How about a minimum specs build? Minimum requirements for XP are a 233 MHz Pentium, 64MB of RAM, 1.5 GB of storage...

Might be interesting to see how XP runs on something like an old-school Pentium.

Well Athlon XP is a fairly obvious choice I guess. Maybe Pentium III to see what that can do under XP with an XP era GPU upgrade (a fairly common thing to do back then).

Shponglefan wrote on 2025-09-21, 13:13:

How about a minimum specs build? Minimum requirements for XP are a 233 MHz Pentium, 64MB of RAM, 1.5 GB of storage...

Might be interesting to see how XP runs on something like an old-school Pentium.

Make sure to use a hard drive that spins at less than 3000 RPM if you really want to experience the pain. You want the computer going so slow that you constantly have to ask yourself, "is it really booting?"

You could do a "pick a year" build with only hardware released in a certain time frame.

You could take inspiration from LGR's Oddware build, and find weird components.

I personally would love to do a desktop build around a Pentium M, but I haven't pulled the trigger on the weird motherboards out of China that have a socket 479.

Shponglefan wrote on 2025-09-21, 13:13:

How about a minimum specs build? Minimum requirements for XP are a 233 MHz Pentium, 64MB of RAM, 1.5 GB of storage...

Might be interesting to see how XP runs on something like an old-school Pentium.

That sounds like fun! I have enough parts to build yet another P233 PC. An AT style PC with XP 😬
But then again, what games can you possibly play with this spec?

As for my XP builds, I have a very common one with a core2 E8400 and a GTX750ti.
My usual XP machine (playing DOOM3 at the moment) is an i7 3770k on a sabertooth Z77 board with a GTX680.
Nothing special but I like it.

Shponglefan wrote on 2025-09-21, 13:13:

How about a minimum specs build? Minimum requirements for XP are a 233 MHz Pentium, 64MB of RAM, 1.5 GB of storage...

Might be interesting to see how XP runs on something like an old-school Pentium.

I see your P233 and raise you a PODP-83 running at 16.7MHz on an So3 board with 64MB RAM.

Took about half an hour to boot, never felt so good to finally see the blue&green hillside :+

Kouwes wrote on 2025-09-21, 14:46:

That sounds like fun! I have enough parts to build yet another P233 PC. An AT style PC with XP 😬
But then again, what games can you possibly play with this spec?

Even on a P233MMX: not much that would be enjoyable. Maybe something Very light & turn-based - Civ2 maybe.

Still, won't be fun. The fun is building a system like this, not expecting it to run Crysis playably 😉

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2025-09-21, 11:53:

I've built so many XP builds over the years with loads of 478/775 /1156/1155 /AM2 systems. I am looking to build something more interesting.

Does anyone have any interesting ideas?

I would try maxed-out build based on built-in drivers of vanilla XP SP3 CD. This will be an interesting limitation.

The idea is to build PC that starts working on a clean XP installation, without additional drivers - just like a Mac.

I had a similar build (S478/P4-3.2Ghz/1GB/FX5500/Vortex2), after installation and closing XP Tour, I could immediately launch some games with sound and 3D hardware graphics, so that was cool!

Here is an interesting P4 build which I plan to replicate someday. It was my childhood build and was sort of a late Win 98 but early XP era build.

A Pentium 4 2.4 GHz (socket 478) build with 256 MB of RAM. It was built around late 2003. It most probably had an Intel motherboard but I am not too sure about that. The storage was a paltry 40 GB HDD with 2 partitions of 20 GB each for the OS and the other stuff. I also had a floppy and CD drive. In addition to that, we had a Logitech keyboard, mouse and speakers. We had a modem card for dial up connections and a HP printer for printing my dad`s office documents. The case was a black one(I forget the manufacturer) and the peripherals too had the same color except for the white HP printer. I also remember the huge CRT monitor which was always set to 1024*768 resolution and went lower for games.

Coming to think of it, I do not know why my family did not get more RAM for the system. Also we did not have a GPU even though we could have gotten one. We eventually upgraded the RAM to 768 MB and the HDD was replaced around 2010. XP was such a great OS that it felt snappy even on that old machine and it ran quite well till 2012 before the ageing power supply exploded and caught fire. I think the internals of the system might have survived that mishap but we chucked it away/put it in storage for portable laptops.

During the time I had the system, I played games like Diablo 2, FIfa 98/2001, Max Payne, Halo CE, Project IGI, NFS Most Wanted, Prince of Persia WoW and SoT, Aoe 1&2, Warcraft 3, Starcraft 1 and GTA SA/VC. I even remember using an old software called 3D-Analyze to run PoP Sands of Time as it had some weird Nvidia GPU requirement. I also learnt programming using BlueJ, jdk and Borland C. It was also fun to mess around with Clippy in Office. I think people seriously underestimate how great XP was as an OS and how little it`s memory footprint was compared to the later offerings from windows. Another feather in it`s cap was the great reliability. It was an idiot-proof OS able to take any abuse from a toddler to a moody teenager.

Minimum or low end spec XP is quite fun. I do have an overpowered XP system now and it is good to enjoy my collection of old games at crazy FPS and high definition audio, but there is something magical in trying to run those games on a 640*480 resolution without a GPU.

Edit: I just heard that the cabinet and the motherboard/cpu might still be around. The peripherals though are long gone along with the CRT. Maybe I can resurrect the build if the motherboard is still working.

My personal "Ultimate" XP build is something with 2 CPU's and a pair of dual GPU cards

Quad SLI ends with the GeForce 7950 GX2, which reality are a bit slow for a decent XP rig.
You can go much faster with just 2 way SLI but that's not "ultimate" still fun and more useful though

Crossfire driver support ends with HD 6990 but not sure it'll allow 4 ways crossfire as it's about here I stopped as power requirements started to get out of hand.

while i favor late 32bit for windows XP and i like the minimal spec idea, there's a middle ground; the 'ordinary' PC - a low cost appraoch with athlon or duron of socket a vintage, paired with a lower end but useful graphics card and 256-512mb ram. I have one XP that runs on Duron 800 with 320mb ram and geforce 2, another that runs on athlon 1400 with 512mb ram and fx5200 ( 😀 ). They both run really well, just not something to play far cry on.