I doubt that regular GeForce drivers will work on Windows 2000 Datacenter. red-ray was unable to get those working on Windows NT 4.0 Enterprise Server.

3] Best video card is GeForce 980Ti 6Gb Vram

Only with KernelEx. If Windows 2000 is going to be hacked up with Windows XP components, one may as well just install XP.

6] There is no PCIE Audio card with Windows 2000 drivers

Try the Windows XP drivers. A surprising amount of hardware released up to 2009 has Windows XP drivers that happen to work on 2000.

mobo: Asrock X99 Extreme 4 [not certain about drivers though]

Motherboards for Sandy Bridge onwards can have broken ACPI tables that make Setup crash with a BSoD. If this happens, spam F5 while the installer is loading files; a message should appear along with a list of computer types. Select MPS Multiprocessor PC.

GemCookie wrote on 2024-06-19, 09:02:

I doubt that regular GeForce drivers will work on Windows 2000 Datacenter. red-ray was unable to get those working on Windows NT […]
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I doubt that regular GeForce drivers will work on Windows 2000 Datacenter. red-ray was unable to get those working on Windows NT 4.0 Enterprise Server.

3] Best video card is GeForce 980Ti 6Gb Vram

Only with KernelEx. If Windows 2000 is going to be hacked up with Windows XP components, one may as well just install XP.

6] There is no PCIE Audio card with Windows 2000 drivers

Try the Windows XP drivers. A surprising amount of hardware released up to 2009 has Windows XP drivers that happen to work on 2000.

mobo: Asrock X99 Extreme 4 [not certain about drivers though]

Motherboards for Sandy Bridge onwards can have broken ACPI tables that make Setup crash with a BSoD. If this happens, spam F5 while the installer is loading files; a message should appear along with a list of computer types. Select MPS Multiprocessor PC.

I am talking about BlackWingCat hacked video drivers.
As for the chipset: i've seen info that X79 is 100% compatible, but can't be sure regarding x99.
Currently, i'm on the stage of gathering information to start the project.
And as i understand it won't be easy.

If you aren't going to use vanilla 2000 then data center isn't necessary since bwc allows higher number of CPU and memory. Keep in mind driver compatibiltiy and PAE.
Pcie Audigy RX works in 2000, if you want a PCI card then get a pcie to PCI adapter if you don't have a PCI slot.
As for nvme I use proxmox so all the VMS are stored on nvme so that's how I get around that. Someone would have to make the xp nvme drivers work on 2000 for bare metal assuming they don't already work with BWC.

Iirc, bwc allows drivers that support usb3 to work. For XP without any hacks I use the renesas drivers for the emulated ProxMox usb. For 2000 I'd likely have to use BWC with those drivers but I haven't tested.
There is a thread on msfn but do you really need it? SMB1 still works on the latest operating systems, sftp and ftp will likely always work

Back in the day I ran DCS on a Duron ~800 or so, less than a gig of RAM, 5 HDDs in various states of terrible software RAID, all in a midi tower case. It was the domain controller for my home, and the act of having a domain at home suddenly made all Windows file sharing so smooth: a 9x workgroup is such tedium of invisible machines, timeouts, needless delays, unreliable or no name resolution....

The big problem for me with DCS was SP4. The normal version will not install, and by the time SP4 came along the site I originally got DCS and info from had gone. I think it was bink.nu?

I used probably MBSA to determine what patches were needed after SP3, and then installed them all.

I do not rememeber any problem with drivers, my DCS had a passively cooled Radeon in it, with TV out and connected to a little B&W CRT so at least what was on the screen could be looked at. Terminal Services was used for admin.

So I ran it way below the spec MS envisioned for DCS, not way over. I put Advanced Server on a laptop the other week, and haven't looked at it lots..... I think that saw all 3 gig of RAM and 4 CPUs, so DCS might decide it can see all your hardware.

DosFreak wrote on 2024-06-19, 10:18:

If you aren't going to use vanilla 2000 then data center isn't necessary since bwc allows higher number of CPU and memory. Keep in mind driver compatibiltiy and PAE.
Pcie Audigy RX works in 2000, if you want a PCI card then get a pcie to PCI adapter if you don't have a PCI slot.
As for nvme I use proxmox so all the VMS are stored on nvme so that's how I get around that.

Thanks for clarification about extended kernel. Are there any specs, which are showing maximum limits for core count and available ram?
And yeah, didn't know about Audigy RX compatibility with W2000, i assume that i need to take XP drivers and try out.

USB 3 PCIe card with ASMedia chipset works with 1.16.1.0 driver. I've also gotten AMD chipset USB 3 to work by using the "Daniel K" modified driver for the USB 3 Root Hub (AMDHUB30.SYS), and using the 1.1.0.145 AMD driver for the AMD USB 3 Host Controller (AMDXHC.SYS)

FWIW, I have not gotten PAE to work (causes BSOD), or video drivers for anything newer than Kepler (also cause BSOD). Others have succeeded at it, but I guess it varies by motherboard.

bakemono wrote on 2024-06-19, 13:23:

USB 3 PCIe card with ASMedia chipset works with 1.16.1.0 driver. I've also gotten AMD chipset USB 3 to work by using the "Daniel K" modified driver for the USB 3 Root Hub (AMDHUB30.SYS), and using the 1.1.0.145 AMD driver for the AMD USB 3 Host Controller (AMDXHC.SYS)

FWIW, I have not gotten PAE to work (causes BSOD), or video drivers for anything newer than Kepler (also cause BSOD). Others have succeeded at it, but I guess it varies by motherboard.

Thanks for your experience! Could you point me the exact model which 100% works.
I mean exact model of USB controller.

spacedrone808 wrote on 2024-06-19, 18:29:

Thanks for your experience! Could you point me the exact model which 100% works.
I mean exact model of USB controller.

The ASMedia controller is a PCIe x1 card with vendor id 1B21, device id 1142

I don't know what all motherboard chipsets work with the "Daniel K" driver, but mine is an AMD A88X "Bolton".

bakemono wrote on 2024-06-19, 21:36:

spacedrone808 wrote on 2024-06-19, 18:29:

Thanks for your experience! Could you point me the exact model which 100% works.
I mean exact model of USB controller.

The ASMedia controller is a PCIe x1 card with vendor id 1B21, device id 1142

I don't know what all motherboard chipsets work with the "Daniel K" driver, but mine is an AMD A88X "Bolton".

Technical details are almost always nice, so thanks for that!
But could you express yourself a bit grounded and provide model of controller (not the id number) so that even generic consumer understand?

spacedrone808 wrote on 2024-06-20, 05:13:

bakemono wrote on 2024-06-19, 21:36:

spacedrone808 wrote on 2024-06-19, 18:29:

Thanks for your experience! Could you point me the exact model which 100% works.
I mean exact model of USB controller.

The ASMedia controller is a PCIe x1 card with vendor id 1B21, device id 1142

I don't know what all motherboard chipsets work with the "Daniel K" driver, but mine is an AMD A88X "Bolton".

Technical details are almost always nice, so thanks for that!
But could you express yourself a bit grounded and provide model of controller (not the id number) so that even generic consumer understand?

It is a COTS no-name part from Asia. My advice to generic consumer is to go to a search engine (eg. Google) and type in 'ASMedia 1142 USB 3 PCIe card' or something similar.

bakemono wrote on 2024-06-20, 17:10:

It is a COTS no-name part from Asia. My advice to generic consumer is to go to a search engine (eg. Google) and type in 'ASMedia 1142 USB 3 PCIe card' or something similar.

Thank you so much, and it looks like that board is widely available.

I have Windows 2000 Advanced Server running on a B75 motherboard, Xeon E3-1280v2, a GeForce GTX 285, and an Audigy 2ZS with the Vanilla kernel. It works great with all 8 threads active in the processor. No issues with the Nvidia drivers with a 200-series card.

I bet an X79 board would work just fine. ACPI incompatibilities for Windows 2000 cause problems on newer boards.

I tested Windows 2000 Datacenter SP4 in VirtualBox and found that by default it supports up to 32 threads and 32GB memory

System doesn't start with 33+ cores set. Memory in this example was set to 60GB. I verified its visible through PAE in patched Windows 7 32-bit
I also verified if its VBox issue by disabling some hardware threads in the CPU.
For reference patched Windows 7 SP1 32-bit sees full 60GB memory and boots with 48 threads but only sees 32 threads.

It seems no one made NVMe work on XP 32-bit let alone 2000 but I guess second best would be SAS 6gbit RAID controller and bunch of SATA3 SSD's in RAID0
Core-wise I think you can get to 32 cores if you don't use HT.
PAE performance hit is minuscule and nothing to worry about. Investigations (read: googling) regarding PAE topic it seems its more related to XP and/or drivers needing cache (read: those which don't support PAE directly) where system needs to do some trickery to allow them to work with PAE. Imho nothing to really worry about - besides you already loose performance left and right by using old 32-bit OS with sub-optimal* scheduling rather than new 64-bit OS.

On the related note - is there a way to use Chrome/Chromium on Windows 2000 that I am not aware of?

*) To be honest imho Windows NT5.x scheduling it just fine. Maybe not perfect to squeeze every last bit of performance out of multiple CPU's/cores/threads but at least it has zero issues with multi-tasking despite number of cores unlike NT6.x (which include even Windows 11)

e8root wrote on 2024-06-23, 12:03:

I tested Windows 2000 Datacenter SP4 in VirtualBox and found that by default it supports up to 32 threads and 32GB memory https: […]
Show full quote

I tested Windows 2000 Datacenter SP4 in VirtualBox and found that by default it supports up to 32 threads and 32GB memory

System doesn't start with 33+ cores set. Memory in this example was set to 60GB. I verified its visible through PAE in patched Windows 7 32-bit
I also verified if its VBox issue by disabling some hardware threads in the CPU.
For reference patched Windows 7 SP1 32-bit sees full 60GB memory and boots with 48 threads but only sees 32 threads.

It seems no one made NVMe work on XP 32-bit let alone 2000 but I guess second best would be SAS 6gbit RAID controller and bunch of SATA3 SSD's in RAID0
Core-wise I think you can get to 32 cores if you don't use HT.
PAE performance hit is minuscule and nothing to worry about. Investigations (read: googling) regarding PAE topic it seems its more related to XP and/or drivers needing cache (read: those which don't support PAE directly) where system needs to do some trickery to allow them to work with PAE. Imho nothing to really worry about - besides you already loose performance left and right by using old 32-bit OS with sub-optimal* scheduling rather than new 64-bit OS.

On the related note - is there a way to use Chrome/Chromium on Windows 2000 that I am not aware of?

*) To be honest imho Windows NT5.x scheduling it just fine. Maybe not perfect to squeeze every last bit of performance out of multiple CPU's/cores/threads but at least it has zero issues with multi-tasking despite number of cores unlike NT6.x (which include even Windows 11)

From what I found online, core affinity on Windows was done via a bitmask so for 32-bit OSes this caps at 32 logical processors (cores/threads) and with 64-bit OSes, 64. Apparently for CPUs with more than 64 cores/threads a new concept called "processor group" was introduced in newer Windows to support such, but programs must also be "processor group aware"* in order to take advantage of it, or otherwise they'll only see up to 64 cores/threads available (32 if 32-bit).

On a X99 board I have to disable HT on my E5-2699v4 (22 cores) to let WinXP boot. Same should apply to Win2K as well.

Not sure if anyone ported the NVMe driver to Win2K, but the modded NVMe driver for WinXP does work and I can access my NVMe drive in XP, though I cannot say much about reliability as I haven't intensively tested it...

Latest nVidia video card drivers can work with PAE in most cases. Not sure about AMD, though.

AFAIK PAE is quite problematic especially when paired with audio drivers. Some (C-Media/ASUS) BSOD outright while others (like Creative) would misbehave, as well as BSOD in random or specific occasions. Your mileage may vary and I think the older cards (predating XP SP2) may behave a bit better.

Can't say how drivers behave with NT 6.x when it comes to PAE. Perhaps similar, as the only officially PAE-enabled 32-bit Windows past that point was Windows Server 2008 (non-R2), so can't expect any intensive test regarding PAE from vendors themselves...

PS: Windows 2003 R2 Datacenter SP2 is the only NT 5.x that can support 128GB on 32-bit via PAE (assuming your CPU is modern enough to support it), but that's only if no video/audio drivers installed. I only tested it briefly and it seems nVidia's 2003 drivers cap at 64GB and will refuse to boot if you've more installed (so you need to manually limit memory). Other behaviors are similar when it comes to PAE -- bad audio drivers will still BSOD or misbehave the same way.

EDIT: It seems according to the site I read about the "processor group" concept, the issues with "processor group unaware" programs has been resolved starting with Win11 and Server 2022.

e8root wrote on 2024-06-23, 12:03:

I tested Windows 2000 Datacenter SP4 in VirtualBox and found that by default it supports up to 32 threads and 32GB memory

Thank you so much for your efforts and time. Very neat screenshot!
As for modern chrome, i'm trying to launch supermium 122. It almost executes, but freezes right at startup time.
Extended Kernel 31l, .Net 4.0, VC++ 2019, DirectX 9 June 2010.
It looks like it is too early to speak about normal work under Windows 2000.

LSS10999 wrote on 2024-06-24, 03:38:

On a X99 board I have to disable HT on my E5-2699v4 (22 cores) to let WinXP boot. Same should apply to Win2K as well.

EDIT: It seems according to the site I read about the "processor group" concept, the issues with "processor group unaware" programs has been resolved starting with Win11 and Server 2022.

I have to do the same, because i have almost the same 2696.
As for Process Lassso and Park Control. They are excellent applications, i'm using them on Windows 7 for at least 4 years already.