victormun wrote on 2024-04-05, 08:56:However, I've got two questions: […]
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However, I've got two questions:
- Would WinXP install without issues in that kind of "modern" system or would it require some special drivers?
- I've seen a couple of videos that show some issues with WinXP games and modern cards with more than 1GB of VRAM. Is that something to worry about?
Two things with installing WinXP:
1: SATA drivers, WinXP doesn't support SATA out of the box. But it's easy to slipstream SATA drivers directly to WinXP install media with nLite or put them on a floppy disk and press F6 to load drivers from it while installing. Or simply set SATA to IDE mode in BIOS if you don't mind a small performance penalty.
2: WinXP also doesn't understand what an SSD is and treats it like an HDD, which means the partition alignment gets misaligned during partitioning. You can get around this by using a Win7 install media to partition/format the disk and then booting with WinXP install media and installing to the partition you made without formatting it.
As for VRAM, yeah some games don't understand large VRAM amounts but there aren't that many of them and there's also often fixes for them. Only ones I can think of right now are The Sims 2 and Red Faction, both have fixes for it.
Note that GTX 980 doesn't have "official" support for WinXP, but the drivers apparently can be easily modified to work. The drivers from NVIDIA officially support only up to GTX 960 for some reason. Also you might notice i7 CPUs are weirdly more expesive than i5 CPUs, you really don't need an i7 since four cores is more than enough and thus hyper-threading doesn't do you much, it just increases power usage. I've been personally perfectly happy with an i5-3570.
Also if you go for Ivy Bridge motherboard do note only some of them offer WinXP chipset drivers directly from the manufacturer site, I don't know is that because only few of them actually support WinXP while the rest don't or what. Safer to get one with available WinXP drivers or get a Sandy Bridge motherboard that also supports Ivy Bridge CPUs, which they pretty much all do from what I've seen.