Linoleum wrote on Yesterday, 13:54:

I followed your recommendations and picked up a GTX 750 Ti—found a few locally for just $20 CAD. I’d forgotten what a gem that card is! It packs an impressive punch for its size and needs so little power. I also scored a Sound Blaster X-Fi for $30 CAD.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the AMD Wraith Prism cooler fits perfectly on an AM3 socket. Swapping it in dropped my temps by a solid 20°C compared to the stock cooler—huge improvement. That said, I’m honestly shocked by how much heat the motherboard itself puts out, especially from the VRMs and chipsets.

My Win9x machine is a Socket 754 Athlon 64 running a Wraith Prism from a Ryzen 3700x. AMD kept their cooler measurements the same for a crazy long time.

The 750ti was a decent midrange card that sipped power when released in 2014. But put it into an XP machine and it's a powerhouse that can be powered solely off the PCIe slot. So you could get a cheap or even free early i-series decommissioned business machine, insert one without needing to worry about an under powered PSUs and you have a monster XP machine.

My only concern would be driver overhead with slower CPUs, so we'll see how it ends up performing. Have fun with the build, going back to XP is surprising when you see how few processes and random stuff MS has running in the background compared to Windows 10/11.

I still have GTX 750 Ti in my desktop. Bought in 2014 as Radeon HD 4890 couldn't handle Wolfenstein: The New Order. Something more expensive probably wouldn't make sense for an aging PC.

Archer57 wrote on 2025-08-16, 18:05:

Linoleum wrote on 2025-08-16, 17:36:

If I am running a FX 6300 that can do 4.1Ghz on boost, would that be feasible to limit cores to 2 and have then run them at 4.1ghz at all time (or at least when games are running)?

Should be. Just be aware that FX6300 is not really full 6 core CPU. It has 3 "modules" with each module containing 2 "cores", which share some components including FPU, L2 cache, etc. So it essentially is 3 core CPU with "Clustered Multithreading".

I am not sure how disabling cores would work, but if you leave one module it would not be great. Probably safer to leave at least 4 "cores", or even all 6. Just have good enough cooler and it'll run at 4.1Ghz all cores...

So far, everything is working perfectly with the MSI 970 Gaming board (AM3+) + Fx 6300; after wasting countless hours trying to use a USB3 port to install WinXP IE. Ugh...

I am trying to disable 2 of the 3 CPU modules while overclocking around 4.0Ghz and I get faulty overclocking BIOS errors almost every time I reboot the system. I'd be curious to know what settings/voltages you are using...