It's a budget model of a 2000 Radeon, so I think of the 400-800mhz Duron/Celeron/K6 Me-loaded camp for that. That's where my instincts lead. I don't think it can be blamed for XP being slow as that's generally notorious wrt i/o at the time (i held off on xp until 2006)

VanillaFairy wrote on 2026-04-21, 17:46:

So quite a while ago (almost a year at this point) I disassembled an old PC that used to be my family's computer before I was ev […]
Show full quote

So quite a while ago (almost a year at this point) I disassembled an old PC that used to be my family's computer before I was even born
It had a ATI Radeon 7000 and although I'm not 100% sure if it'll still work after a year in storage, I have gained some interest in it now & in retro systems as a whole.

so, with that in mind, uh. What would go well with it?
Originally it was "paired" with the Northwood Celeron 4 that the system had (which ran at around 2ghz), and... I'm not sure if the card was slow, the XP install was defragmented to oblivion and back or if the CPU was pants (probably all three) but the XP install that the system had was incredibly sluggish when I tested it a year or so ago.
...
but I do want to know if it'd work for building an even older system than the one I currently want to make out of that old system's motherboard.

Yes, you can definitely build an older system with it. I don't know if the earliest Radeon 7000 drivers will go back to Windows 3.1, but I think Windows 95 should be OK.
As leileilol said, the Radeon 7000 was a very budget card from the early 2000's. Most of these use pretty slow 166 MHz VRAM, and the bus being only 64-bit, they probably won't do well with games past '98-'99.

That being said, I don't think the Northwood Celeron is that much more powerful for the Radeon 7000 card. Given that Celerons had really small L2 cache, a 2 GHz Celeron Northwood will probably be on par with a fast-ish Pentium 3 (e.g. 700-850 MHz, more or less.) So you can leave it with the original system or you can pair it with something slower. IMO, even something like a Pentium II will be fine with it. Now if you do upgrade the CPU on that P4 Celeron system, then you probably would want a faster video card for sure - something like a GeForce 4 MX 440 or FX 5200 as a minimum.

And yeah, that old P4 Celeron system was probably slow due to all of the things that you mentioned... though if anything, probably the bloatware was the biggest factor here. A clean XP SP2 install on that system with no unnecessary startup programs should fly pretty well, even with as little as 256 MB of RAM.

As this is Low Profle and budget VGA for Radeon, throw it in SFF / Low Profile case with some AC97 integrated sound and install Win9x for it. Socket A and Duron Morgan (SSE/3Dnow!)

Your two routes are:

• Keep it authentic and build a budget system of early 2000s around them. Socket A Sempron, Willamette or Northwood Celeron, maybe faster s370 Celerons
• Give top-end performance and 32bit color depth with 16x AF support with a barely noticeable performance hit to an early AGP Socket 7 or Slot-1 system.