Great advice. Thank you 😀

Way ahead of you! It's been by my leg for the past 10 years. It's powerful enough to Crysis on high and retro enough to run at 2003 period speeds with native EAX 2. 😀

.......🙁

leileilol wrote:

Way ahead of you! It's been by my leg for the past 10 years. It's powerful enough to Crysis on high and retro enough to run at 2003 period speeds with native EAX 2. 😀

Oh come on now, tell us all about it!

I'll start talking dirty first:
My Dell T3400 is currently an E6850 with 2GB of DDR2 667. Eventually, it will be an E8600 with 4GB of DDR2 800, a GTX 750 Ti, and an X-Fi PCI. I'm currently in the process of building an XP image for posterity. FYI: Microsoft Update still works just fine for XP. Just avoid the stupid EOL update and modern versions of MSE. You want v4.4.304. Normally, I would be concerned about the electrolytic caps on the T3400, but used T3400 motherboards are so damn cheap at around ~$20 each that I'll just stockpile a few spares rather than re-cap it. I'll also take my time with the CPU and GPU. I'm not currently using it, so I have plenty of time to get the very lowest prices for both.

My ABIT IP35 Pro system is currently in service as my HTPC with both WinXP and Win7 32-bit images built. It's got an E8600, 4GB of DDR2 800, a Radeon 5770, and an ATI 650 Theater card. For Halloween, I installed Alan Wake on it. It runs max settings really well at about 38 FPS at 1360 X 768. (My 32" LCD TV is more than I really need.) (Alan Wake didn't run as well with an E6850.)

leileilol wrote:

.......🙁

Don't be sad. Rejoice in the goodness of yesterday's electronics!

KT7AGuy wrote:

Fortunately, I think we're in the middle of a great time to build WinXP machines!

I've been saying this for ages!

Especially anything Pentium 4 is cheap as chips. But performance is limited.

Everyone has their own preferences, some go for period correctness, I see a lot of Core 2 based machines. Some use newer stuff like socket 1155 for example.

My favourite is hands down the AM3+ platform. I'm actually just working on a Windows XP project and it's a lot of fun. You can disable cores, lower clocks and there is a wide range of graphics cards available. Get a X-Fi for EAX / CMSS-3D and you're set.

Core 2 Duos are starting to get thrown away at my university. I think this is insane. I have a 3.16 GHz w/8GB RAM here and it's far and away powerful enough to run anything I throw at it (music production stuff mostly, but Steam is on there too.) And you can't even give away P4s anymore. I see "wanted: free computer" ads all the time on a local site that specifically say 'no P4s.' Yeesh.

I've probably got a render farm worth of mid-2000s raw computing horsepower that I've picked up for free in the last year. When you count up the dual P4 Xeon, three C2Ds, two dual-G5 towers, a couple P4HTs, etc. there's a lot of grunt there.

I recently rebuild my 2004ish PC replaced some caps and shot a FX5900 on eBay.
It runs with XP SP3 and i have to say it runs super smooth. It is definitely fast enough for daily work.
It should also be possible to run 98 without changing any hardware.
some pics: https://imgur.com/a/BXQIt

My daily driver at home is a C2D, 4GB, 8800GTX, and WinXP. I use it for web browsing and GOG gaming (I play almost zero modern games). It's perfect, though eventually Firefox will stop supporting XP, security protocols will move forward, and XP won't be viable for web browsing anymore. But it should always make a great GOG PC.

KT7AGuy wrote:

The days of cheap Win9x computing are over. Parts are becoming scarce and prices are

No it's not. Your ether too picky or don't know how to shop around. I put together a few 9x systems recently and put less then 100$ a pice into them.

^^

Agreed. Sure if you're dead set on a 1.4 GHz Pentium III-S Tualatin with Voodoo 5, then it's going to be harder, but all you really need is am average Pentium III with a GeForce.

But OP has a point, For XP gaming you can get some really nice stuff for little money. So get in while you can 😀

I guess you could say I have three XP gaming machines. One of them doesn't even run XP, but I have a ton of XP games on there. Jeez, it runs them better than the actual XP computers!

Number 1 is kind of an early XP machine that also happens to run many newer Win98 games completely maxed out. This machine copes surprisingly well with games up to around 2004-2005. A couple of months ago I finished Prey, a 2006 game, on it. This machine can even run Crysis at 21 fps @ 800x600/low!

-PIII-S overclocked, 1575MHz
-2GB of CL2 DDR at 300MHz to match the FSB
-evga 6800GT AGP
-X-Fi XtremeMusic sound card. EAX 5 in a PIII!
-500GB 7200RPM IDE/PATA hdd
-QDI Advance12T motherboard
-An old LG Blu-ray drive that came from my main rig when I upgraded to a BDXL writer. Hooked up to PCI SATA card
-An older Zalman 400w PSU with an astounding 40a on the 5v rail mounted in a newish Antec case.
-XP Pro SP3

The second machine was built in 2006. I used it as my main machine until 2014. Even today it could still be used comfortably as a web surfing box. There's enough CPU power to handle 1080p HTML5/VP9 youtube video with ease. This machine has two hard drives and dual boots XP and Win7.

-Socket 939 dual-core Opteron 185 overclocked, 3GHz. I won the silicon lottery with this chip. It runs completely stable at 3GHz on stock voltage (1.35v)! With a little more voltage, it'll do 3.13GHz, but at that point it's really hitting the limit of the stock AMD heat pipe cooler. So, I just run it at 3GHz.
-Two overclocked (via firmware) G80 GeForce 8800GTS 640MB graphics cards running in SLI mode. Through NVFlash, I ratcheted these babies up to 625/1458/1950 (up from 500/1200/1600). By some minor miracle, these cards still work just fine and show no signs of quitting!
-The best socket 939 motherboard: the Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe. 40 lanes of PCIe for true x16/x16 SLI. Passive heatpipe snaking through the board to keep the Northbridge, VRM, and NV SP100 chip cool.
-Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro sitting in the PCIe x4 slot.
-4GB of CL2 PC3200
-Two 1TB/7200RPM SATA hard drives. One for XP SP3; the other for Win7 x64
-Corsair HX620 PSU in an Antex P182 case

The third machine doesn't run XP, but I've found that a surprising number of XP games play just fine on it, and at ludicrous speed, too.
-A 6c/12t Core i7 4930K overclocked, 4.6GHz.
-GTX 970 overclocked to 980 levels of performance.
-32GB of CL10 DDR3-2400 "undervolted" to 1.58v (from 1.65)
-Win7 SP1. More compatible with XP games than Win10, and let's face it: it's also a much better OS. *flame shield up* 😁
-Wanna run Doom 3 at 651 fps? This machine will do it. There's a face melting amount of single-threaded CPU horsepower here. Perfect for XP games!

I have a number of other machines that would make great XP rigs; a Phenom II X6 @ 4GHz with a GTX 680, a Core 2 Quad @ 4GHz with a GTX 760. A couple of P-D/Core 2 era motherboards and 18 different CPUs that would work in them. However, I find that the combination of my main rig, former main rig, and souped up PIII handle all forms of XP gaming with ease. 😀

This is a very good point however I don't personally believe that Win9X hardware is that hard to get in general. It's more just specific pieces of hardware which are desirable but not nessecarily required.

3DFX hardware, AWE64 GOLDS, Tualatin desktop boards with AGP slots, and other things are getting harder and harder to get. But that does not mean there isn't plenty of other alternative hardware to be had. You can run Win9x on P4, Athlon XP, and Athlon 64 hardware which is cheap. The problem is with specific graphics cards or specific sound cards.

Regarding Windows XP, it was the version of windows to use for the general public for a lot longer then Windows 98 was. There is 10 times more Windows XP compatible hardware then there was Win9X compatible hardware. There of course will always be hardware of every generation that commands a premium but in most cases it is hardware that commanded a premium retail because it was the fastest P4, or the Fastest Core2Quad or the fastest Phenon II, or the best AGP card you could get etc, or the fastest card of a particular API version or something. You might have to pay a premium for that hardware when the next step down you can pay only pennies for, but keep in mind how much that hardware costed new compared to the next step down as well. As long are are happy enough with the second or third best thing you will always be able to get by fairly cheaply.

Solarstorm: That's a really nice PC there! What sort of HSF are you using? I've never seen a socket A/462 cooler like that.

clueless1: Try PaleMoon. There are still XP builds available. It's basically a stripped down and optimized pre-Australis version of FireFox.

Jade Falcon: You're right. I'm incredibly picky about this stuff. I agree with you. If I were building a box for a casual gamer who just wanted a retro box, then yeah it's still cheap and easy to put something together. I prefer to think of people like ourselves as connoisseurs. See Standard Def Steve's post for an example. Yow!

Standard Def Steve: Your Tualatin system is amazing! I'm a bit surprised to see it only getting 13655 in 3DMark2001SE. Something doesn't seem right. I would have thought it would get closer to 18000. Maybe I'm confused.

Rhuwyn: You and Jade Falcon are both right. I think I might have a bit of tunnel-vision regarding some of the more desirable components. It's still very easy and cheap to put together a very nice P3 1ghz with 512mb PC133 and a GF4 Ti4200. A system like that would even be a very strong Win9x gaming machine. SBLive and AWE64 Value cards are still readily available and incredibly cheap.

I think that what set me off is the current pricing and availability of V3 3000 cards. For a long time, these were the final good-n-cheap option for somebody who wanted a 3dfx machine. Now that supply is falling and prices are rising for those cards, options are becoming more limited and I think I'm starting to feel old.

KT7AGuy wrote:

Standard Def Steve: Your Tualatin system is amazing! I'm a bit surprised to see it only getting 13655 in 3DMark2001SE. Something doesn't seem right. I would have thought it would get closer to 18000. Maybe I'm confused.

Thanks!

18K is firmly in 2.8/800FSB P4 territory. However 13655 is roughly what a 2.4/400FSB P4 or Athlon XP 2400+ gets with a 6800GT, which I suppose is fairly good for a PIII system. 😀

Even though it's not real 3dFX nGlide does run on Windows 98. Or at least some versions of it did, and there are other Glide Wrappers I just only used nGlide. If you get a beefy enough system you should be able to run most all by the early 3DFX games no problem at even better performance then a Voodoo5 5500. Of course I haven't compared the image side by side I do have a 5500 also. I might do that.

KT7AGuy wrote:

Solarstorm: That's a really nice PC there! What sort of HSF are you using? I've never seen a socket A/462 cooler like that.

Thanks, it's a Coolsonic Coolermate Icecube, apparently the manufacturer isn't in business anymore it seems and i can only find german sources for it, it might have been a german manufacturer, only selling here.
It also has some downsides, the tunnel design doesn't allow enough air to reach the inductors and they get really hot beside those caps, those i had to replace.
I want to cool them with a second fan in the future.

It depends on the XP era your targeting.

Do you want 2002/2003 the processors are cheap but video cards are rising in prices, and boards are harder to get.

But later 2005/2006/2007 stuff is plentiful as long as you want PCIe

candle_86 wrote:

It depends on the XP era your targeting.

Do you want 2002/2003 the processors are cheap but video cards are rising in prices, and boards are harder to get.

But later 2005/2006/2007 stuff is plentiful as long as you want PCIe

I agree with you as far as being period correct. But practically if you have an 05-07 era system and are running XP you shouldn't have any issues running any of the earlier XP stuff.

EDIT: Also regarding the very early XP era those games very well might run as well on Windows 98/ME

Way ahead of a lot of people and even did a number of xp era laptops, better collect the graphics before supplies dry up and there is a lot of modern options as well. I really don't care for pentium 4 builds even though I got a few systems, AM2/3 Phenom is a good choice as hardly no one wants them and they are pretty strong when compared to Core 2 boxes that sometimes become micro shutter generators.

nforce4max wrote:

Core 2 boxes that sometimes become micro shutter generators.

What do you mean? Is there a problem with the C2D systems? I hope not. I'm now invested in two of them. Only got ~$20 in the T3400 so far. I'm sure I could sell it for that and break even.

I'm still very happy with my Phenom II X2 though. It's still my daily driver as well. I always thought that a 3.3ghz C2D E8600 was supposed to be quite a bit faster than my 3.3ghz Phenom II 560 BE. No?