There was a bit of a rough patch where single core mhz meant a P4 3.6 could do better in some games than the affordable initial crop of core duos around 2ghz, despite them being generally faster, but that was gone by next core shrink, and c2d optimisations and low end being 2.4 or so by then. Otherwise, P4s are just the platform which is fastest CPU for the last of the win98 compatible AGPs under win98. No special bennies for XP I think. Can cover XP with later CPU, not sure where the limitations start.

There are multiple games that run better on XP vs Windows 7 and above. Like GTA-SA, X: Beyond the Frontier, Star wars knights of the old republic, and probably many others, run poorly on my Windows 10 machine.

If you don't have a specific windows XP system yet, and you want best coverage, then definitely make one.

Although, I'm tempted to recommend a quad core Core 2 system for that.

If you want a P4 computer with Windows 2000/XP get a Socket 478 motherboard with AGP slot, a Northwood CPU with Hyper-Threading and 1GB or 2GB RAM.

For LGA775 get a Core 2 Duo CPU with a motherboard compatible with it because they are much faster (including the ones with lower clock) than any NetBurst based CPU except on corner cases around SSE2. Quad-core CPUs on consumer computers weren't commonly used during Windows XP heyday.

Some programs may have issues with multi-core CPUs but it can be fixed by changing the process affinity to one CPU core.

canthearu wrote on 2021-09-20, 23:51:

There are multiple games that run better on XP vs Windows 7 and above. Like GTA-SA, X: Beyond the Frontier, Star wars knights of the old republic, and probably many others, run poorly on my Windows 10 machine.

Funny how you downplayed DOS compatibility on a different thread and here saying that these old games doesn't run well on Windows versions later than XP, the irony isn't lost to me. 😉

Don't worry, no offense to you. Just pointing out.

So, If I'm reading this correctly the advantage to having a PC from this era is mostly the advantages of having windows XP vs newer windows? Any thoughts on Win2k vs WinXP?

Probably all the mid-early 00s games that panic and crash when there's more than 1 core. That was a growing pain going into the '10s where you'd have to keep setting affinity, etc. Hyperthreading also introduces a similar mess. Bonus points for the Pentium 4 if one of these requires SSE2.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2021-09-21, 00:59:

Funny how you downplayed DOS compatibility on a different thread and here saying that these old games doesn't run well on Windows versions later than XP, the irony isn't lost to me. 😉

Not really. I have about 12 different DOS computers, ranging from XTs to an Athlon XP 2000+. If a games doesn't work on a particular machine, I'm sure I can find a close enough substitute to run it on 😀 And I suspect that many here are the same. Hence not needing to obsess too strongly about compatibility on any one particular machine. I already have 4 DOS machines with S3 accelerator cards for the small number of games that need maximum compatibility.

I've a MSI Mega SFF based Pentium 4 + AGP 6800GT GPU for Windows XP, thought it great until I built up a Core2Duo + PCIe 9600GT GPU system for a friend running Windows XP. System was much more responsive, so much quieter and put my system to shame in every game without any issues.

Now all I want is a faster CPU to run those heftier late XP games, that isn't as noisy.

I've got a feel gx620 I'm going to try to fix up. I think if I disable a core in the bios it's basically a pentium 4 at that point.

Low profile gpus are super expensive!!

There are LGA775 motherboard me with AGP that support C2D CPUs.

Byrd wrote on 2021-09-21, 02:02:

I've a MSI Mega SFF based Pentium 4 + AGP 6800GT GPU for Windows XP, thought it great until I built up a Core2Duo + PCIe 9600GT GPU system for a friend running Windows XP. System was much more responsive, so much quieter and put my system to shame in every game without any issues.

Now all I want is a faster CPU to run those heftier late XP games, that isn't as noisy.

Yep, that is why I had in my first reply to consider using creating a Win XP machine using a core 2 quad machine vs an older P4. You can pair it with an SSD and a higher end graphics card (GTX 260, ATI 58xx or so) and get really nice performance out of it.

There are fewer of the random hardware compatibility problems you find with Windows 95/DOS gaming, although some games dislike multi-core systems as mentioned earlier, but you typically force CPU affinity (or disable extra cores in BIOS) to get them going.

In my experience, no. It's more OS dependent than CPU. Speed is a non-issue and software that can't handle more than a certain amount of CPU cores generally ignores the surplus.

Fallout 3 used to have an issue where it crashed much more on more than 2 core CPUs, but Pentium D stopped at 2 cores without HT.

aspiringnobody wrote on 2021-09-20, 23:33:

Are there any games that would run on a P4 system that wouldn't just run on my Ryzen PC with a modern GPU?

Now that's a different matter. A Ryzen with a modern GPU gemerally means modern Windows and that can be an issue. There are also a certain level of incompatibility between modern GPUs and early 2000s games though to a much lesser digree than with 90s games. A P4 generally also means AGP graphics cards which is generally more compatible with those 90s games. The exceptions can be the late ones, especially the ones designed for PCI-e with bridge chips.

canthearu wrote on 2021-09-21, 01:43:

Gmlb256 wrote on 2021-09-21, 00:59:

Funny how you downplayed DOS compatibility on a different thread and here saying that these old games doesn't run well on Windows versions later than XP, the irony isn't lost to me. 😉

Not really. I have about 12 different DOS computers, ranging from XTs to an Athlon XP 2000+. If a games doesn't work on a particular machine, I'm sure I can find a close enough substitute to run it on 😀 And I suspect that many here are the same. Hence not needing to obsess too strongly about compatibility on any one particular machine. I already have 4 DOS machines with S3 accelerator cards for the small number of games that need maximum compatibility.

Exactly. You don't even need that many computers. If you have one or two well-chosen DOS computers in the sub-1GHz range, there is exactly no need to worry about DOS compatibility on Windows boxen, and if you needed more than that, it would be at the bottom end (XT), not faster than any DOS game actually needs.

Of course, nothing wrong with accepting the challenge of getting DOS stuff to run on 21st Century machines, but it's only really needed if you only want one retro system to cover everything (bad idea IMHO unless space is REALLY at a premium, even a thin client/ITX box with 686B southbridge is much easier), or have another overriding reason to particularly want to do DOS on such a system.

aspiringnobody wrote on 2021-09-21, 01:19:

So, If I'm reading this correctly the advantage to having a PC from this era is mostly the advantages of having windows XP vs newer windows?

WinXP allows you to run EAX games natively, without wrappers and such. Most games released up to 2007 or so will benefit from that.

Get a Sound Blaster X-Fi for the best EAX experience.

aspiringnobody wrote on 2021-09-21, 01:19:

So, If I'm reading this correctly the advantage to having a PC from this era is mostly the advantages of having windows XP vs newer windows?

Pretty much. I own a P4 HT system, and it's beaten completely by my Core 2 Duo laptop, both running XP. A Core 2 Quad or even a fast desktop Core 2 Duo (3GHz+) will be much better than a P4 and still have 100% XP compatibility. Other than a museum piece, I can't find justification to a Pentium 4 / Pentium D system these days, surely not to build one from scratch. The only reason I still have mine, is because I bought it in 2004.

Games that freak out with multi-core are actually quite rare, and if all workarounds fail, temporarily disabling all cores but one should work.

aspiringnobody wrote on 2021-09-21, 01:19:

Any thoughts on Win2k vs WinXP?

I say - go with XP. 2K may have an advantage on older and lower-powered hardware, cause it's a bit lighter than XP (although even for that there is Windows FLP, never tried it actually). However, for anything P4 and later - XP all the way, because it gives you pretty much all the advantages of Win2K, some advantages of Win9x, a more versatile UI, better PnP support, and with SP3 it can be patched to be a semi-modern OS, with greatly extended software compatibility.

I'm a big fan of 2k for nostalgic reasons, but beyond that, unless you want to run something on a DEC Alpha, there's hardly any reason to prefer it. Yes, it's marginally lighter, but XP boots faster, has better multimedia and driver support.

Do beware with patching XP to SP3 - it's still not safe to let onto public internet, but it MASSIVELY increases resource usage. You can run vanilla XP sort of acceptably on a P3-500 with 128MB RAM and it flies on an Athlon XP with 512MB, but with SP3 you really want a dualcore and 2GB RAM just for parity in terms of desktop responsiveness.

dionb wrote on 2021-09-21, 08:34:

Do beware with patching XP to SP3 - it's still not safe to let onto public internet, but it MASSIVELY increases resource usage.

That it does, but it also increases software compatibility. Behind a hardware NAT firewall it should be reasonably safe to use online. For slightly lower-end systems XP SP2 might be a good compromise.

how about XP 64 bit edition - something I've never used but seems suited to those early 2 core systems, at least on paper. Not sure how they deal with the single core expecting 32 bit games of the time though

XP 64-bit is more or less a BETA product, and not really needed/usable for some sort of gaming especially.

XP 64b is a totally different beast, driver and software support was pretty limited. I'd avoid and go Windows 7 if 64b is required.