First post, by Xenphor
Normally I would go for an overkill system like maybe a sandy bridge or ivy bridge for Windows XP, but I have an extra Asrock 775i65G R3.0 (agp only) board with a Pentium Dual Core E5800. For some reason prices of even low end sandy bridge era components are still high or even higher than they were at launch, so I thought I'd just try to get a high end agp card for my existing board. I could get one of those used i5 business machines but then I would also have to get a pci express card to go along with it which would probably put me around 150-200 dollars total.
So what would someone recommend for a decent agp Windows XP graphics card for a e5800 cpu? I prefer to stick with Nvidia because I value compatibility above all else, unless there are some AMD agp cards that are known to perform well in XP with equivalent compatibility. I know that there are some high end AMD agp cards like the radeon 3850, but it's fairly expensive and I'm not sure if I need it to be that high end. Also, I know there is the issue of getting a card with a bridge chip in it so will that be an issue for my motherboard?
So far I'm looking at maybe a 6800 GT agp which doesn't seem that expensive and would cost way less then getting a used core i5 system + pci express card.
Of course it's been a long time since I've used XP and played XP-era games on older hardware. Would a setup like this even work well?