greasemonkey90s wrote on 2026-01-19, 18:24:

thanks again.

*Edit kv8 pro does with bios 23 E6 revision support.

Thank you sir.
I consider that searching for the clawhammer 3700 or mobiles Athlon 64 which happens to cost a lot does not make sense. For 3% extra performance you are going to spend 100USD or euros?

All estimates for prices are based on ebay as of 2026.
1. CPU
The model you want is the athlon 64 3400. It costs around 20-40 USD and provides 97% of the performance of the 3700 which is very rare and highly expensive. It does not matter which revision it is, they all perform the same.
Because socket 754 is disregarded by most people maybe you can get some hardware for free as I did.

2. Cooler. Stock am2 cooler from AMD is more than enough. With copper heat pipes it is compatible with socket 754-am2+.
Aluminium coolers are ok if you got some Venice based Athlon, otherwise they will be noisy.
The copper stock cooler included with socket AM2 dual cores is designed for CPU with 125w TDP; I used it during testing and it was quiet and efficient.
Cost: ~ 5-6 USD.

3. Motherboard.
I think by now it is clear that the platform of choice is nforce4. It has the highest performance out of all chipsets tested -they are all within 5% anyway - and supports 4 sata drives including SSD! Tested with kingston, verbatim, intel, adata. Because it is pci express based you are going to have a very easy time finding a good video card. 4 pin connector solves the "psu problem". Also supports sata optical drives. A lots of pros!
The con is the poor compatibility or should I say incompatibilty with windows 98/me. I searched the forum and found contradictory reports: some people succeeded in installing 98 some didn't. I am one of those who didn't.

Oh no i agree i bought a 4000+ newark on sale 5 years ago for $50 us from a cpu website and my 3700+ came with my dfi lanparty board for free that i picked up locally around 8 years ago

But yes your right on your recommendations.

Unfortunately, since the pandemic, prices have skyrocketted! Example: i got 3 NV8: one for free many, many years ago, one for 20 euros and one in 2022 for 40 euros.

Coming back to the motherboard question: my recommandation is Abit NV8. Very good board, as long as you set the voltages to AUTO in BIOS which means 2.6V you can use any sticks; tried with kingmax as you can see in the photos, OCZ, aenenon.
There are many other brands however as I did not used them personally I can not make a recommandation in " the dark".
The board has only 2 dimms slots for a maximum of 2gb of RAM which run in sync with the CPU (this is extremely important for Athlon 64)- more than enough for any game from 2000-2004.
Price: 20-40USD.

4. RAM: any 1gb modules from any manufacturer for a total of 2gb is enough to play any game from the 2000-2004 period with page file disabled under Windows XP. Extremely cheap, around 5-10 USD, but again: maybe you can get some ddr-400 for free as I did.

5. Storage: ssd all the way! There are 2 enormous advantages of the socket 754 over socket 462 that are not performance related: modern power supply compatibility and the ability to use SSD's. I tested intel, kingston and a few others and they all work! The maximum capacity that I tested is 1.000gb.

6. Optical drive: nforce4 accepts any SATA DVD without question. Again very cheap for now I highly recommend to stockpile your optical units because all production have ceased!

7.Floppy disk (required for BIOS flashing): there are many solutions out there - I use Gotek and it just works!

8. VIDEO CARD.
This is a highly debated topic with very diverse opinions! High end AGP cards have become very expensive and rare; thankfully nforce4 has pci-express and we can use much newer, cheaper and easier to find cards! This is another advantage of the Abit NV8 over the competition!
I will quote myself from the old topic when I tested socket A:
Most reviewers on YouTube or on the forums take a card, card X, test it in games with mediums settings and conclude: card X is bottlenecked by the CPU, you need a stronger CPU!
Case in point: someone takes a geforce 6600gt, put it in a socket 462 machine, test a few games such as Half life 2 or Farcry 1 at medium settings. Than they put the same card in a LGA 775 system with a Core 2 duo, test the same games at the same settings and draw the conclusion: heavily bottlenecked by Athlon XP, that CPU is too weak for the geforce 6600GT.
I will be blunt: I consider all of the above wrong! I am not interested in medium settings. I have a geforce 6600GT from Leadtek that I bought in 2004 and that card runs Farcry 1 and Half life 2 just fine at medium settings. Today I do not want to repeat the same experience that I had back in 2004. I want the improved experience when I build my dream system and play Farcry 1 and Half life 2 at max settings – that includes AA & AF. I want to feel like I just bought a top of the line system and my dream PC had just come true!
Geforce 6600GT has severe problems running DirectX 9 games at max settings! In fact it can not run Farcry 1 or Half life 2 at max settings at any resolution with a comfortable frame rate.
I will consider that you want a card that can play your favorites games at maximum settings in order to enjoy what it was not possible back in the day so my recommendations will be based on this assumption.

You definitely should not hunt down a period correct geforce 6800 ultra or radeon x850xt PE! They are extremely expensive and sought after! Because you need a pci-express card it is much better to search for a geforce 7900gs/radeon x1950gt or even better a geforce 8600gts/radeon 2600xt which are plentiful, cheap and provide comparable performance for a much lower noise/power consumption. I got a gainward 8600gts for free and I tested it with many games from 2000-2004: performance was top notch, the card was inaudible and drivers installation was a breeze!

9. POWER SUPPLY: use a modern PSU ; because your retro system will likely be in use for many,many years buy a new one if you can! I use a Corsair RM650 that I bought new and it's more than enough!

10. CASE: In this case 😀 I can not make a recommendation. Everyone likes a certain case: some like the beige boxes of yesteryear, some like a new case with RGB, some like a standard black case - like me, so choose the case you like when building your system!

After all of the above it is time to put those ideas into practice! Here is my socket 754 build that I consider to have the best price to performance ratio!

CPU & cooler & BOARD & SSD:

The processor came from some computers that were thrown out - kept what I needed and donated the rest. Many years ago I got a Abit NV8 with an Athlon 64 for free because it seems nobody is interested in socket 754. Cooler came from some decommissioned system.
The SSD was bought brand new earlier in 2025 before the price hikes!
So far we got:
CPU: 0 euros
Cooler: 0 euros
Motherboard: 0 euros
SSD: 1.000gb 40 euros

RAM * video card:
I got lots of kingston/kingmax/you name it sticks from old computers that were recycled/thrown out - I will never run out of DDR/DDR2.
I got 2 PCI-express radeon x1950 pro: one brand new that I bought in December 2024 for this project and one that I traded for a radeon 2600xt that came from a free PC. You do not actually need such a powerful card. 2600XT/8600GTS are more than enough for Athlon 64 3400 and make the system very balanced!
So, taking into account the free radeon we got:
RAM: 0 euros
Graphics card: 0 euros.

Case: I used a cooler master force 500 that has the power supply mounted on top during testing. A classic case, it came with a 3.25 inch FDD and it costed me nothing. The optical drives were also free, both IDE and SATA drives. I strongly advise to start stockpiling optical drives. In 10 years they will cost a minimum of 50 euros on eBay!
For power supply I used a recent acquisition: another enermax eg701ax - the tester showed it to be good but I wanted to test the endurance: it took all 4 systems and ran them without problems for a whole year.
CASE: 0 euros
DVD-RW: 0 euros
PSU: 40 euros excluding shipping.

So in all 80 euros for a system that has better performance than the ultimate socket A build which costed over 200 euros; also you can use modern power supplies with it, modern SSD and optical drives and it's quieter.
I would say that this is one of the purpose of what retro hardware should be about: affordable yet with good performance.