My immediate gut reaction is system 2 - maybe get a cheap Q9650 on eBay.

That being said... if this is a single boot XP system, the extra RAM is irrelevant... how does the GTX 750 compare to the 7950?

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-28, 20:05:

My immediate gut reaction is system 2 - maybe get a cheap Q9650 on eBay.

That being said... if this is a single boot XP system, the extra RAM is irrelevant... how does the GTX 750 compare to the 7950?

The 7950 can be anywhere from on par to as much as 2x faster depending on the game. The 7950 has much more potential on paper, being a 384-bit memory bus, and like 4x the number of shader cores. But it has a 200w tdp while the 750 is 128-bit bus pulling 50w.

Difficult question.
The optiplex has fine specs for XP. Just about right to play everything in period correct resolutions. The CPU performance roughly matches the Core2 Quads. The problem is the sound card. As far as I'm aware, no drivers for XP. If I remember correctly, the uATX variant uses standard ATX PSU. Unless Dell changed the pinout.

System 2 is right down the middle of the XP era. Just enough CPU power for most cases, but the graphics card is not optimal because of the lack of PhysX support. That feature without an Nvidia graphics card kills the performance. But you get a sound card that actually properly works with XP.

Neither of them is feature complete and both have strengths over the other.

RandomStranger wrote on 2024-09-28, 20:36:

Difficult question. The optiplex has fine specs for XP. Just about right to play everything in period correct resolutions. The C […]
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Difficult question.
The optiplex has fine specs for XP. Just about right to play everything in period correct resolutions. The CPU performance roughly matches the Core2 Quads. The problem is the sound card. As far as I'm aware, no drivers for XP. If I remember correctly, the uATX variant uses standard ATX PSU. Unless Dell changed the pinout.

System 2 is right down the middle of the XP era. Just enough CPU power for most cases, but the graphics card is not optimal because of the lack of PhysX support. That feature without an Nvidia graphics card kills the performance. But you get a sound card that actually properly works with XP.

Neither of them is feature complete and both have strengths over the other.

Fwiw the Audigy RX has official working xp drivers.

Ah, yes. It's the Audigy FX that only goes back to Vista.

Neither. Both are post-DX10 and are specced more like Vista/7 machines

leileilol wrote on 2024-09-29, 05:53:

Neither. Both are post-DX10 and are specced more like Vista/7 machines

I should clarify - I have several period correct machines. This one is supposed to be the top end time machine. For doing things like FEAR and Stalker COP at 1600x1200 with 4x super sample AA. Otherwise I agree they aren’t really in the xp era club.

If you are going top end, I'd go for the core series. My XP rig is a Ivybridge i5, 2GB 750ti, and Sound Blaster X-Fi. A GTX 960 will supposedly work, but IMO the low power draw of the 750 and 750ti is more desirable to me, and the games I've tried already max out what the display I use can handle.

I'd question the support of the Audigy RX for EAX support in games as that's the last OS that supported it via hardware.

System 1 seems a lot more practical for a top-end XP rig to me - all low-power consumption parts and very good single-core performance.

As for System 2, I'd say it's matched quite badly. The HD7950 is old, power-hungry monster than can still play some recent-ish games (including Cyberpunk 2077) and output to a CRT monitor (one of the last AMD cards with RAMDACs). But the CPU is horribly underspecced for feeding that HD7950 anything intensive. So the card won't be doing much most of the time. Also, indeed the 8 GB of RAM would go to waste, since XP will probably only see about 3.5-ish GB, if even that much. A better match for that system would be a GTX 400 series card or older. If high-resolution gaming is your goal, perhaps aiming for something like GTX 460 or GTX 280 would fit that bill. (Well, not sure you'll be able to max out STALKER with any video card on this platform, as it's just a poorly optimized game, IIRC. FEAR should be a lot easier to max out. I anticipate even a GTS450 might do it.)

momaka wrote on 2024-09-30, 23:43:

System 1 seems a lot more practical for a top-end XP rig to me - all low-power consumption parts and very good single-core performance.

As for System 2, I'd say it's matched quite badly. The HD7950 is old, power-hungry monster than can still play some recent-ish games (including Cyberpunk 2077) and output to a CRT monitor (one of the last AMD cards with RAMDACs). But the CPU is horribly underspecced for feeding that HD7950 anything intensive. So the card won't be doing much most of the time. Also, indeed the 8 GB of RAM would go to waste, since XP will probably only see about 3.5-ish GB, if even that much. A better match for that system would be a GTX 400 series card or older. If high-resolution gaming is your goal, perhaps aiming for something like GTX 460 or GTX 280 would fit that bill. (Well, not sure you'll be able to max out STALKER with any video card on this platform, as it's just a poorly optimized game, IIRC. FEAR should be a lot easier to max out. I anticipate even a GTS450 might do it.)

Yeah, I was running a gt640 in system 2 but the 7950 landed in my pile of parts and I had no other machine to use it in. I should probably just go back to the gt640 or even a Radeon 5570 I have laying around. Just a shame to have the 7950 and no home for it. Oh well it’ll find one eventually.