First post, by nd22
Hello everyone! First of all I would like to say that the community here looks very nice, I have been reading the forum for a long time and I find a lot of useful information every time.
Despite being a retro gamer only now I have found enough time to build my retro rig! It will be from scratch (main components) and I would like some advice if possible.
The purpose of the machine will be full windows 9X/2000/XP compatibility in order to play all the 1995-2005 games and enough performance for office tasks, listem to music or to watch some movies – not HD.
What I have at the moment and can choose from:
1. cases: antec titan, antec nsk6580, cooler master haf xb.
2. PSU: antec SU-430w, antec true power 650w, corsair tx750w v2, corsair rm650w. From what I understand many old motherboards do not work with new PSU - you need a ATX 1.3 PSU which I do not have. Is it true or not?
3. HDD: I have no PATA hard drives, only SATA: maxtor 80gb sata1; WD 320gb sata1; wd 1000gb black sata2 with jumper to set SATA1 mode; and many large HDDs who could not possible work in an old system because they are larger than 2000gb and/or are SATA3.
4. RAM: 2 sticks of DDR1-3200 1gb samsung ram; 2 sticks of DDR1-3200 1gb corsair ram and many smaller sticks - 512 and 256.
5. ODD: several cd-rw and dvd-rw all PATA.
Now I have several options each with its own advantages and disadvantages:
I. Socket 478: advantages – ok performance, motherboards support 4 sticks of dual chanel memory usually; disadvantages – late pentium 4 prescott can get very hot, price for the 3.X ghz models are very high here, motherboards with intel 865/875 chipsets are expensive.
II. Socket A: advantages – really cheap even 3.X barton models; easier to cool; disadvantages – lower performance, motherboards support 3 sticks of memory usually but I dreamt of having a barton chip back in the day when all I could afford was a duron!
III. Socket 754: advantages – dirty cheap, good performance, easy to find; disadvantages – not fully backwards compatible, motherboards support 3 stick of memory usually.
IV. Socket 939: advantages – top performance, motherboards support 4 sticks of dual channel memory, have extra SATA and LAN connectors, support pci-express graphics cards which are really easy to find; disadvantages – really expensive especially the top single cores models and the dual core models, not compatible with windows 9x.
So which path should I choose?