The usual answer is:
If you want win98 too: gf4 or gf fx or ati ?x800?
If you want xp only: and you want "the best" gf 9x0 or amd HD 7000/R9

Naturally you can go lower if you don't care about 'the best'.

For Windows XP and AGP it is definitely GeForce 7600 GT, but those can be expensive.

I see WinFast 760GXK8MB is MicroATX. There are MicroATX socket 754 boards that have pcie. They are very cheap as nobody wants them. Then you can go with GeForce 9800 GT which is very cheap as it is useless for other systems. If you can ever find a cheap Athlon 64 3400+ then get it. I have it and it is a nice early-mid Windows XP system.

Well, with AGP - theoretically 6800GT/ultra should not be afected by bumpgate. They are also a bit slower than 7600gt/7800gs (which definitely are affected) and with GF6 you get official w98 drivers.

Then there are 7900gs and 7950gt, which are faster, but quite rare/expensive.

And ATI side of things, anything from 9800pro/xt (which is not worthless on xp unlike GF FX stuff) to X series up to x1950GT/pro/XT. Or even HDnnnn stuff like HD3850, if you are feeling adventurous.

However if tou are on a platform which can have pci-e, which you are, you'll save a lot of money, get much better performance and reliability if you replace the motherboard and go with something way newer like GF GTX4nn-7nn. Skip GF8,9 and 2nn to avoid bumpgate...

GeForce 9800 GT(X) and GeForce GTX 2xx are the last NVidia cards that allow Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 to be played on Windows XP with an AMD CPU. There is a major performance regression starting from GTX 480 (verified on socket 754, AM2 and AM2+ CPUs). Intel CPUs seem to be unaffected, there may be an intel specific code optimization in the driver.

AlexZ wrote on 2025-07-28, 13:13:

For Windows XP and AGP it is definitely GeForce 7600 GT, but those can be expensive.

I see WinFast 760GXK8MB is MicroATX. There are MicroATX socket 754 boards that have pcie. They are very cheap as nobody wants them. Then you can go with GeForce 9800 GT which is very cheap as it is useless for other systems. If you can ever find a cheap Athlon 64 3400+ then get it. I have it and it is a nice early-mid Windows XP system.

Thanks a lot for you recommendations. I was not aware that there socket 754 boards with pcie. This would make things much easier but my specific board is agp only. so I have tow work with it. An cpu upgrad to the athlon 64 3400 if I can find that cpu at a good price is als on my to to list. The Athlon 64 3400 should be among the best cpu for a early to mid win xp system.

@Archer57 Thanks a lot for your recommendations as well. I am aware that the 7800 and even 7900 gf 7 cards would be an option too. I have ruled them out because they are too rare and expensive.

Actually 7800gs is not faster than 7600gt, at least with no OC involved. And it can be a reasonable alternative as it is not necessarily more expensive and at least where i live - more common.

By the way there is also 7300GT which, if you can find ddr3 version, is roughly equivalent to 6600gt in performance. It is also cheap because model number suggests it is low end.

Just understand that all this cards are fairly limited in performance and if you want higher resolution/fps you would not be able to go much furter than ~2004 in terms of games...

You don't need to be fixed on WinFast 760GXK8MB just because you got it. A pcie 754 board + pcie GPU will be probably cheaper than a GeForce 7600 GT AGP. In the EU there is a good selection of hardware on sale.

Archer57 wrote on 2025-07-28, 16:17:

Actually 7800gs is not faster than 7600gt, at least with no OC involved. And it can be a reasonable alternative as it is not necessarily more expensive and at least where i live - more common.

By the way there is also 7300GT which, if you can find ddr3 version, is roughly equivalent to 6600gt in performance. It is also cheap because model number suggests it is low end.

Just understand that all this cards are fairly limited in performance and if you want higher resolution/fps you would not be able to go much furter than ~2004 in terms of games...

Thanks for the Info. I was not aware of that. The 7300 gt also sounds interesting. I am fully aware of the card's shortcomings. This is why the suggestion of

AlexZ wrote on 2025-07-28, 16:19:

You don't need to be fixed on WinFast 760GXK8MB just because you got it. A pcie 754 board + pcie GPU will be probably cheaper than a GeForce 7600 GT AGP. In the EU there is a good selection of hardware on sale.

sounds tempting. I was dealing with older APG only mainboards for too long, and I totally lost focus on how cheap PCIE 754 mainboards can be.

I think I will follow your advice and get a 754 pcie board an a good pcie gpu with plenty of power to really max out out my windows xp gaming experience. I think I will go with board from asrock. They are quite cheap and have a good reputation. Or would you recommend another brand?

For the pcie gpu you said the geforce 9800 is good pick right ?

retep_110 wrote on 2025-07-28, 20:56:

I think I will follow your advice and get a 754 pcie board an a good pcie gpu with plenty of power to really max out out my windows xp gaming experience. I think I will go with board from asrock. They are quite cheap and have a good reputation. Or would you recommend another brand?

For the pcie gpu you said the geforce 9800 is good pick right ?

IMO that's a good decision. However...

- If you want to "max out XP gaming experience" you'd need way more than S754. At least something dual core, probably LGA775, 1156 or 1155. So if your platform of choice is S754 have realistic expectations - you still will not be able to run everything that runs on XP.

- It is best to avoid bumpgate affected cards, especially high end ones. Too high of a chance to get something already dead or have it die fast. If you wanted to stay within GTX/GTS2nn it would be better to look for something like later GTS250 which were fixed. However my opinion still is - mid range GTX6nn-GTX7nn are easily the best choice for XP gaming, if there are issues on some platforms - it may be worth choosing different platform.

Archer57 wrote on 2025-07-29, 00:35:

IMO that's a good decision. However... […]
Show full quote

retep_110 wrote on 2025-07-28, 20:56:

I think I will follow your advice and get a 754 pcie board an a good pcie gpu with plenty of power to really max out out my windows xp gaming experience. I think I will go with board from asrock. They are quite cheap and have a good reputation. Or would you recommend another brand?

For the pcie gpu you said the geforce 9800 is good pick right ?

IMO that's a good decision. However...

- If you want to "max out XP gaming experience" you'd need way more than S754. At least something dual core, probably LGA775, 1156 or 1155. So if your platform of choice is S754 have realistic expectations - you still will not be able to run everything that runs on XP.

- It is best to avoid bumpgate affected cards, especially high end ones. Too high of a chance to get something already dead or have it die fast. If you wanted to stay within GTX/GTS2nn it would be better to look for something like later GTS250 which were fixed. However my opinion still is - mid range GTX6nn-GTX7nn are easily the best choice for XP gaming, if there are issues on some platforms - it may be worth choosing different platform.

Thanks again for you objections. I cannot argue with that. To max out things for real going for a alt least lg775 plattform or even further would make perfectly sense. It is a fact that staying with s754 could lead to some serious drawback.

But how about potential backward comapability problems for older games with a more modern plattform. I am craving for a system that can play winx games from 2002 to 2006 with high settings. I believe games from 2004 onwards would shine an lga 775 system but not so sure about 2002 and 2003 games. I have not found anything definite yet on driver issues or something like that but I need to dig deeper before I decide if I will go for a more advanced plattform.

Platform itself is unlikely to cause any compatibility issues. LGA775 has full support for XP, drivers and everything, there should be no issues here.

Issues with older games may happen because of videocard and its drivers. Given pci-e cards tend to be quite inexpensive you can even get a few different ones to experiment.

I have a few systems with XP, mainly AthlonXP 3200+ with 7600GT and C2D E8600 with GTX660. From my experience most stuff runs absolutely fine on newer system. Even old stuff, which is late 98/early XP. The only game that caused issues so far is enter the matrix, but this one is quite picky and i suspect the issues may be because of 120Hz refresh rate/monitor and not the card/drivers.

What's great about system like this - it means "unlimited" performance for older games. Any resolution, settings, refresh rate the game can handle will work. It even runs crysis very well, if you had that question 😁

In another words IMO there will be practically no difference between S754 and LGA775 with the same videocard in terms of game compatibility. Performance, however, will be vastly different.

You need to make up your mind whether you intend to build a socket 754 system for historical value purposes with a decent gpu or want something that can play Windows XP era games maxxed out at 1920x1080. An Athlon XP system can play games comfortably until 2004, socket 754 until 2005 (with 9800 GT). If you want to play at max settings at 1920x1080 then you need LGA 775 or AM2+ (with Windsor or Phenom II).

I have not had any bumpgate era GPUs die on me but I always asked for 1-2 days warranty when buying. We are probably buying the lucky ones that survived. I tested a GeForce GTX 275 yesterday in my socket 754 system and the GPU runs really hot, in Sanctuary benchmark it reached 86'C in open case. It would die if it was used like this for extended period. These GPUs had misconfigured fan profiles out of factory and will die if not fixed. I configured RivaTuner to regulate fan based on GPU core temperature. It would probably be better to flash BIOS with fixed fan profile. It is also necessary to change thermal paste which usually brings down temperature by about 4'C.

9800 GT have the same problem with factory fan regulation. Only with GTX 480 things got better.

AlexZ wrote on 2025-07-29, 06:51:

I have not had any bumpgate era GPUs die on me but I always asked for 1-2 days warranty when buying. We are probably buying the lucky ones that survived.

Perhaps the one which were not actively used or ones which had good enough coolers. And depending on which one it is they may either die quickly when actually used or last for a while.

I was quite surprised with palit 7600GT and 7300GT i got - both stay way under 60C while never increasing fan speed from default "31%" value. No wonder this survived with such cooling.

with GTX 480 things got better.

*chuckles*

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2025-07-29, 07:26:

with GTX 480 things got better.

*chuckles*

Actually a modern case can handle GTX 480 as long as it is repasted. Fan regulation works.

Currently I see that the Geforce 6600 cards are sold at a very cheap price on market place.

eliot_new wrote on Yesterday, 17:39:

Currently I see that the Geforce 6600 cards are sold at a very cheap price on market place.

That's because 6600 is not a good card. It is very different from 6600GT in typical fashion at that time, uses DDR1 instead of GDDR3, resulting in roughly halved memory bandwidths and 300Mhz core instead of 500Mhz so again also almost half.

6600GT by itself is somewhat limited for XP games, 6600 is simply inadequate in most cases. And being GF6 is is not really good in terms of compatibility with older/W98 stuff.

So is not a desirable card => cheap. Does not mean you can not make use of it in certain cases, just have to understand the limitations.

Archer57 wrote on 2025-07-28, 16:17:

Actually 7800gs is not faster than 7600gt, at least with no OC involved. And it can be a reasonable alternative as it is not necessarily more expensive and at least where i live - more common.

By the way there is also 7300GT which, if you can find ddr3 version, is roughly equivalent to 6600gt in performance. It is also cheap because model number suggests it is low end.

Just understand that all this cards are fairly limited in performance and if you want higher resolution/fps you would not be able to go much furter than ~2004 in terms of games...

Actually as the resolution and level of details increase 7800gs lead over 7600gt also increase - at 1600*1200 the gap is huge because of the 256 bit memory bus, but yes if you test only at 1024*768 there is not much difference between them! Main problem with 7800gs is price - the card is very expensive because it is a sought after item and considered one of the best AGP card from NVIDIA.

nd22 wrote on Today, 06:13:

Actually as the resolution and level of details increase 7800gs lead over 7600gt also increase - at 1600*1200 the gap is huge because of the 256 bit memory bus, but yes if you test only at 1024*768 there is not much difference between them! Main problem with 7800gs is price - the card is very expensive because it is a sought after item and considered one of the best AGP card from NVIDIA.

It does not seem that simple.

The issue with 7800gs, reference one, are low clocks. It is 375 core, 600 memory instead of 560 core and 700 memory for 7600GT. Yes wider memory bus helps, but the GPU itself is not faster despite having more PS/VS/TMU because of huge clock difference.

Also G70 is 110nm vs , G73 is 90nm, or 80nm in case of G73-B1. So not only it is hard to get any performance advantage from 7800gs because it is not fast enough to be practically used at those settings/resolutions where it may happen, but also it is hotter for no good reason.

I've had much easier time finding 7800GS then 7600GT locally, prices may be a bit higher because of "8" instead of "6", but not significantly so and availability is better.

There are different versions which are factory overclocked or in some cases use different GPUs, those are rare, expensive and better. There is also 7900GS which is significantly better, but also rare and expensive.

I got 7800GS too, out of curiosity, and my opinion is that all things considered 7600GT is actually more practical, especially if available at lower price.

I am going to build a fun S939+AGP system, already got the important parts, so may be i'll bench a bunch of AGP cards i got on that for fun and post it. The only thing i am not sure about is which games have built-in benchmarks and which of them to use...