Here's some reviews I would have looked at back in the day:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1621/9

It was all pretty close, but the Prescott probably wins by a small percentage.

At the time, I opted to go with a socket 939 Athlon 3400+ because price was a factor.

AGP? So you're probably stuck with i865 chipset. In that case, Athlon is faster.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-04-05, 03:26:

AGP? So you're probably stuck with i865 chipset. In that case, Athlon is faster.

I also have a 9800GTX+ PCIe here. Would that make a difference?

EDIT: I didn't mention this card because I was planning to maybe build some sort of Dual/Quad core build of 2008-2009 (sorta WinXP-end) with it. Maybe that would be better instead of using the AMD64 or P4's I found, I honestly don't know.

victormun wrote on 2024-04-05, 05:04:

I also have a 9800GTX+ PCIe here. Would that make a difference?

EDIT: I didn't mention this card because I was planning to maybe build some sort of Dual/Quad core build of 2008-2009 with it. Maybe that would be better instead of using the AMD64 or P4's I found, I honestly don't know.

Using 9800 GTX+in a dual/quad core system makes much more sense, I briefly used 9800 GTX+ with Cedar Mill 3.4GHz P4 and the CPU was bottlenecking the GPU pretty bad.

Late Intel chipsets have better performance and access to DDR2 which should help with performance. Also you can overclock Cedar Mill CPUs over 4 Ghz pretty easily.

Sombrero wrote on 2024-04-05, 05:15:

victormun wrote on 2024-04-05, 05:04:

I also have a 9800GTX+ PCIe here. Would that make a difference?

EDIT: I didn't mention this card because I was planning to maybe build some sort of Dual/Quad core build of 2008-2009 with it. Maybe that would be better instead of using the AMD64 or P4's I found, I honestly don't know.

Using 9800 GTX+in a dual/quad core system makes much more sense, I briefly used 9800 GTX+ with Cedar Mill 3.4GHz P4 and the CPU was bottlenecking the GPU pretty bad.

And what CPU would you recommend to pair it with? I'm thinking either an E8700 or a Q9650 (ideally a QX9770 but they're heck of expensive), though I'm open to suggestions. Apparently WinXP scales better with 2 faster cores than 4. However, having the Quad-core would allow me to have a dual boot with WinXP and Win7.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-04-05, 05:41:

Late Intel chipsets have better performance and access to DDR2 which should help with performance. Also you can overclock Cedar Mill CPUs over 4 Ghz pretty easily.

Thanks!! I will definitely take that into consideration.

victormun wrote on 2024-04-05, 06:49:

And what CPU would you recommend to pair it with? I'm thinking either an E8700 or a Q9650 (ideally a QX9770 but they're heck of expensive), though I'm open to suggestions. Apparently WinXP scales better with 2 faster cores than 4. However, having the Quad-core would allow me to have a dual boot with WinXP and Win7.

I personally don't really see a point with C2D/C2Q XP/7 systems and rather go straight to Sandy/Ivy Bridge and NVIDIA GTX 9xx which makes a very fast and power efficent system.

But if you want to put that 9800 GTX+ to use I suppose a fast C2D/C2Q would be a good fit, though 9800 GTX+ isn't the fastest card for Win7 era. But for WinXP <2010 or so a fast C2D is enough, for >2010 quad cores start to be beneficial more often but that GPU is going to start being the limiting factor. I wouldn't touch those extreme editions though, they are expensive, power hungry, run hot and aren't even that much faster. Unless you want to build a period correct maxed out build.

Also I've never seen E8700 anywhere, I'm not sure did it even ever really get lauched at all.

Sombrero wrote on 2024-04-05, 07:43:

I personally don't really see a point with C2D/C2Q XP/7 systems and rather go straight to Sandy/Ivy Bridge and NVIDIA GTX 9xx which makes a very fast and power efficent system.

But if you want to put that 9800 GTX+ to use I suppose a fast C2D/C2Q would be a good fit, though 9800 GTX+ isn't the fastest card for Win7 era. But for WinXP <2010 or so a fast C2D is enough, for >2010 quad cores start to be beneficial more often but that GPU is going to start being the limiting factor. I wouldn't touch those extreme editions though, they are expensive, power hungry, run hot and aren't even that much faster. Unless you want to build a period correct maxed out build.

Also I've never seen E8700 anywhere, I'm not sure did it even ever really get lauched at all.

Interesting. So, let's say I'd like a maxed out WinXP and capable Win7 PC. According to what you said, a good choice would be an i7 3770 paired with a 980. However, I've got two questions:

1. Would WinXP install without issues in that kind of "modern" system or would it require some special drivers?
2. 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?

Thanks a lot!

victormun wrote on 2024-04-05, 08:56:

However, I've got two questions: […]
Show full quote

However, I've got two questions:

1. Would WinXP install without issues in that kind of "modern" system or would it require some special drivers?
2. 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.

Sombrero wrote on 2024-04-05, 09:39:

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.

There's an official driver which supports GTX 970 and GTX 980 cards. Works fine on my 970 so I assume it would also work on a 980 card, though I have no way of testing that.

That said, it is indeed trivial to modify drivers to support even Titan X cards under WinXP.

Thanks a lot for the info on drivers and such.

Sombrero wrote on 2024-04-05, 09:39:

Two things with installing WinXP: 1: SATA drivers, WinXP doesn't support SATA out of the box. But it's easy to slipstream SATA d […]
Show full quote

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.

The SATA drivers I already had to use win a floppy disk on a WinXP build I did a couple of years ago when I installed it on a SATA-SSD. Funnily enough, I had no idea about what you just explained regarding the formatting issues. I will definitely take a look at that.

Regarding the graphics card, I just realized I've a spare 970 on my wive's PC, so that's one less thing to worry about. To be fair, a 970 is way overkill for anything in WinXP (< 2010) anyways.

Just curious, are you guys targeting a particular service pack or are you patching up to SP3 once you complete your builds?

I do remember that Sata support and sector offsets could be a tangled problem if you didn't plan out your steps in advance.

Then I picked up this MSDN XP install disk w/ SP3 rolled into the installer around 2009. That distribution seems to make all of the Sata and partition offset issues go away & I've not had to deal with those issues in a long time.

douglar wrote on 2024-04-05, 12:56:

Just curious, are you guys targeting a particular service pack or are you patching up to SP3 once you complete your builds?

Then I picked up this MSDN XP install disk w/ SP3 rolled into the installer around 2009. That distribution seems to make all of the Sata and partition offset issues go away & I've not had to deal with those issues in a long time.

I've almost always used a WinXP with SP3 install media and on my systems it has never worked with SATA by itself unless SATA has been in IDE/compatiblity mode. So I suppose it has some SATA support to some unknown point if you haven't had any issues without external drivers? I think the oldest chipset I've tried is Intel P35 and it definitely required SATA drivers.

But for the alignment, I just realized that I don't think I've ever just partitioned and formatted an SSD with WinXPSP3 install media and then checked is the alignment ok? I've just assumed WinXP even with SP3 doesn't align it correctly since I've never seen anyone prove otherwise.

Sombrero wrote on 2024-04-05, 13:37:

I've almost always used a WinXP with SP3 install media and on my systems it has never worked with SATA by itself unless SATA has been in IDE/compatiblity mode. So I suppose it has some SATA support to some unknown point if you haven't had any issues without external drivers? I think the oldest chipset I've tried is Intel P35 and it definitely required SATA drivers.

I'll double check my disk tonight.

douglar wrote on 2024-04-05, 12:56:

Just curious, are you guys targeting a particular service pack or are you patching up to SP3 once you complete your builds?

I do remember that Sata support and sector offsets could be a tangled problem if you didn't plan out your steps in advance.

Then I picked up this MSDN XP install disk w/ SP3 rolled into the installer around 2009. That distribution seems to make all of the Sata and partition offset issues go away & I've not had to deal with those issues in a long time.

In my case, I use a WinXP with SP3 official CD and I only had to use the AHCI drivers in a floppy. But like I said on the other post, I used the install disk to partition the SSD.

douglar wrote on 2024-04-05, 12:56:

Just curious, are you guys targeting a particular service pack or are you patching up to SP3 once you complete your builds?

I do remember that Sata support and sector offsets could be a tangled problem if you didn't plan out your steps in advance.

Then I picked up this MSDN XP install disk w/ SP3 rolled into the installer around 2009. That distribution seems to make all of the Sata and partition offset issues go away & I've not had to deal with those issues in a long time.

I have an official XP Pro SP3 ISO from the Dreamspark program. I slipstream the post SP3 updates using the RyanVM integrator.