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GCN 1 or GCN 2 for dual boot Win XP gaming?

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First post, by Starbomba

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I have a retro machine that dual boots to Win XP and Win 7. Win 7 mostly used because i never gotten Steam to properly work on XP. My PC is an HP dc7900 SFF with a Q9550, Q45 chipset (PCIe 2.0), 2GBx4 DDR2-800, Soundblaster X-Fi XtremeGamer.

As for GPU, I am torn between a Radeon R7 450 4 GB GDDR5 (512 SP Cape Verde GCN1) or a Firepro W4300 4 GB GDDR5 (768 SP Bonaire GCN2). I know the second GPU is, in paper, 25-35% faster, but i do expect some bottlenecks on my own system. My main question is more regarding driver compatibility on XP. Would i see too many issues with the Firepro? Any standout software/game that gives issues on GCN2?

Reply 1 of 2, by Matth79

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Two oddball cards, you may need inf modded Catalyst 14.4 to support them in XP, unless their ids are already included

Reply 2 of 2, by Starbomba

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Matth79 wrote on 2026-03-13, 19:50:

Two oddball cards, you may need inf modded Catalyst 14.4 to support them in XP, unless their ids are already included

I was thinking of just selecting their respective origin cards (HD 7750 & HD 7790/R7 260) for modding, but one way or another they'll work. My only concern would be game/application compatibility.

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