Hello, I'm an occasional lurker, and a first time poster! This is my very first build thread on VOGONS and I hope you will enjoy reading it.

The build I'm here to showcase is my latest creation that I call "Watchtower". It is a 2012-era Ivy Bridge system that I built for older games and general Windows 7/XP usage. It also happens to be my very first build! Most of my PCs have been either built by others or purchased pre-assembled and used, so I used this build as a good way to practice PC building.

Here are the current specifications:

• CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K
• Cooler: Noctua NH-D14
• Motherboard: ASUS SABERTOOTH Z77
• RAM: Corsair Vengeance LP 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3-1600 CL10
• GPU: GIGABYTE GTX 680 WindForce 3X OC 2GB
• Storage: Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD & WD Caviar Black 2TB HDD (Windows 7), GB0250EAFYK HP Enterprise Drive (Windows XP)
• Case: Fractal Design Define R4 Black Pearl
• Power Supply: Corsair TX850V2
• Sound Card: Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium
• Optical Drive: LG GH24NSC0 24x Super Multi DVD-RAM

(pardon the cable management and dust, I plan to fix it when I get the free time and will)

Introduction

I'd like to give a bit of a dive into how the build came to be and its intentions and purposes before I dive into the technical nitty-gritty.

Previously, my alternative PC for retro purposes was an old Athlon II X3 system that ran Windows XP. While there were no problems with it, other than it sometimes being a bit slow for certain applications, I started thinking about building something more powerful that would still run XP and maybe also run Windows 7. The usage of Windows 7 would be for both the OS itself, and the games that would be appropriate for it. And originally, an XP/7 dualboot was the only motivation for this build. But as I was planning out the parts more and more, I had another idea as to where to go with it.

I think it is important to establish that I grew up in a different era of PC gaming and PCs in general, much later than the generally discussed eras on this forum. I have quite fond memories (wouldn't call it nostalgia, at least not yet 😉) of the early 2010s, and particularly the year 2012. Why? While it seemingly isn't anything special on the surface, it is a year I hold a strong sentiment for when it comes to PC gaming and my early gaming years.

So I gave this build another purpose: Being a top-of-the-line and period-correct 2012 gaming PC.

While it may not sound as impressive or as retro as most of the other builds on the forum, I personally view it as an interesting concept to take on for a build. I always have fondness and a lot of respect for period-correct builds that people create in the modern day, so I wanted to create something similar, but for a PC gaming era I have more personal interest in revisiting. It having Windows XP as a secondary OS may be viewed as bogging down its "omega gaming PC of the year" status, but ultimately I believe it gives me greater compatibility for games released before 2008-2009, and I think they fit Windows XP better than Windows 7 (even if 7 is perfectly capable of running the games). I should also note that I am not going absolutely balls to the wall with every single part (like a Xeon or an LGA2011 CPU or what have you). I'm aiming for a pretty realistic consumer gaming build for the year its based on, but still with very high-end components.

This project involved a lot of research for me, having to look up 2012 buyer's guides, old Anandtech articles and reviews, PCPartPicker completed builds, and old forum threads. It was a pretty fun ride that resulted in a sick build, and I'd love to do something like that again for an older time period if I ever got in the mood for it!

Parts

I'd like to give some more info about some of the parts used in the system.

CPU: There was no doubt in my mind that I had to go for the i7-3770K for top-dog gaming performance of the time. While I haven't overclocked it yet, it is something I'm considering, as the CPU, cooler and motherboard should be fairly capable for it. I have also thought about potentially delidding it for lower temperatures, but it is not something I'm comfortable with or capable of doing at the moment.

Cooler: While maybe not the newest at the time, the NH-D14 was a very well-regarded cooler, and the absolute top-end for air-cooling for the time, as far as I'm concerned. (And it's still a great air cooler today, even if discontinued!) I considered liquid cooling, but getting a 13 year old AIO doesn't bode well for reliability, and I'm unsure if those old models from back then are still manufactured at all. Plus, I've always personally preferred air cooling's simplicity. Nevertheless, the Noctua is a very fitting choice for this build, and it performs wonderfully. It should give me plenty of overclocking headroom in the future!

Motherboard: Originally, I was going to use whatever motherboard I could find that had a 3770K in it already, but as all the good bundles I cound find locally dried up, I focused on finding a specific one. And for the intentions and purposes of this build, the SABERTOOTH Z77 was absolutely perfect. It was a very well-regarded Z77 motherboard back in the day from what I can tell, and the aesthetics and functionality drew me to it like a moth to a flame. I just had to have it for this build.

RAM: I was originally going to use a different Corsair set of 4x4GB sticks, but they would be incompatible with the cooler due to clearance, so I opted for a different set of low profile Corsair memory. While arguably not the fastest speed or latency at the time, it is still plenty fast, a great choice for the build, and the capacity would still be more than enough for the time.

GPU: Considering Nvidia's equal or slightly better amount of performance around this time over most of AMD's offerings, and my preference for more efficient cards, the obvious choice for the GPU was the GTX 680. I was lucky enough to find this pretty good Gigabyte model locally for super cheap, and it works very well for the games I run on it. I considered maybe using an improved 4GB variant instead, but I didn't think it would be worth the money and time to hunt one down, and 2GB of VRAM is plenty for this era of games and older at 1080p. I'm a bit wary of the 690 and dual-GPUs in general, so I decided not to consider it as a potential upgrade, nor did I think SLI would be worth the time and money to set up due to limited support. It is something I'd love to experiment with however, if I were to get a second compatible 680.

Storage: The 840 Pro was regarded as a very good SSD when it came out, so I opted to grab it as the Windows 7 system drive. I feel like I'm taking a bit of a risk, considering it's a used drive. I have committed to the period-correctness as much as I can at this point however, and I'm sure it'll be fine for now, as Samsung drives are known to be pretty reliable. Plus, I don't plan to hold anything sensitive or valuable on this drive, so I can always replace it if it fails at any point with no real repercussions. I originally considered a pure 500GB SSD setup for Win 7 for both the OS and games, but it was a much less realistic storage setup than SSD+HDD at the time, as the 500GB version of the system drive alone retailed for 600 dollars! The HDD should also give me plenty of space for games and whatever other stuff I want to put on there. Maybe not the most HDD storage in the world at the time, but 2TB is still a sizeable amount for the time, and it'll be more than enough for all the games I'd want to run on this PC. The smaller hard drive on the other hand is solely for Windows XP usage, as I was not in the mood to risk and mess with SSDs on XP, so I went with it as a safer storage option, and for proper self-containment. Doing this also lets me avoid MBR/GPT shenanigans on any of my main drives, which is much appreciated.

Case: The Define R series of cases was a pretty popular choice in this period from what I can gather, so getting the latest at the time R4 model was a good choice. It's a great case with plenty of room for building and it looks incredibly stylish too! The used example I got had some parts missing, but I was able to make due with other spare parts I obtained, such as replacement feet and HDD screws.

Power Supply: The TX850V2 was a pretty solid choice for a high-end system back then, and I was able to find one locally for a good price, so I snapped it up for this build. The non-modularity made it a bit of a cable mess, but I managed just fine, and it is running very well in the system. Ironically, it has a higher wattage than the PSU in my main rig! And it should give me plenty of headroom for SLI, should I ever want to mess around with that in the future.

Sound Card: The X-Fi Titanium was intended and used for my previous XP PC, but I put it in this system instead for both higher quality audio output, and X-Fi compatibility under XP. While X-Fi also works with certain games under 7, the DirectSound shenanigans I read about make it a better fit for XP in my opinion. It may be viewed as pretty old at the time, but I don't find it to be super out-of-place for the build. That being said, I do think a Sound Blaster Z-Series card would be a pretty interesting part to put in and mess around with.

Optical Drive: The optical drive was not a part that I thought needed much deliberation, so I just use the one that came pre-installed in the case. It supports DVD-RAM and M-DISCs, which I find interesting and amusing.

Software & Setup

As previously mentioned, the machine runs both Windows 7 & XP, with the latter mostly for older games and software that are better suited for that OS. I originally wanted to have a proper boot menu that let me pick between them on boot, but due to UEFI shenanigans on 7, I could not get it set up for love nor money. So I settled on simply choosing the XP HDD in the Boot Override menu in the BIOS, which works well enough. To install XP, I had to temporarily set the SATA mode to IDE and install the proper AHCI driver, but after that it was all smooth sailing with Legacy Update and whatnot. I was going to install XP first originally, but I didn't have the parts necessary to properly install it, so I did 7 first. This meant I had to fix the bootloader with a Windows 7 install USB after installing XP, but it wasn't anything complicated or troublesome. I still want a proper boot menu solution though, so if anyone has a solution to my UEFI problem or a good boot menu alternative, please let me know!

I didn't have any real goal with the XP install other than to get all the old games going, but for Windows 7, I had an additional goal of getting it period correct to the era as well. As a compromise from all my options available, I chose mid-2013 as a sweet spot for all the old game versions and software themes to be based on. I think I nailed it pretty well, all things considered. Desktop pictures for both OSes (as of July 9th) below.

In terms of stuff like drivers or general GPU usage info, I chose driver 352.86 for XP (proper GPU scaling options and monitor recognition) and 441.66 for 7 (better compatibility with Kepler GPUs), as well as the latest Daniel_K X-Fi drivers for my X-Fi Titanium under both OSes. For 4:3 games under XP, I chose the Do Not Scale option with a 1440x1080 resolution selected in-game. The result is sharp visuals with the proper aspect ratio. Example pic below.

For peripherals, I currently have a generic cheapo gaming keyboard and mouse set (I seek to change them at a later point) and a period-correct 1080p monitor that I luckily found at a thrift store! I do not have any speakers and I don't use headphones, so all the audio as of now is coming out of the monitor. Not the greatest sound quality, but until I find decent speakers from the time, I consider it to be the most comfortable option while still being reasonably adequate to me.

Ultimately, most of my time is spent on the Windows 7 end, and I absolutely love it! Watching older videos, listening to music, and playing games while doing either of those has been incredibly cozy, and the period-correct theming and games add to it a lot. 😀 The XP end has also been incredibly fun to tinker with in terms of games and software, even with the added inconvenience of having to boot override into it every time.

The Future

What could potentially be next for the build?

• Overclocking would definitely be an interesting avenue to explore for slightly more performance, but I am not good at it at all, 🤣. I'm definitely planning to do it very soon, though.
• Triple-booting Win 10/7/XP and running some more modern games would violate it's period-correctness, but would make for (in my opinion) an interesting experimental and temporary change to post about in this thread.
• It's also possible that I could obtain a cheap 4GB 680 and upgrade to that, which would make Windows 10 gaming slightly more viable, but I'd only go for it if I found a suitably priced offer.
• I could also try and get my hands on a comparable AMD GPU offering (such as an HD 7970) and benchmark it for comparisons between it and the 680 for suitable games.
• Adding a second 680 for SLI would be a fun thing to tinker with, if the right card at the right price showed up. Ideally I'd have a second unit of the exact GPU, but I don't imagine finding another one that easily.

Fin

All in all, I'm incredibly happy with the build, and I absolutely love using it whenever I can, for both XP and 7 gaming! It gives me great performance for both operating systems in all the games I've intended to play on it, and it looks quite nice. I hope you like it as well! I'm fully open to suggestions and feedback, and I would also love to hear about related builds or stories about your gaming experiences from 2012-13 and/or general era of Windows 7 or even XP PC gaming. Thank you for reading this thread. 😀