplished.

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-05, 03:06:

Any thoughts about my new dual-drive, dual (x86) OS system specification (Win XP/Win 7)? Would this impact the hardware required for using these two great old operating systems? I understand that Win 7 x86 has the same sort of RAM utilization limitations as Win XP x86, so I'm thinking that they could potentially make a good "team" in our audio authoring machine. What do you think?

Why would you want to dual-boot 32-bit 7 and 32-bit XP? I would probably go for 64-bit 7; if you have any software that doesn't like 64-bit, just run it under XP where it will likely be happier anyways.

VivienM wrote on 2023-12-05, 03:28:

Why would you want to dual-boot 32-bit 7 and 32-bit XP? I would probably go for 64-bit 7; if you have any software that doesn't like 64-bit, just run it under XP where it will likely be happier anyways.

It's very likely that I'm misunderstanding something, VivienM, but we have two separate expensive old audio authoring applications we wish to utilize. One of them, as you know, is a 32-application that the audio engineer I'll be working with insists will only run on a standalone 32-bit XP PC ... and it's hard to doubt him because he's the authority on the software ... and he purposely keeps an old XP-era PC around exclusively for the application in question.

There's also a second [also expensive] audio authoring application - with different capabilities - that was written for Win 7. It's not as important to us as the Win XP utility, but it would expand our capabilities, nevertheless.

Quite honestly, I was thinking that one could not run a 32-bit Win OS on one storage drive and a 64-bit Win OS on another while connected to the same mobo. I guess it's the whole thing about memory allocation that's making this confusing for me. Would you mind giving me some clarification in this regard?

If it's possible to load Win XP x86 on one storage drive and Win 7 (x64) on the other, that would be a great news! If this is true, does this also mean that I would be free to add ... say 16GB or more RAM ... to the system? Man, I've got my fingers crossed about this.

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-05, 04:04:

Quite honestly, I was thinking that one could not run a 32-bit Win OS on one storage drive and a 64-bit Win OS on another while connected to the same mobo.

Don't worry, there is no such thing, you can multiboot as many 32 and 64 bit operating systems as you wish, as long as the CPU supports x64, and basically anything newer than about 2004-2005 does so. At one point on my ivy bridge system I was multibooting like 10 different OSes. You also do not need to use separate SSD for each, you can partition one SSD and put them all there. Only reason Im currently using separate drives is because I do not like winXP being on SSD because of lack of trim support, so Im currently running winXP on a high performance WD Velociraptor 10000rpm HDD, and win7 on SSD

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-05, 04:04:

If it's possible to load Win XP x86 on one storage drive and Win 7 (x64) on the other, that would be a great news! If this is true, does this also mean that I would be free to add ... say 16GB or more RAM ... to the system? Man, I've got my fingers crossed about this.

so yes, you can, also having more ram is not a problem for 32bit windows, it will just ignore what it cannot use and use what it can. You can even use the extra ram to make a speedy ram drive that could be useful for your app. If you max the motherboard out with 4x8 = 32 gigs, you can split some off for ram drives for both XP and 7. You mentioned something about moving large files quickly, so it might help for that. Going for X58 or X79 HEDT system can be a help here too, as you can have even more ram on those, you can have 6x8 = 48 gigs on X58, and 8x8 = 64 gigs on X79. Those also use triple and quad channel ram, so its even faster. Just check with your guy if your apps can benefit from a ram drive so that its worth it to go that way

fosterwj03 wrote on 2023-12-05, 02:42:

Haswell has more efficient cache circuits and much higher stock speeds (up to 4GHz base, 4.4Ghz turbo).

@fosterwj03 stock speeds hardly matter much as OC is so easy to do and a sandy bridge can usually reliably hit 5ghz. Also haswell memory controller was notoriously weaker, so Im guessing you can also achieve better ram speed and timings on the sandy. So unless theres any apps or games that can utilize AVX2 and run on XP, Id personally stick with a sandy or ivy system for XP and not bother with a haswell. Did I mention sandy bridge has a soldered lid so you dont even need to bother with the PITA that is delidding?

agent_x007 wrote on 2023-12-04, 06:47:

REDACTED

Just showing it can be done, can't mention how I did it 🙁

You can run XP and 7 at the same time, if they are on seperate drives.
Important thing is getting installation order right, first you install WinXP and then Win7.
Boot drive (the one with XP), will get Win7 as priority/default after Win7 install.
You can change priority order later though, if you want to.

However, this kind of Windows 7 installation will NOT boot by itself (ie. when WinXP drive "dies" or get's formatted/removed - it will stop working).
Win 7 in this case will require the drive with WinXP to always be present, connected, and set-up the same way it was during first time installation - including AHCI/IDE mode in BIOS (or at least, it's boot sector side).
Luckily, you should be able to use automatic recovery from Win7 installation (boot recovery option), to get it back and running without WinXP drive (if such need arises).

What I am missing from the OP: which ressources are most critical?
- Single-thread performance?
- Multi-thread performance?
- Harddisk / SSD speed?
- RAM speed / amount?

If we don't know those things, it is really hard to give a good recommendation.

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-04, 21:01:

Man, @Bancho, that is one really sweet looking machine you've got there! […]
Show full quote

Bancho wrote on 2023-12-03, 22:01:

I'm just finishing up a build for XP. Asus Gyphon Z87 and a I7 4770k. I'm just waiting for the GTX 780ti to turn up I picked up off eBay (Hopefully tomorrow). I've installed XP SP3 32-bit on it. Never intended to build this machine but its turning out quite nice and should rip through XP stuff. Just need to pick up a PCI-E X-Fi card and it will be complete. Will also install Win 7 on it at some point.

Man, @Bancho, that is one really sweet looking machine you've got there!

As my continuing research is telling me that a dual-boot or dual-drive/OS system might be possible, your words about a Z87 mobo and a Haswell CPU are very attractive. We also have a second audio authoring utility that was written for Win 7, so the fact that you mentioned installing Win 7 (see the quote above) in the future is really interesting.

When you installed Win XP SP3 x86 (32-bit), did you have to use a "slip-streamed" or doctored to installation disc to get all of your hardware functioning properly?

I'm not sure, but the photo of your very cool looking new XP machine seems to show HDDs for storage. In the likely case that I'm wrong, have you employed any SATA 3 SSDs in your system? Given the obvious transfer speed benefits, employing an SSD (or SSDs) for our machine is fairly essential.

By the way, we've already purchased a big Fractal Design case, so I really liked seeing their logo on your case! Having that integrated/internal ROM drive plugged into your machine a sweet touch, too! My hat's off to you, my friend.

Thanks man. I like fractal design cases and they are reasonable in price too.

In regards to SSD's, it does have a SATA 3 SSD in the top caddy above the 2TB HDD. Its fitted in a 3.5mm docking caddy to fit the slot bracket. I think its a Sandisk X400 SSD and its 128gb in size. I used Easy2Boot with the inbuilt AHCI driver package to install XP SP3. Just put the ISO on the USB stick and follow the method to install XP. I was initially facing a freezing issue with the Loader loading the ISO into ram. The cause ended up being that the system has 16GB installed. I removed all the sticks leaving just 1 4gb stick in and the install went fine, and then later putting all the sticks back in.

In regards to drivers, i used Snappy driver to install the drivers. They only driver i had issue with was one for AMDA00 Interface which i think is some temperature sensor. All other drivers install fine.

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-04, 20:37:

Cheers for the words about what X58 and X79 represent, @GodsPetMonkey! Although it seems like a cool thing to experiment with, […]
Show full quote

Cheers for the words about what X58 and X79 represent, @GodsPetMonkey! Although it seems like a cool thing to experiment with, I've never tried overclocking, so ignorance just may turn out to be bliss in this case ... and the words in this thread about possible reliability issues due to taxing a mobo seem to make sense to me.

As I wrote in a recent post, I've gotten great information and suggestions via this thread, so I really hesitate to complicate things ... but we also have another audio authoring utility (with some different capabilities) that was written for Windows 7. Initially, I was thinking that we should get a 32-bit Win XP machine up and running, make use of the older audio authoring (XP) utility and, once that's been accomplished, shift the focus to a separate Win 7 machine, but my research is indicating that a "dual-boot" or "dual-OS" system might be possible ... and by "Dual-OS," I mean two separate system drives in one machine - one drive for Win XP and the other for Win 7. This is why some of the suggestions for newer hardware in this thread - newer than Ivy Bridge - has really got me thinking.

Regardless, your words about ECC RAM really caught my eye. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what the advantages of EEC RAM are, so would you mind elaborating about that? The size of the multichannel (MC) audio tracks involved with these future audio authoring projects are very large [read: some greater than 700MB], especially by Win XP standards, so anything related to improved transfer speeds is of special interest to me, which segues nicely to my next subject.

Your thoughts about SATA 2 and SATA 3 make perfect sense to me. If there's an add-in card that can deliver SATA 3 transfer speeds - and will work with both Win XP and Win 7 - it seems like an extremely important piece of hardware to consider. Do you happen to know of a specific SATA 3 add0in card that fits this description?

I'm with pentiumspeed that you should just stick with Ivy Bridge and earlier. Yes, you can run XP on more modern hardware, and with the right research/tools, it isn't especially hard, but ultimately your goal here isn't to run XP on things it was never meant to run on, or to build the most insane XP gaming build, but to run specialised XP specific software for a productive (ie. non-gaming) purpose. Stability and compatibility should be high on your list of priorities, and so I recommend you stick with platforms that properly support XP. It just minimises any space for stability or compatibility issues to creep in.

By all means, run XP on Haswell or later, or AM5... but do that in a system that isn't going to be dedicated to running this specialised software.

Similarly, I recommend workstation hardware because it is designed for stability. You are building a (audio) workstation, so workstation hardware is just a natural fit. Within reason of course, don't overspend!

For Windows 7, any of the platforms discussed (Nehalem to Ivy Bridge, to use Intel's micro-architecture codenames) is going to handle x64 Windows 7 just fine. All of it is contemporaneous to Windows 7 being the Windows OS of choice. Just dual boot as others have suggested (pretty easy to do). You don't need to install Windows 7 on a separate physical drive to Windows XP, but it needs at least separate partitions. Plenty of guides and Youtube videos on how to do this, and it's not hard. All these platforms are fine with Windows 10 too, if you want to go with something that is currently supported by Microsoft (and assuming your other software is ok with it).

ECC RAM is Error Correction Code memory. Basically it means that it can detect certain types of errors in hardware (where a bit is flipped in RAM). There's a lot that we could go into on the topic, and ECC RAM isn't magic, but the deep detail isn't really important and not likely to be helpful. The much shorter version is if you are building a gaming system, errors in RAM are not likely to really matter (outcome of an error might mean your game crashes... oh well!). For a workstation or server though, an error in RAM can mean big problems, massive data loss and major monetary costs/losses. I'm going to assume you aren't running a full on audio production studio or anything, so the risk posed by non-ECC RAM isn't one you need to care about. Probably the main benefit for you will be, if you are running a Xeon (most non-Xeon Intel CPUs don't support ECC) in an appropriate motherboard, it won't hurt and ECC DDR3 RAM is cheap as chips in large quantities due to it being left over from decommissioned servers.

If you are not sure though, just get normal RAM. It works great too! Used DDR3 is plentiful.

For SATA3, I guess the question is, do you need it? Yes, it offers double the throughput of SATA2 (theoretically... your most likely going to be limited by something else, though with the right drive still in excess of SATA2). But a good SSD on SATA2 is still snappy and fast compared to a spinning disk - the access time of an SSD is what makes it feel so fast compared to mechanical hard drives. Throughput is only going to matter a lot if you are doing big sequential transfers.

SATA3 is just there with Ivy Bridge boards (whether consumer or HEDT), but I suggest you weigh up how valuable it is on its own, as if it isn't a major priority you have so many other platforms to choose from. Sorry, no recommendations on an add-in card, I just wanted to put it out there as an option if SATA3 is a high priority. Personally, for my XP machines, it isn't.

God Of Gaming wrote on 2023-12-05, 00:27:

haswell is not much of an improvement over ivy bridge, and ivy bridge is not much of an improvement over sandy bridge, there really isn't much benefit of building a winXP system on a haswell motherboard, sandy bridge can be just as fast. Yeah IPC is a just a little bit lower, but it more than makes up for it with better OC potential. The first cpu that it made sense for sandy bridge owners to upgrade to was broadwell-c, but winXP probably not gonna work well on that (though Im very interested in experimenting with it)

p.s. far as I see it haswell has one single benefit over sandy/ivy, and that is AVX2 instructions. Any games/software written to take advantage of AVX2 will see a noticable uplift on a haswell. Sadly I don't have a list of what both uses AVX2 and can run on XP, if there's anything like that. Anyone here know of any examples of software or a game that can use AVX2 and can run on XP?

While it is true there isnt a massive step up between the two there are more improvements there that.

Improved Performance per Watt: Haswell brought enhancements in power efficiency, offering better performance while consuming less power compared to Ivy Bridge. This efficiency was particularly notable in mobile devices, providing longer battery life and improved thermal characteristics.

Enhanced Integrated Graphics (GT2/GT3): Haswell introduced improved integrated graphics performance with Intel HD Graphics 4600 (GT2) and Iris Pro Graphics 5200 (GT3), offering better graphical capabilities for integrated graphics solutions compared to Ivy Bridge's HD Graphics.

New Instruction Set Extensions: Haswell introduced new instructions, such as Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2) and Fused Multiply-Add (FMA3/FMA4), which allowed for better parallel processing and improved performance in certain applications optimized for these instructions.

Improved Turbo Boost Technology: Haswell refined and enhanced Turbo Boost technology, allowing processors to dynamically adjust clock speeds based on workload demands more efficiently compared to Ivy Bridge.

New Socket (LGA 1150): Haswell introduced a new socket type, which required a compatible motherboard, not backward compatible with Ivy Bridge processors' sockets (such as LGA 1155).

Better Power Management: Haswell processors included more advanced power management features, enabling finer control over power consumption, particularly in idle or low-load scenarios, further enhancing energy efficiency.

Improved Integrated Voltage Regulator: Haswell integrated voltage regulation onto the CPU die, which contributed to better power efficiency and allowed for more granular control over power delivery.

Security Features: Haswell introduced certain security features and enhancements, such as Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX), which aimed to improve software performance through better concurrency control.

Those are not my words, its just a copy and paste, but you get the idea that Haswell did offer several features over Ivy bridge CPUs.

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-05, 04:04:

It's very likely that I'm misunderstanding something, VivienM, but we have two separate expensive old audio authoring applicatio […]
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VivienM wrote on 2023-12-05, 03:28:

Why would you want to dual-boot 32-bit 7 and 32-bit XP? I would probably go for 64-bit 7; if you have any software that doesn't like 64-bit, just run it under XP where it will likely be happier anyways.

It's very likely that I'm misunderstanding something, VivienM, but we have two separate expensive old audio authoring applications we wish to utilize. One of them, as you know, is a 32-application that the audio engineer I'll be working with insists will only run on a standalone 32-bit XP PC ... and it's hard to doubt him because he's the authority on the software ... and he purposely keeps an old XP-era PC around exclusively for the application in question.

There's also a second [also expensive] audio authoring application - with different capabilities - that was written for Win 7. It's not as important to us as the Win XP utility, but it would expand our capabilities, nevertheless.

Quite honestly, I was thinking that one could not run a 32-bit Win OS on one storage drive and a 64-bit Win OS on another while connected to the same mobo. I guess it's the whole thing about memory allocation that's making this confusing for me. Would you mind giving me some clarification in this regard?

If it's possible to load Win XP x86 on one storage drive and Win 7 (x64) on the other, that would be a great news! If this is true, does this also mean that I would be free to add ... say 16GB or more RAM ... to the system? Man, I've got my fingers crossed about this.

It wouldnt matter what the reasons behind it are. You want to use that software and you want to run it on Windows XP just because you want to can be as valid a reason for it all as because it will only run on XP.

Then you come to the Windows 7 software, well thats a whole new problem, and Im not so sure if that doesnt count as "project creep" because wanting to dual boot isnt going to make the solution as easy as it could be.

There is a way to do what you want to do. I wouldnt worry about things like how much RAM is installed in the system though, its just not going to matter to the lesser of the two because it /PAE switch doesnt work how people think should work, and adding more RAM to XP doesnt cause it to become unstable like it doesnt in Windows 98.

Why would the operating systems need two different drives to boot from? You can just dual boot WinXP and Win7 from the same hard disk then use another hard disk for storage.
Yes XP can live on a system with 16Gb of RAM, not only that it will address it all, it just wont use it in the way you think it will. But its /PAE switch will allow it 36bit memory addressing which is upto 64Gb of RAM.

On pressing the power button you can chose which OS to boot into, you can set either OS as the default so if you press nothing on boot it will boot that default option.

You can do all that on a system costing £75-£100 these days. OS licences are extra.