Alternative computer is HP Z220 with E3-1280 V2. I have this and have researched well. Essential for very sensitive software use like this audio work.

Most fastest you can go without breaking XP is Xeon E3-1280-V2, single threaded is 4GHz, for specialized high quality work without errors and reliability is best done with using ECC memory, and cheap too Go with 1GB ECC or 4GB ECC memory modules, even at 16GB, XP sees as less than 4GB. Still have drivers for XP and can be had from HP drivers for Z220 computer.

Not to mention, cheaper.

PS: since this Xeon E3-1280 V2 have extra PCIe 4 lanes for total of 20 lanes instead of 16, you can have plenty of lanes and you can use a x1 single port ethernet card called intel pro/1000 PT which off loads TCP/IP onto ethernet controller. Supported in XP 7 and 10, very well. Very noticeable with C2D E8600 computer which I had, and would be essential with this software if very sensitive to interrupts.

I had Optiplex 780 on XP, 7 then 10 with pro/1000 PT before I upgraded to Z220, moved everything to it, currently 10. But I know this will work with XP.

Cheers,

Fastest Windows XP platform, without workarounds, is X79.

You might want to look at X58 as a platform as well. Being the prosumer/workstation platform of it's time, motherboards are well built with good components, and you can find plenty of designed-for-workstation models from the well-known manufacturers, which given your use case is perfect fit really. Grab a 6 core Xeon for peanuts off Aliexpress (an X5690 or X5680) and you'll get more cores, more threads and more cache then you would on a consumer Sandy/Ivy Bridge. Triple channel RAM is just the cherry on top.

X79 is the next step up, and while I've had no issues with Intel's AHCI controller on my X79 WinXP system, God of Gaming's experience shows your mileage may vary. A big advantage of going X79/LGA 2011 is it opens up core counts and cache amounts that are pretty crazy for XP, but for a productive system that could make a lot of sense, especially given how cheap (and robust) second hand LGA 2011 Xeons are. Motherboards still command a premium though, and I wouldn't trust the 'rebirthed' Chinese mobos for a system like this.

I built a supermicro C7Q67 with a modded bios to accept the LGA1155 E3-1200 xeons, about 2015.
About 2018 I repurposed a Debian X8DTi-F when I found the drivers for XP on the CD., and had built a bigger one for Debian. With the extra ram used as a ram drive under the PAE kernel I left 48GB, now 24GB. The fresh nlite install came up error free first time with the extra memory, dual socket E5687's, and a 4GB firepro gpu.

The E3 is a sports car, well balanced. The X8 is more like an obese early 70's muscle car.

God Of Gaming wrote on 2023-12-02, 23:42:

I used to use a Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 (gigabyte's top of the line overkill motherboard for that socket) with i7-3770K and 16 gigs of nice ram, for winXP, and it worked absolutely perfectly, full driver support for winXP on official gigabyte page, stable, reliable, compatible.

I now use an Asus P9X79 WS motherboard with a Xeon E5-1680v2 and 32 gigs of nice ram. Basically doubled down on everything from the previous machine. However the winXP support is nowhere near as good. As an example, there are no winXP 32bit ahci drivers for the intel x79 chipset sata controller, only for the additional marvel sata controller. There are winXP 64bit drivers, but no 32bit ones. To access hard drives connected to the intel sata controller, I need to run them in IDE mode. Didn't have that issue with the Z77 board. So I cannot recommend X79 chipset for winXP 32bit, but I can recommend Z77 chipset. Everything just works with Z77. I had no yellow checkmarks in device manager with Z77. I do have some now with X79. Funny thing is Z77 is actually a bit newer than X79, came out like half an year later

Cheers for the post, @God Of Gaming! So I'm assuming that you would recommend the Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 over ... say ... the ASRock Z77 Extreme4? If this is true , would you mind elaborating about what sets the two mobos apart for you?

Looking forward to it ~
Sigtryggr

Another recommendation for Z77 here.

I'm currently using an MSI Z77A-G43 (MS-7758) motherboard paired with an i5-3570K for my main WinXP system, and it works great. That board officially supports WinXP (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions) and all drivers are still available on the manufacturer's website.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-12-03, 07:16:

Another recommendation for Z77 here.

I'm currently using an MSI Z77A-G43 (MS-7758) motherboard paired with an i5-3570K for my main WinXP system, and it works great. That board officially supports WinXP (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions) and all drivers are still available on the manufacturer's website.

Cheers for the post Joseph !

Would you mind telling me what you did for the initial XP Pro Sp3 x86 installation to ensure that you could employ the speed that comes with the post-XP era SATA III SSDs? Did the MSI Z77A-G43 come with an install disc that allowed you to employ a SATA III SSD? Go easy on me, I've been away from PCs for a very long time.

GodsPetMonkey wrote on 2023-12-03, 05:18:

You might want to look at X58 as a platform as well. Being the prosumer/workstation platform of it's time, motherboards are well built with good components, and you can find plenty of designed-for-workstation models from the well-known manufacturers, which given your use case is perfect fit really. Grab a 6 core Xeon for peanuts off Aliexpress (an X5690 or X5680) and you'll get more cores, more threads and more cache then you would on a consumer Sandy/Ivy Bridge. Triple channel RAM is just the cherry on top.

X79 is the next step up, and while I've had no issues with Intel's AHCI controller on my X79 WinXP system, God of Gaming's experience shows your mileage may vary. A big advantage of going X79/LGA 2011 is it opens up core counts and cache amounts that are pretty crazy for XP, but for a productive system that could make a lot of sense, especially given how cheap (and robust) second hand LGA 2011 Xeons are. Motherboards still command a premium though, and I wouldn't trust the 'rebirthed' Chinese mobos for a system like this.

Cheers to you for the post, @GodsPetMonkey!

Bearing in mind that the PC I mentioned in the OP is the first PC I've built in over 20 years, would you mind elaborating on what an "X58" and an "X79" is? I'm assuming that they're Intel chipsets, but would you kindly give me an example of a good mobo for each of these chipset series?

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-03, 07:28:

Cheers for the post Joseph !

Would you mind telling me what you did for the initial XP Pro Sp3 x86 installation to ensure that you could employ the speed that comes with the post-XP era SATA III SSDs? Did the MSI Z77A-G43 come with an install disc that allowed you to employ a SATA III SSD? Go easy on me, I've been away from PCs for a very long time.

I don't think I did anything special in that regard. After installing the chipset drivers, SATA III SSDs worked right out of the box. This motherboard only has two SATA III ports though, the rest are SATA II.

If you want more details, you can see the full build in this thread.

I run XP on my Ryzen 5950x system.

Only thing I don't have a driver for is the 2.5Gbit ethernet, but I got around that with USB 1gbit ethernet.

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-03, 06:51:

Cheers for the post, @God Of Gaming! So I'm assuming that you would recommend the Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 over ... say ... the ASRock Z77 Extreme4? If this is true , would you mind elaborating about what sets the two mobos apart for you?

Looking forward to it ~
Sigtryggr

Nah, i wouldn't recommend the Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 in specific, its a luxury motherboard with lots of excess, in fact if I myself ever go back to Z77 chipset Id probably go with a lower tier model that has less features I dont need and more features that I do need. So for example the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H, Id probably find a lot more use out of that today. But really any motherboard with Z77 chipset should do great for winXP32, that asrock too. But I kinda like the Gigabyte brand from around that time, they used to have better quality components than the competition, and also dual bios chips, nice to have one as backup if the other one gets messed up. I would probably also use an older i7-2600K instead of the 3770K that I did use, they were better overclockers, they had soldered lids instead of having thermal goo underneat like 3770K and up, and also they were made on a larger node, which in my mind meant they could take more voltage safely, and probably have stronger memory controllers too, giving me some peace of mind when using 1.65v ram instead of 1.5v ram. To be honest my taste is for a bit more of an enthusiast-type build, since you just need a workstation, all I just mentioned is probably irrelevant. Maybe check if you can find a good deal on an Asus P8Z77 WS motherboard, these were specifically optimized to be used for a workstation machine, so might fit your needs well

If you want to go the X58 route I built myself and my wife gaming systems based around the Asus Sabertooth X58 motherboards and Xeon X5675 cpus. They have been rock solid for us with great windows 10 performance. Even playing games they run smooth with our RTX 30 series cards. I'll probably pickup a pair of X5690s and overclock them .

Its a hard question to answer because first you have to ask if it does or does not have to have 100% hardware compatibility with the system.
Some people are quite happy to run systems with devices that have no XP drivers at all, so the device sits there without any device drivers installed, and some people dont even bother to disable to device in the hardware profile too.

But some perfer to have devices with drivers that XP can use.

The answer would depend on the problem above.

Personally I perfer a system with all the drivers and I dont consider systems unless it can do that, otherwise I would have it on the latest i7 system blah blah blah.

God Of Gaming wrote on 2023-12-03, 17:26:

Nah, i wouldn't recommend the Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 in specific, its a luxury motherboard with lots of excess, in fact if I myself ever go back to Z77 chipset Id probably go with a lower tier model that has less features I dont need and more features that I do need. So for example the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H, Id probably find a lot more use out of that today. But really any motherboard with Z77 chipset should do great for winXP32, that asrock too.

Agree ! Have a Asrock Z77 Fatality Pro and it has more stuff than I ever plan to use. One thing for SATA 3, it has two SATA3 from the Intel PCH and 4 SATA3 from Amedia chip plus 4 more SATA2...so lots HD capability.
Asrock has both XP x86 and x64 drivers still on their website plus it has a PS2 port and floppy port (only for one 3.5" 1.44Mb drive)....but it is some what over kill if you just need a good workstation board....

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-12-03, 17:58:

Personally I perfer a system with all the drivers and I dont consider systems unless it can do that, otherwise I would have it on the latest i7 system blah blah blah.

As I said, my X8 came up free of any missing device drivers first run. It has a single 5520 chipset with 2 banks of numa and fancy many-way QPI, all things I would think are beyond XP but are not. First I tested installs on a X8DTH with dual 5520 chipsets, a monster of a board. I dialed in full support after a few attempts, then intentionally downsized to the X8DTi. It's rock solid. The ECC memory beyond ~3.2GB is useful. It's all good.

The 5520 is basically a bigger X58

Cheers to everyone who's posted to this informative thread!

I keep seeing references here to X58 and x79, but, quite honestly, I don't know exactly what they mean. My research is telling me that they're references to Intel chipsets that are older than either Sandy or Ivy Bridge, so, being older, can either chipset accommodate SATA III SSDs?

Bear in mind that the "wounded" mobo I managed to get Win XP Pro SP3 x86 to function on is an ASRock Z68 Pro3-M (Sandy Bridge chipset) with a Core i3-2105 CPU installed (Sandy Bridge CPU). As it was rather difficult to get the system I just described to work with a SATA III SSD, I was assuming that older Intel hardware doesn't work with SSDs... and please feel free to take a Win '98 era PC builder to Windows XP school. I'm here to learn.

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-03, 19:58:

Cheers to everyone who's posted to this informative thread! […]
Show full quote

Cheers to everyone who's posted to this informative thread!

I keep seeing references here to X58 and x79, but, quite honestly, I don't know exactly what they mean. My research is telling me that they're references to Intel chipsets that are older than either Sandy or Ivy Bridge, so, being older, can either chipset accommodate SATA III SSDs?

Bear in mind that the "wounded" mobo I managed to get Win XP Pro SP3 x86 to function on is an ASRock Z68 Pro3-M (Sandy Bridge chipset) with a Core i3-2105 CPU installed (Sandy Bridge CPU). As it was rather difficult to get the system I just described to work with a SATA III SSD, I was assuming that older Intel hardware doesn't work with SSDs... and please feel free to take a Win '98 era PC builder to Windows XP school. I'm here to learn.

X58 and X79 are the workstationy chipsets. What did they call this mostly dead category now? HEDT?

Not sure when SATA 3 started to be a thing, but other than early Via chipsets having SATA issues, SATA is generally fairly backwards compatible.

That being said, a Z68/Z77 board with a Sandy/Ivy bridge is clearly the simplest option for you.

VivienM wrote on 2023-12-03, 20:00:

....That being said, a Z68/Z77 board with a Sandy/Ivy bridge is clearly the simplest option for you.

Cheers again, @VivienM! I'm assuming that the mobo designers/manufacturers were working to improve their boards with every chipset advancement, so, given the quote above, do you also think that the Z77 era mobo is the ultimate Ivy Bridge main board?

I am using H87-based motherboard with i7-4990 CPU - everything is supported in XP and there are drivers, but 8-series chipset removed the PCI support. So, if you want good PCI support then Intel 7-series chipset based motherboard makes more sense.

Sigtryggr wrote on 2023-12-03, 21:09:

VivienM wrote on 2023-12-03, 20:00:

....That being said, a Z68/Z77 board with a Sandy/Ivy bridge is clearly the simplest option for you.

Cheers again, @VivienM! I'm assuming that the mobo designers/manufacturers were working to improve their boards with every chipset advancement, so, given the quote above, do you also think that the Z77 era mobo is the ultimate Ivy Bridge main board?

They were improving things and, at the same time, removing legacy things (e.g. floppy drive connectors).

I would suggest going for a simple Z77 board. You don't need the one with the add-on PCI-E storage controllers that will confuse you, you don't need the one with the super-duperest most-overclocking-friendly power setup, etc. Just go for something simple whose manufacturer has a full set of XP drivers on their web site today. Then slipstream the F6 storage driver into an XP disc and off you go...

I happen to have an Asus P8Z77-M here; other than the fact that I am a bit hesitant to recommend mATX boards, it certainly seems fine.