philscomputerlab wrote:

Phenom II X2 Black Edition 555

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2927

Firtasik wrote:

philscomputerlab wrote:

Phenom II X2 Black Edition 555

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2927

Yes! This chip fully unlocks 😀

But it's not something I need for this project.

Here some DX9 Futuremark benchmarks:

What's the use of the Gotek on a machine that has standard USB ports? Seems a real FDD would make the machine more versatile, but I imagine virtually no late XP software actually needs the drive. Are you really working with floppy images that much?

xjas wrote:

What's the use of the Gotek on a machine that has standard USB ports? Seems a real FDD would make the machine more versatile, but I imagine virtually no late XP software actually needs the drive. Are you really working with floppy images that much?

I used it to load the AHCI driver.

AHCI

Getting AHCI is pretty straight forward.

First it needs to be activated in the BIOS. The motherboard I am using has three options: IDE, RAID and AHCI.

When installing Windows XP, the AHCI driver needs to be loaded. There are several ways, the most popular ones being using a floppy drive and pressing F6 or by slipstreaming the AHCI drivers into a new Windows XP boot CD.

I used the GOTEK, seeing that this motherboard still has a FDD connector. The AHCI drivers can be downloaded from the download section for this motherboard from MSI.

Here some screens showing the process:

philscomputerlab wrote:

Very nice. More period correct too. […]
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elianda wrote:

My Win XP 32 Bit system is at the moment:
Athlon XP 3200+ (FSB400) on an Asrock nForce2 Ultra RAID board with 4 GB RAM, Geforce 6800GT, SB Xi-Fi xTremeMusic, Intel 1000GT, WD 150 GB VelociRaptor, EnerMax 365W PSU and a few other components.

Very nice. More period correct too.

alexanrs wrote:

Does the X-Fi offer anything for XP-era gaming an Audigy 2 doesn't?

EAX HD 5, lower noise, better positional surround, PCIe vs PCI

My XP machine (also currently my main machine while I sort out some issues with the Phenom II I have):
Pentium 4 Prescott @ 2.8GHz on stock Intel cooler (I'd go for better except I have no better)
4GB DDR1-400 (4x1GB, for some reason I had this in my parts box. Matched modules, runs at 333 due to mobo support I believe, but dual-channel ahoy!)
Motherboard isn't anything special. Identifies itself as an HP d530 motherboard. mATX. i865 chipset, SoundMAX AC'97 audio w/ wavetable synth, no MIDI port. Broadcom NetXtreme onboard ethernet (gigabit? not sure, haven't tested, my internet is 3.3mbps on a good day so I'm not that concerned) Onboard SATA, probably 1.5Gbps if I had to guess. No floppy connected currently, have none available.
Hard drive is a well loved 250GB SATA Seagate Barracuda. It's served me faithfully for years and still seems to be going strong, though I made a drive image just in case. No way am I installing 100GB of games all over again. I think it's in IDE emulation mode although I confess that I honestly don't care that it's in AHCI mode so long as it works fine in IDE emulation. Which it does.
Optical drive is nothing but a cheap lite-on DVD-RW job. PATA. Gets the job done, though I'm disappointed at the lack of working analog audio connection.
Sound that I'm actually using is just an Audigy I have around. Kept the SoundMAX synth, I like its sound better than the Audigy's. Audigy has superb sound quality though, and indeed it does have support for EAX although I don't do much of anything with that support, I just drive two stereo speakers or occasionally my headphones..
Video is courtesy of the Radeon 9600XT 128MB card I have. Dual display support, taking good advantage of that for sure. Nice, fast card for what I want from it. Not happy about that rinky dink little fan they put on it though. Will have to work on replacing that. For now it seems fairly happy. Displays are a Dell Ultrasharp 1703FP (DVI) and Dell SE198WFP (VGA), max native resolutions of 1280x1024 and 1440x900 respectively. Again, these are veterans, having served me very well for many years.

OS is WinXP Pro SP3, unofficial SP4 w/ hack applied to make Windows Update think it's POSReady 2009. Chrome is installed, eats up half of my RAM when in use but I suppose having a whopping twenty tabs open in it does me no favors. And I have my RAM here to use it anyway.

It is a rock solid system, I've had it running for three days straight and it shows no signs of being even somewhat fatigued. Still seems just as fast as when I first booted it up.

Runs games like Morrowind and NFS:HP2 without breaking a sweat. Oblivion and Far Cry are a bit more of a stretch, although completely possible so long as I lower the resolution I play at. Which is fine by me, personally I can't pick out the difference between 640x480 and 1024x768 in-game anyway unless it scales the UI to match.