The thing is, that most GOG games run well on Windows 8.1. Windows XP will avoid a few bugs in a few games, and have native support for EAX with Creative cards, but that can be resolved with ALchemy on modern machines as well.

But it should work well regardless. On my modern i7 machine, I have a hard drive bay, and just replace the disk with one with XP on it for occasional testing games under Windows XP.

So if you're down-sizing, I would just play these games on your main desktop. Maybe use two hard-drives, on with modern Windows, the other one with XP.

There will be space for barely one PC, (the other two in storage) so yes, this was my thought too. Maybe there is no need to chose XP but I already own it, it can run fine with just 2GB Ram. Maybe I can even get max payne to work on it. Oh well time changes everything. Thank you sir.

TELEPACMAN wrote:

There will be space for barely one PC, (the other two in storage) so yes, this was my thought too. Maybe there is no need to chose XP but I already own it, it can run fine with just 2GB Ram. Maybe I can even get max payne to work on it. Oh well time changes everything. Thank you sir.

Have a look at this build by GeorgeMan: Win 98, XP & 8.1 fully supported on one dual core PC? Here is my retro approach!

If you don't need Windows 98, you can dispense with AGP and move up to a newer/faster PCIe card. I like the GeForce 8600 series because they're cheap, support DirectX 10, and have full video/Flash decoding features as well as decent gaming performance. You could do a very simple dual-booting machine with a Core (or AMD equivalent), GeForce 8600 (or something else), 2-4GB of RAM, and Windows XP alongside a newer OS like Vista, 7, 8.1, or a *nix/BSD distro of choice.

Yes very nice build by GeorgeMan. It is more or less what I had in mind, but I'll have just Windows XP and Ubuntu.
While packing some stuff I discovered an AM3 motherboard I forgot I had, and I'm thinking of going with it just to see if it can manage what I need without spending too much $. It is Asus M4N68T-M LE V2 with a Sempron 140@2700MHz and 4GB DDR3. For the time being my only concern is if this cpu will bottleneck a GT730 1GB DDR5 64bit, because I like the GT720 2GB DDR3 fanless model. Also I plan on a Corsair VS350 80+ with the sempron tdp of 45w and these entry-level GPUs. What say?

As far as I know all of semi-recent AMD hardware supports Windows XP - perhaps some of the newest boards do not, but I think all of the AM3 boards should. "Bottlenecking the graphics card" isn't quite so cut and dry - there will be situations where you're CPU bound, and there will be situations where you're GPU bound, and having a faster CPU or GPU may allow you to defray some of those situations, but ultimately one or the other will always be a performance limiter. Any modern card would be an advantage though, as it will handle all sorts of decoding and compute-assist kinds of things, which will pull a lot of load off of the CPU.

I'm not familiar with that power supply, but assuming it's semi-modern in design (that is, most of its power is on the 12V rail) it probably won't have an issue with such a machine. You can check against a PSU calculator, like this one: http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp if you're concerned.

Ok cool. This board has been used with XP before, no probs. About the GPU I'll be getting the faster version then, they are only $10 apart. As for the PSU it is a cheap <$40 one and it has 25A / 300W on the 12V. It is about 85% efficient at 50% to 90% load. I really feel it is adequate. That psu calculator is better than coolermaster's - nevertheless both gave me 270W to 280W recommended psu. Thanks.

AM3 works great with XP, so does Intel up to socket 1155. 1150 however is mostly a no go. Easiest is to check the download section of the motherboard website.