Building a Retro Gaming PC (2002) with Athlon XP and GeForce4 

almost same here... but started with the athlon thunderbird 1.4 and ended up with the xp2600 barton + a hd3850 agp

I would find Pentium computers just like that in 2002 in Good Will Thrift stores for $10 and resell them for $100 nearly every day.The profit was good pocket money.

m9078jk3 Yeah, I think I got mine for about 100$ in 2000 or 2001. The case was huge and it came with a 13inch crt with burnt in screen. Still I was amaized at what it could do because before that I only had consoles.

I also had that pentium 133mhz, but mine had 64mb and almost 2gb caviar hdd.

Same here bro: before 2004 I had almost the same machine like yours but with a bit higher mmx 166. then i got an althon xp 2600+ and gf4 mx 440 8x (upgraded to fx5700 eventually).

Did the intel stock cooler exists back then?

Hot Chocolate is my preference. :D

+MasterControl90 I got by with a TNT2M64 and PIII 600 MHz and 64 MB of RAM until 2002-ish. I mostly played half-life mods and UT anyway and it did OK. I got an MX440 and 128 MB more RAM and continued using that system until the pentium 4 2.4C GHz was released. I almost went with an Athlon XP or athlon 64, but I was shopping for a new computer in the brief time window when the 2.4C northwood was generally a bit faster than the athlon XP and the athlon 64 hadn't yet arrived in force outside servers. I think it was 2004 when I upgraded to the 9800 non-pro for just a little more than $100 I believe it was, not that long before half-life 2. That was a magical era in gaming for me. There were earlier games such as Stunt car 3D, Hunter, ultima underworld, Doom and System shock that blew my socks off; but Half-life and its mods and community were magical. I had just got 10/100 mbps, rock solid fiber in 1999, straight from 56K. Online gaming was new and amazing to me. HL:DM was great fun bunnyhopping around and propelling yourself around the map with the gauss rifle, but it was more chaos than community. Counter-strike, before it became so toxic, had some great servers were you could just drop in and talk shit with friends and have some nice, friendly games whenever. Science and industry was great for some variety and took the gameplay and weapons of HL:DM, added a few more and made it into a team sport. As was day of defeat and TFC. But Natural Selection; that was amazing; it was an RTS/FPS combination with aliens vs marines, think Starcraft in first person; it had the best, most friendly community for the longest time without too many toxic A-holes. The movement in that game was superb. The level design was the best of the best the aging Half-life engine had to offer, with the same gamma ramp trick as used by Quake III making the lighting stark and crisp yet retaining the soft and realistic indirect lighting from radiosity. There were so many combinations of unexpected things that could happen. I still remember many individual games that I played almost a decade and a half ago. Many games hinged on single player happening to discover something and effectively communicating with their team and the commander and or team (aliens didn't have a commander, they just had a builder class that they had to protect) not panicking and focusing on a single task to the exclusion of everything else. I remember games that lasted the better part of a day with hives changing hands and battle lines shifting back and forth, people leaving to eat and comming back to find the game was still going. I remember when the game was about to be lost and the marine base was relocated into vents and other silly places. I remember aliens massing through the marine's phasegate into their base (back when you still could) and taking them by surprise. I remember the phase gate going down and everyone on the team being dead except for one guy who slogged it back all the way across the map without being discovered and managing to beacon people back in and continue on to win the game (this was back when people didn't really know how to play and the aliens didn't focus down the marine base correctly and just killed the infantry portals/respawn points). It was later made more competitive and short game oriented, but it was still an excellent game.

ATI 9800 PRO a beast! I had one from Hercules, I LOVED that GPU. Oh, and it came with a proper hard copy of " No one lives forever 2, a spy in harms way", one of the best FPS games ever imo. Good ol days, these days you get a f...ng game coupon. Some things _were_ better in the old days.

I had the Radeon 9800 Pro as well- def a king of its time. Went to the X800 from there and it DOMINATED! God I loved those cards. Miss them. Good old days ^^ Still AMD tho - rockin an 8370 and R9 390x - but I have many AMD builds all on my channel. Intel made me an AMD fanboy after Intel paid manufacturers to use only intel cpus when the Athlon 64 3000 series was so much better and more cost efficient. I upgraded from a pentium 4 extreme edition to an Athlon 64 3500 Venice and the difference was so staggering I later upgraded to the Athlon 64 3800X2 with 2x X1900XTs in crossfire. Been AMD ever since. No regrets.

Also I love the Socket A machines.

I miss avp2 multiplayer : (

Thanks :D

Dmitriy DarkJoney в каком году ?

В 2003 году был куплен.

Dmitriy DarkJoney подозрительно дофига оперативки для того времени, да ещё и с такой затычкой видяхой.

Отчим был фотографом, машина крутила Фотошоп большую часть времени. Игры он играл Age of Empires II только. Перешла ко мне в 2006 году, в 2009 я потом взял C2Q вместо нее. Да и сейчас у него машина с FX 8320 и 640й GeForce, все так же играет только в AoE.

I used to have exactly the same components. I overclocked the Athlon XP 2500+ to 3200+ with a Thermaltake Volcano 12. Oh man, those we're the days. My first pc was actually a 486 DX4-100mhz and climbed over to K6-2 500mhz, then the Athlon.

Whoops, speak of the devil.

SolarstrikeVG I think he said the physics get weird if you remove, or at least they did with GTA3.

For the purpose of benchmarking, I would ignore bugs and physics issues and just try the game with the frame limiter off.

Any GTA game before IV has weird problems when you turn off the frame limiter. GTA:SA for me on my modern computer will freeze in cutscenes with the frame limiter off, and yes, the physics are a lot more fun with the frame limiter off haha.

i once removed the fpslimit and i wasnt able to drive backwards anymore. also the cars were slow as hell

Did yours come OEM with Windows ME? I have an 8100 (I think!) which was cursed like that. (What awful technology the whole P4 era from Intel was! When a P3 of the same clock is 30-50% faster you've done something very wrong.)

OEM PCs were bad especially with the capacitor plague with motherboards during the 2000s era, many of them had faulty capacitors that failed after a while, i had a dell dimension 4400 with a pentium 4 northwood 2.0 ghz, 768 mb ram (originally 256 mb), nvidia geforce fx 5200 (originally a ATI rage 128), and a soundblaster live value 5.1 sound card. It ran Windows XP Pro SP3 and i played GTA San Andreas and Need for Speed Underground 2 and others, I used Mozilla Firefox which ran better than chrome and it played youtube on 480p decently, it had hiccups on 720p and was a lagfest on 1080p. I mainly used Facebook and Twitter on it and they both worked fine on it. It suffered the fate of the capacitor plague and it bit the dust after a few months of using it. I got a MSI KT4A Ultra Socket A board with a Athlon XP 2600+, fortunately it has good capacitors and it posts and works good, i need a case for it though, it didn't fit in the dell proprietary clamshell case :(.

It should scale better in later tests. A 3 GHz Pentium 4 HT should perform better than this. Well unless you're running onboard Intel GMA. Got one of the P4 631 here myself and got planned to send it through benchmarks soon anyway.

HappyBeezerStudios - by Lord_Mogul it is oc ed to 3.93ghz and i am using the intel gma graphics!! Lol

Because of oc the fsb is 1333mhz

Kuntal ghosh Mine is even worse, I have a Socket 478 Prescott running at 2.8GHz (HT). I do have an AGP Radeon 2400 Pro though, but my CPU is definitely worse.

RogerRHF i actually have a ryzen 7 1700 and the asus prime x370 pro!! But because of money short it will taks soms time for the whole system... Ram is gskill rident z 16gb 3200mhz,gtx 1060 6gb evga ftw, samsoung 750evo120gb it is very cheap in India only 40$ i know it is 100$ on us,case will be a full black mid tower with out any side window as i hate it something under 50$ , 700w cooler master psu.....

Awesome, thanks for sharing! It's funny, there are lots of mods of GeForce to Quadro, but not the reverse. Because these days, often the Quadro cards can be had for a lower price.

PhilsComputerLab you can convert Quadro to the corresponding GeForce just as easy. Softmodding is done with RivaTuner. For hardmod you need to resolder some resistors on the plate.

You can only disable the entire CPU cache altogether, and doing that will cripple your Athlon to speeds of a really old PC. But for DOS, this works well. Set Mul tool should work for this.

RaidRazer Yes, it's a store in Vienna.

Wie ich die Rechnung gesehen habe wusste ich es sofort ;-)

I will test some PCI IDE controllers soon and use IDE to SATA adapter because I can use SSD. I do not have any super fast IDE drives.

That being said, in 2002 or so I was on an old PIII Dell that I got from a yard sale for $5, it was missing most of its parts but I eventually found a spare hard drive and disc drive to get it running. It was a huge upgrade from my old Pentium, though I really wish I still owned both machines.

That little metal plate was a CPU shim.

Yea, not sure why I said the second one.

PhilsComputerLab not to worry, just wanted to point it out to the others because that was my childhood game. Everyone, try it if you have time

Dragos, Salut! Daca vrei putem juca in lan (tunngle /gameranger) jocuri mai vechi sau chiar retro!

i like underground 2 better, its open world unlike the 1st one

And the vinyl system for NFSU2 was AMAZING! I can't tell you how long I spent in the decal design mode lol

If you want more of those, check out Druaga1's GeForce GT 420 video.