The fastest supported hardware on windows XP is a 780ti on a socket 1155 or 1366 platform. I good setup for XP IMO is an i3 sandy or ivy bridge with a good clock speed and a gtx 960 or equivalent.

With a simple inf mod you can get a 980ti working, and it is possible to slipstream SATA drivers for socket 1150 with Z170 and Z270 chipsets if you want. So theoretically at least you could get an 8600k or 9900k with sli 980ti's running in XP if you wanted. Theoretically.

If you are playing games from 1999-2002ish you can run into compatibility issues here and there. A lot of that has to do with later drivers on later era XP graphics cards. I have had a lot of success fixing these issues by using GoG releases of games on windows XP.

I have tried to run my XP gaming collection on my modern windows 10 machine, with a haswell CPU and a GTX 1080. I had actually quite a bit of success, although most games required patching and tweaking to get working properly, or to take full advantage of modern displays.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oSWRc … dit?usp=sharing

Basically pcgaming wiki is your friend.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Home

I would say the biggest hurdles for running XP games on windows 10 are:

-Compatibility with windows directx 7 or earlier is pretty bad
-Getting EAX working can be pretty difficult. Not all games will run through alchemy.
-If you are using original media, you will need a CD crack, and some of those cracks do funny things according to arbitrary appeals to honor by software pirates of the time. For example, the no cd patch for warcraft 3 breaks the final mission in the campaign.
-Gamepad and peripheral support was mostly a miss for me, especially with Xinput devices.

I have at one point used a gtx 960 and 2500k with XP and it worked just fine.

Xeon E5-1680 v2
GeForce GTX Titan X (Maxwell)
Forte X-Fi

3DMark 03 : LINK
(OS is at the bottom)

It was an HP z800 with dual 6-core Xeons ( 12-core, 24-threads total ).
Same as a 12-core Mac Pro ( 2009 thru 2012 ).
48gb of ram.
PCIe SSD
4x hard-drives.
Blue ray drive.
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 zs with live drive.

I was a BIG Loud beast of a computer.
Fully supported in WinXP.

Can you run a core 2 quad your existing rig? I'm running a q6600 @ 3.6ghz w/ sli 9800GTX+. That machine runs games to 2010 with absolute ease. If i swap the 9800s for a GTX 260 it runs skyrim quite well at 1080p (512mb buffer on the 9800s is a bit weak for newer titles)

Naturally my use case requires a decent power supply, heatsink, and motherboard that allows FSB overclocking. 3.6ghz q6600 is a tremendous boost over stock, you could also do a later Xeon ~3ghz model with a pin mod if your board supports it.

I haven't done *really* extensive testing, but an i3-2120 with no discrete GPU runs FEAR just fine, and that's a pretty piggy game. I don't have Crysis so I haven't tested that yet.

So, I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule, but I suspect there's a ton of overkill in a lot of builds.

OpenGL games seem to run fine as well, at least until Intel downgrades... I mean updates the drivers again.

I had it running on a 4.7GHZ Haswell i7-4770K with a GTX-780 not too long ago. The single-threaded performance that XP games love was absolutely absurd on that thing. It was doing something like 140K in 3DMark01SE, and late XP games like FEAR were running at hundreds upon hundreds of fps. Pure awesomesauce. 😀

My current fastest is a Q9650 on Asrock board with 8800GT. My friend had tricked it to running on a i7-3770 on a Q77 chipset with Radeon vid but cannot recall the specifics of the motherboard brand and vid card model.

^there's no need to trick anything, winXP installs and works fine out of the box on my Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 with i7-3770K and GTX 980 (formerly GTX 780 but that one died) and Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD. Only had to do a light modification of the nvidia driver to add a string for gtx 980 so it could detect it.

From Intel desktop CPU point of view, I think Intel core 4th generation like i7-3yyyy are the last officially supported. This due to integrated GPU.

From AMD, I think the last is AMD Carrizo CPUs with some motheboards like ASUS. ASrock does not support Carrizo and Windows XP.
Such AMD configuration is available now: you can buy it new, but I think stocks will be out in few months.

If you like to run Windows XP 32 bit too much RAM or graphic RAM is useless.

I'm probably the only one here who doesn't feel a desire or need to push XP to the absolute bleeding edge, primarily because I've never really been big on PC gaming (Doom 2 on my PMMX 200 laptop & Minecraft on my current daily driver make up the majority of my PC gaming history). Not to say I won't do such experimenting in the future, but for now pushing XP as far as it'll go hasn't caught my interest.

Besides, the title of this thread is "Fastest rig you have running XP", not "Fastest rig XP will run on". 🤣

That said...the absolute fastest intact computer I currently own running WinXP is an ultra-small form factor Dell Optiplex from around 2004 or so, but it has been in storage for a few years now and I don't have immediate access to it. It worked the last time I used it, but I imagine it might have bad caps by now. I don't recall the specs beyond it being some flavor of P4.

I also got a working first-gen Acer netbook (1.6GHz Atom N270, 1GB RAM, 8GB SSD-ish drive) given to me for disposal that I have yet to actually get rid of, it's the fastest computer I currently have immediate usable access to (not in storage) that's still running XP. Despite being several years older, I expect the Dell would run circles around it though. 😜

The absolute fastest/most powerful computer I have ever owned that ran XP (factoring in GPU and not just CPU) would be the final upgraded version of my custom build from about 2007 or so. It had an Athlon 64 x2 4400+ (Or 4200+, don't remember for certain) with 2GB RAM and a Radeon X700 GPU. Yeah, it was lower-midrange for the time, but it still counts. I did also own a laptop running XP with a Dual-core Pentium T2060 that may have been on-par CPU wise with my custom build (according to the brief Google searches I've done for comparison benchmarks), but regardless of CPU the weak onboard GPU put its overall performance behind my build. The laptop is long gone, but I still have some of the parts from my custom build in storage, including the motherboard and CPU. It is currently not working though (bad caps).

I just knocked together a 775 system for XP. A Gigabyte P43-DS3L, with a Xeon 5460 that I ordered premodded from AliExpress ($16.00 shipped). I found a BIOS on the web that had the CPU microcode, and I'm using a Radeon HD 7850. I've only just begun tweaking the system, and the 3D Mark 06 score is 18,000 and climbing. The only disappointment so far as that the SATA ports on this board are supposed to be SATA 300, but they are in fact SATA 150. I even tried installing Windows 10 to see if it was some sort of driver issue with XP, but the result was exactly the same. But I got this mobo for very little, so I can live with it.

God Of Gaming wrote:

Horun wrote:

My friend had tricked it to running on a i7-3770 on a Q77 chipset with Radeon vid but cannot recall the specifics of the motherboard brand and vid card model.

^there's no need to trick anything, winXP installs and works fine out of the box on my Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 with i7-3770K and GTX 980 (formerly GTX 780 but that one died) and Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD. Only had to do a light modification of the nvidia driver to add a string for gtx 980 so it could detect it.

I think he had to make or use modified video drivers also, I just remember him having an issue with something that took a few weeks to sort out.

In the past fastest rig i had for Windows XP was i7-950 with 8800GTX and X-Fi Elite Pro, maybe 3-4 months before i switched to Windows 7. It was replacement for Q6600. Planning to resurrect it, just need to decide on GPU: either 7900GTX for anything pre 2006 or GTX680 with maybe some issues due to too modern drivers. Speaking of any games past 2006 only two things came in mind that may cause troubles with Windows 7: copy protection for media and 3D sound (but developers really don't care about it at that time, either better full software positioning or worst than early Windows 98 games, but they can stick fancy logo and get some money from card manufacturer). I also don't care about high resolution and widescreen, games not developed with it in mind looks horrible, so 15" 1024x768 is a sweet spot (for me maybe, i have a good Sony with DVI+VGA inputs), but i plan to find 20" 1600x1200 in good shape and with acceptable response.

Technically, the 2x Opteron 285 Server, as it has a WinXP partition to be able to always fall back into the good times... (I know that it doesnt make much sense as the vast majority of the 16GB DDR1 memory on-board sits idle during that time.)

The HP Z420 in my signature. E5-1620 and 32GB RAM, FirePro V7900.

BeginnerGuy wrote:

Can you run a core 2 quad your existing rig? I'm running a q6600 @ 3.6ghz w/ sli 9800GTX+. That machine runs games to 2010 with absolute ease. If i swap the 9800s for a GTX 260 it runs skyrim quite well at 1080p (512mb buffer on the 9800s is a bit weak for newer titles)

Naturally my use case requires a decent power supply, heatsink, and motherboard that allows FSB overclocking. 3.6ghz q6600 is a tremendous boost over stock, you could also do a later Xeon ~3ghz model with a pin mod if your board supports it.

I can run the q6600, never tried overclocking though, it can run up to a Core 2 Duo e8600 also. Would either of these make that much difference?

Been looking at some i3 3220 mobo combo's on sale and pairing that with a 750ti and ssd (if I can figure out how to get those to work in XP).

oeuvre wrote:

The HP Z420 in my signature. E5-1620 and 32GB RAM, FirePro V7900.

Oeuvre, how did you go about getting the SSD to work in XP? Are there any "potholes" to watch out for?

There is nothing special about SSD support in windows XP. XP doesn't natively support TRIM, but you can run a TRIM routine from a bootable CD if you want, and most modern SSDs have some degree of hardware TRIM support anyway.

An SSD that has been neglected for a long time will have reduced performance (particularly in write), and more cell ware. Nothing to worry too much about IMO. Especially if you are using cheaper TLC models, which IMO, for an XP based machine, you should.

Regardless of whether or not you are using an SSD or a mechanical hard drive, you will need to set your SATA controller to IDE/Legacy mode, or you will have to provide an AHCI driver during the XP installation. AHCI has better performance, but not so much better that I think it actually make much of a real world difference. I just use Legacy mode and forget it.

You can also use a tool like partition magic to make sure that your SSD drive is properly aligned. I just chuck my SSD drive into my modern machine and run it against the C: partition. It will improve performance, particularly write performance, by a fair bit. Even then though, SSDs are so overkill fast that you neglect them quite a bit and still have more than satisfactory performance.

I have a Core i7-860 with a GeForce GTX970 (using an inf-hack for the drivers) running Windows XP 32-bit and x64.