This project is the merging of two previous projects of mine that never quite got the traction I wanted.

First is the Compaq SR5000 system. I came into this via a yard sale giveaway. In later era Compaq fashion, there were quite a number of configurations for this machine. Mine is based around an nForce 430 Chipset Socket AM2+ Motherboard. The initial plan for this when I got it years ago was to max it out to as far as it would go. Supposedly, with a firmware update the motherboard would take up to an AMD Phenom II X 4 95 Watt 3.2GHz 955 Quad-Core Processor and 8Gb RAM. I did end up getting the processor and ram upgrades, but I could never find any firmware update that unlocked the ability to use these.

But I loved the design of the case and so I put it in storage for a possible future project.

Before putting it into storage, I did some research on it and happened upon a photo of one of the configuration variations that was geared to video capture and processing. It’s front mounted media input panel reminded me a lot of the SoundBlaster Live! and Audigy drive-bay breakout boxes from the Windows 98/XP days. I always dug those and thought it would be cool to do the same to my model.

While my SR5000 model does not have video capture and associated ports installed, it does have all the ports holes for them built into the case – they are just obscured a sticker covering them on my model. So the plan with this build it to populate the ports with the correct interfaces. I’m thinking something like an El Gato USB capture box could be hacked a little bit to populate the s-video, composite and RCA inputs. 1394/firewire card will cover that front input. And the motherboard has USB 3 and audio headers, along with the front mounted ports I can take from the ProDesk case.

The other project this build combines with is a Hackintosh that I was going to put together. That was to be based around a Gigabyte GA-Z87X-D3H motherboard and the EVGA GTX 780 card. The motherboard came from eBay, but was DOA. But it did have 32Gb RAM and the i7 4770 processor, both of which are compatible with the HP ProDesk motherboard (we’ll at least 16gb of the memory is anyway).

It’ll be fun to have that decked out 98/XP era tower vibe with a bunch of superfluous ports beckoning to be used.

Nice plan. I had put together a similar system (3rd gen Core i7, GeForce 980 with modified XP driver, multiple SSDs) and it was a lot of fun.

Will there be weirdness with the front panel I/O? Sometimes these OEM cases had funky pinouts for USB, audio, etc.

I hope you have those four SSDs on hand already and don't have to buy them in the current market!

As far as I'm aware, the MS-7860 doesn't have a floppy connector. Actually it is really rare for a Haswell based system to have a floppy connector. Are you planning to use a USB internal adapter?

Did some work on this project a few days back.

First was swapping in the Intel i7-4770. Here's the processor "frosted" with a thin layer of thermal paste.

Then installed a brand new 550 watt MSI power supply

Reinstalled the heatsink / fan and went for the initial bootup. Nothing.

Turns out the i7-4770 is dead. Bummer.

Reinstalled the i5-4570 back in and it booted right up. Installed Windows 10 on an SSD to make sure all the hardware was good to go.

Left it running for a few hours and ran some benchmarks to make sure its all stable. Looks to be super solid.

Since I need to source another i7 processor, I'll probably just go ahead and top it out with an i7-4790. They look to be relatively affordable.

For video capture, I hemmed and hawed about whether to get a quality video capture device, or just go with something that captures (lol) the vibe. Firewire based capture card / devices with image timing and stabilization are at least $70 used. I'm not going to be hardcore archiving VHS tapes, so I decided to go with a cheap USB capture card.

And I've got an ESI Juli@ PCI-E Soundcard on the way.

The other piece of hardware I need to get is a Firewire PCI-E card that has both 400/800 ports and an internal 400 port for the front panel. Recommendations for a Mac OS X 10.9 and Windows XP compatible versions would be great.

bZbZbZ wrote on 2026-04-01, 18:19:

Nice plan. I had put together a similar system (3rd gen Core i7, GeForce 980 with modified XP driver, multiple SSDs) and it was […]
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Nice plan. I had put together a similar system (3rd gen Core i7, GeForce 980 with modified XP driver, multiple SSDs) and it was a lot of fun.

Will there be weirdness with the front panel I/O? Sometimes these OEM cases had funky pinouts for USB, audio, etc.

I hope you have those four SSDs on hand already and don't have to buy them in the current market!

As far as I'm aware, the MS-7860 doesn't have a floppy connector. Actually it is really rare for a Haswell based system to have a floppy connector. Are you planning to use a USB internal adapter?

Thanks! Yeah, this should be a pretty fun retro system when its all done. The processor and graphics card on your system look great. Third gen i-core processors I think were the last "native" (SP3) supported, rightd? I believe Haswell will require a little bit of hackery / slipstreaming to get it installed.

There will be weirdness with the front panel. The original motherboard had *some* headers for front panel I/O, but no firewire or video capture. Just the port holes in the front panel hidden behind a sticker.

There are 3 separate USB headers on the MS7860 mobo – 2x USB 2.0 and 1x USB 3.0. I'll be using a mobo header to USB A adapter to connect the video capture card. And I'll need to get a USB floppy drive adapter to do the same for the 3.5" drive.

Yeah, I knew a haswell mobo with a floppy header would probably be super rare, so I decided to go the USB route for that reason. I also wanted the floppy to be recognized in OS X, and it will only see it via a USB floppy.

🤣 @ the current SSD mood. I could not have picked a WORSE time to do this build in that regard. Fortunately, I do have some 120, 240 & 512 Gb SSDs around for it.

aroneox wrote on Yesterday, 22:19:

Did some work on this project a few days back. […]
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Did some work on this project a few days back.

First was swapping in the Intel i7-4770. Here's the processor "frosted" with a thin layer of thermal paste.

I know it's almost a religion, but that is like 4 or 5 times as much thermal compound as I would've used.

H3nrik V! wrote on Today, 07:23:

I know it's almost a religion, but that is like 4 or 5 times as much thermal compound as I would've used.

HA!

I'm surprised the Core i7 doesn't work. It's rare to have a dead CPU (especially a pinless CPU). When you tested your GA-Z87X-D3H, was that with the i7 CPU? Did you try testing the GA-Z87X-D3H with the i5 CPU? I suggest clearing the CMOS (pull the coin cell battery for a few minutes, then reinstall) and using a single known-good stick of RAM to test.

But anyways, I suggest that you consider just sticking with the Core i5 - the incremental performance beyond your Core i5-4570 in XP era games is pretty much meaningless. What monitor are you going to be using?

• Any XP era game you put on this system is going to run in the hundreds of frames per seconds... that is multiples of the refresh rate of your monitor.
• XP era games basically never use more than 3 threads (so a hyperthreaded i7 will not help)
• XP era games will run at hundreds of FPS on an i5-4570 (so even clockspeed and cache of an i7 won't help much)
• XP generally does not support Adaptive Sync, so you might want to enable VYSNC and try to max out your monitor's refresh rate (eg 120Hz or 60Hz)
• If you are running a modern monitor with high resolution with 8x MSAA, your GTX 780 might limit you to 120fps or below anyway

Obviously if you want an i7-4790 just for fun, then by all means go for it.