First post, by Almoststew1990
- Rank
- Oldbie
Like many I was awaiting the remastered GTA games with... well, trepidation, but now they're here it has encouraged me to build a Windows XP PC to play my original disk copy.
Now if I was advising a sensible person I'd advise them to make pretty much any Core 2 Duo and 8000 series or greater GPU and it will work great. But I am bored of those PCs so I decided to use my weird socket 478 board:
It's a Biostar 954GC-M4, sold in 2011, that uses DDR2 RAM, SATA 2 and a PCI-E x16 slot, but uses Socket 478. I've got a 3GHz HT Prescott that is hiding under a Thermaltake Sonic Tower passive heatsink. It's mechanism of securing to the motherboard is... not great!
Putting it in the case I've got 2 120mm intake fans in the front and a 120mm exhaust fan in the rear. Hopefully this will keep it cool...
I'm using a Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS (as recommended by the game!) and a Radeon X1950 XT(X?) The 1950 is a blower card so hopefully having it close to the soundcard doesn't cause any problems. I've paired this will 3GB of DDR2 running at 667MHz and a 120GB SSD. The motherboard is quite happy booting from optical disks using SATA which a few early SATA boards don't seem to like.
It actually runs pretty cool at about 45c, and is quiet except for the GPU that has a very distinctive fan noise. Kind of like a race car v8 growl and it is preferable to general fan noise at the same volume. It's pretty quiet when idling thanks to fan speeds set by the card's firmware (or whatever), rather than the drivers.
San Andreas runs well, which I was thankful for considering it runs badly on a 2.4Ghz Northwood. Maybe it's the hyperthreading. This PC actually hits the sweet spot of getting me under 50fps but more than the game's frame limiter rate of 25. If you run the game too fast the physics get a bit weird, with this set up I can leave the frame limiter off and not have it run too fast. (for some reason it crashes when I run it with MSI afterburner, which could limit it to 30 or 40 or something).
Outside of GTA SA I ran 3DMark 2005 which scored 7107, probably CPU limited.
I think I'll keep using this set up for a while and try some Quake 4, Oblivion... general XP gaming.
Ryzen 3700X | 16GB 3600MHz RAM | AMD 6800XT | 2Tb NVME SSD | Windows 10
AMD DX2-80 | 16MB RAM | STB LIghtspeed 128 | AWE32 CT3910
I have a vacancy for a main Windows 98 PC
