I really like how much here those videos are prepared, always great description, all things mentioned, every detail or issue nicely pointed and explained. You do amazing work Man! @PhilsComputerLab
It's funny because with just a bit more RAM this would actually be a perfectly-adequate mid-range gaming PC even by modern standards. XP may feel old but support wasn't dropped that long ago.
I could start building that now, but what does windows 7 do that 10 doesn't? (Legit question, would love to know what could be special about windows 7)
@@アキフナズリヌ Yes and no. Windows 7 doesn't support ray-tracing (RTX), as that requires DirectX 12 and the highest Win7 will go is DX11; Win7 will, however, support RTX 20xx and 30xx graphics cards, as there are Win7 drivers available on Nvidia's website for these.
I can't, so I'll come back to this comment and hold you to it. But probably not a realistic expectation. Nowadays 10 Years is about 4-5 generations of graphics cards and I expect this number to lower as time passes, due to lithography constraints. And we're talking about flagship parts too, so 100$ ten years from now will likely get you 2080ti performance and a soda. Add the processor, motherboard, RAM, plus how rare those parts will be in 10 years and you got yourself in a costly, time consuming purgatory.
A quick correction /note here. This isn't as far as XP will go. You can run XP on 4790K's (I'm doing it on my own retro XP machine with all cores/threads enabled and zero problems) as well as on - ALL - 9xx series Nvidia cards. Although beyond the 960 series cards you have to modify the .inf files otherwise you will get a "no card detected" error but it can be done. You can even run Titan X cards with XP so long as you're willing to modify the .inf files. I'm running a 4790K with a 4 gig Nvidia 960 SSC and I'm exceeding 1300 FPS at 1920 x 1200 resolution in some games... Also a quick note too about Quake 4; it will use up to 4 threads actively throughout game play (I've seen it on my own system). So while it's running fine on your system with only 2 threads enabled, it'll use up to 4. The engine it was built off of is more modern then I think a lot of people realize.
Getting a GTX 780TI might also be a good idea since it still has official XP drivers, it's more powerful than a GTX 960 and has 3 GB of VRAM, not bad. Of course the "best" ones would be one of the Titan cards with XP support.
@@tudormihaialexandru3038 But let's say you have 4 GB of system RAM, and then put a 3 GB of GPU card in your system, then you have only 1 GB free for system? (32-bit 4 GB-limit)
But wait, there's more! There are quadro cards with the same die as the titan,but the vram goes up to 24gb. Maybe not particularly more useful,but imagine running windows XP with as much vram as a modern 90-class titan equivalent a decade later. The source code of XP got leaked in 2020 and people have managed to compile their own drivers for a bunch of modern cpus and supporting hardware, just not graphics cards. I saw a post from two weeks ago of a guy running XP on his Ryzen 7900X, with 32gb of ram and NVME drive all with fully functioning drivers.
I love these OP Builds. The i5 4690 makes more sense for people to buy here as XP caps out at quad cores, and they’re much cheaper. X-fi Titanium’s are also going up in price fast so I’d recommend grabbing that first. Great video Phil! 300fps Far Cry is crazy. I remember when a solid 30fps was amazing XD
Lovely system. My Haswell 4790k still sits in my main rig. At the moment with an RX590 and 32gb Ddr3. No need to upgrade processor yet at all. Maybe in a couple of years but what a great chip it's been.
I remember suggesting you make a video like this a long time ago, so I'm really happy to see this video. I think it's astounding that the GTX900 - series supports windows XP. Amazing stuff.
I love haswell processors, I just completed a build for my father upgrading him from his 2008 Duo Core HP that is on life support. Upgrading him to 8gb of RAM, i3 (planning on getting him a devils canyon i5 or i7 when I get one for a good price), GT660, two 500GB WD Blue SSDs (one for OS & other for Storage) I pre-loaded 3DO: Army Men 1 - 3, Blade Runner, and a few other games on it for him if he wants to play some older pc games. All in a micro atx case, Haswell is a good budget upgrade path for people who don't do much more than basic stuff online but with responsiveness. Or go Ryzen if they just need more modern or even the Athlon 3000. Always nice to see your builds and how you set them up.
This is as good as it gets for a Windows XP machine, coincidentally the GTX 960 is the last generation that supports analogue video output so you can hook it up to a nice CRT.
I'm using a 1660 Ti with HDMI to VGA display converter, with cheap LG 1080P monitor, I tried to turn on my old CRT to play Crysis on it using the display converter but is dead, pressing the power buttom and nothing happend
@@DualPerformance Try lower resolution on your pc before you plug it to CRT. Set it to 800x600 and slowly work to higher resolution afterwards on your CRT monitor.Keep me updated.
@@someboringperson9359 does not work even at 640x480, the monitor has been unused by at least 17 years, was working good back in 2003, I think that some capacitors inside the monitor must be replaced because they dried itselft due to never be power on all those years (sorry for bad english)
For even more ultimate, mod the bios with an older microcode (up to version 7 if I recall correctly) and you can run all cores at the max turbo of 4 GHz. Overclock the base clock a little and you can run it at 4.1 easily ;)
I love your videos Phil. You inspired me to make a retro Windows 98 SE gaming machine. Hp pavilion 8175, Pentium 2 233mhz, 64mb ram, 10gb hard drive and a ati rage 2+. Deciding on what gpu I can put. But currently as it stands it plays my fav game. Age of empires 2 plus the expansion perfectly! Nice to go back and play on classic hardware.
I can see someone nostalgic building something like this in 10 to 5 years from now, cuz he/she would like to play these games as he/she remembers or would like to have played back then, just like people do nowadays with those win 98 computers...
And here I am with an intel2 quad core q9550 I got with my pc for free. Only thing I spent on it was $20aud and that was for a gtx560 that normally goes $40-$45aud second hand...
The cartoonish but clear and sharp look of video games from that era still somehow seem to be much more immersive compared to the bling and bloom nowadays
@@philscomputerlab I've got a Dell Dimension 8200 with a 2ghz Northwood P4 that I got from my uncle about 2 years ago, he got it when the machine originally came out. I threw Win Me on it, an ELSA GLADIAC ULTRA, 512mb pc800 rdram and an SB Live. Slick machine.
Haswells are holding value because of the availability of boards and memory. They are the last DDR3 CPUs that work relatively well with current software. You can almost muddle through with a Vishera or a Sandy/Ivy, but if you want to get use out of a DDR3 kit with a well made and affordable motherboard, Haswell is the best option.
Modern(kinda) PC for XP "Retro-Gaming" Nice one! That rig can be used for modern "Win 10" gaming as well. Perfect for Dual Partition-boot. Can run all modern titles pretty good - though not a the high settings. What I like about Haswell, is the extremely low idle/desktop power consumption. Only dislike is the temperatures. Bad workmanship on the die/ihs assembly and the integrated memory voltage regulator is not the best combo. But this lower power S-model used here, should not experience very high temps. (should stay below or around 80c - under stresstest)
Ultimate XP supported hardware I guess would be a 4790k OC to 5ghz with a 980Ti or Titan, I’m just not sure what XP only game would warrant that build? Desktop would be hella snappy though lol 😆
IMO the full EAX experience needs a good 5.1 surround sound system. Headphones just don't do it for me. So did you disable HT for performance or compatibility reasons? I also wonder the same regarding the disabling of CPU cores. And what about the full RGB colorrange over HDMI on Nvidia GPUs. Does it also default to limited color range in the Windows XP drivers? You could've mentioned those things in the video, which was otherwise a very good one. Thanks for making it!
armorgeddon he did for both better compatibility and performance with the games as well as with XP. Personally, I just use a quad core and turn off nothing, but that’s just me
Multicore and HT compatiblity with XP itself should be perfectly fine. Regarding games it depends on the game, mostly how older the game is. I wonder if disabling cores on a CPU like this would improve boost clock speeds on the remaining cores. I'd still like to hear from Phil was his view is on the subject.
You know, Haswell's revised S versions were pretty sick. My old i5-4690s, due to the instruction set, was on par with the ipc of a stock clocked 4690k. The i7-4790s is typically cheaper and slightly better than the 4790, while having an even smaller thermal envelope and lower power consumption.
@@greatwavefan397 can't say for Haswell because I never used the Haswell variant, and I haven't read any such thing on them. However, I have used the 2500T and despite being two generations prior, for a purely streaming based entertainment type linux daily driver for web browsing, it's actually not bad when paired with a cheapo dedicated GPU like a GT 730 though I used a 1030 since I had it. And those chips are super cheap
THANKS! I was just thinking the other day about building a "end of life hardware" pc for xp. I was just about to start researching all the hardware and your video came out. Saves me some time! Ty
While this does well for the last-supported build idea, it is more confusing as an ultimate build with the GTX 960, when one could reach for a GTX 780, 780ti, or Radeon 7970 without even having to chase expensive and/or cards like the 7990 or GTX Titan/Titan Black.
"GTX 780 Ti" is also officially supported by XP. Bit faster than 960, it's closer to 970, but needs more power (250W vs 120) and not easy to find. Of course You don't need that for games of that era, but it is still an option.
For Windows XP, the R9 280X can be installed as a R9 200 Series along with the inf mod for GTX 970/980/980Ti , Titan X, and the Quadro M2000, M4000, M5000, and M6000, all of which make great for dual booting.
Hey, Phil. I know that this is an old vid, but I found the Asus B85M-G has full WinXP driver support still on Asus's site. It'll still cramp the gpu fans but get a case that will mount a fan on the side over that spot to force air in between the gpu and sound card and it's a much simpler install.
This is pretty neat Phil, I did an ultimate Windows XP pc with a 4790k and Titan X maxwell once on my channel ages ago, it was insane, but I think your choice of gtx 960 makes more sense, and your board has better support for xp than my asus Maximus vii z97 board, I’m just waiting for you to figure out how to use m.2 ssds with modded vintage OSes On a side note, I found drivers for the gtx 970 on Nvidia website, the 980/980 ti I couldn’t find one for though
@@philscomputerlab yes, I did a video showcasing two different XP systems that I currently have dualbooting OSes, one was like the $420 xp build that has a gtx 970 and 3770 in it, just a modded dell optiplex basically, the other one is like my $700 dollar one that has a 1tb ssd and titan x, XP doesn't officially support Titan X BUT, there is a vista driver for the Titan X Maxwell, so, I was able to install it in XP, you can also inf mod the latest installer for the 970 in XP to support Titan X maxwell 12gb, and in XP it actually does show the card as a titan x maxwell with 12gb of vram, I don't think that 32 bit XP can actually utilize all of the vram, but, it works as well. I did some testing using z97 with the titan x and xp and it was getting some rather absurd fps on crysis, enough to justify using a 1440p display or a 144hz+ one on games from the end of the XP era. I did also even get some things to run in 4K within xp, but I found that the 970 wasn't enough firepower for crysis in 4k ultra, hence why I did the titan x xp build, I did some benchmarks, but not as thoroughly as you do, it is interesting.
@@philscomputerlab just to aid you further, here is a link to the sets of drivers confirmed working in XP for 970/980, when i tried to use this for 980 TI/Titan X maxwell, I believe I forced it to install in device manager, I did something funky and it somehow worked without an inf mod, but the inf mod guarantees it to work on any board. us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/344.11/344.11-desktop-winxp-32bit-english.exe here is the link to the driver that nvidia hosts on their site that works, and here is the link to the later version of the xp driver that has an inf mod if you want to see what has to be done to mod later XP drivers instead of brute force installing them like I do. mega.nz/#!KcwXDQIb!G_KVexc_yfK0Cnawiwms_KIWevdtpuj02GdcDxdJh4M
@@philscomputerlab us.download.nvidia.com/windows/344.11/344.11-desktop-winxp-32bit-english.exe nvidia hid this driver from the public after they dropped xp support, but its still hosted on nvidias website, this works on 970/980 officially. 980 ti and titan x maxwell can be forced to work with it too but I think i did some trick with device manager forcing the driver, but an inf mod (just adding titan x to be in the list) can also be used to make the driver install instead of brute force. hopefully this leads to a 4k gaming/240hz windows xp experiment
My choice for going with an Ivy Bridge over Haswell has to do with the Intel USB 3.0 controller not having proper drivers. A fast external hard drive is nice for transferring games and leaving XP offline. Good video Phil.
I feel you man.... my dailydriver laptop has an i7-4xxx something , 16GB RAM, and a GTX860m .... My work laptop sports a 6th-gen i7 , but only has built-in Intel graphics ...
Lol. You guys think y'all have bad PCs?? I have a beauty laying on top of a shelf collecting dust. Celeron 700MHz 64MB SDRAM (I think) Motherboard Graphics Generic Soundcard Win98
I am upgrading to Ryzen soon. My haswell 4690k and used GTX 960 are for my next retro XP machine. I am excited for Ryzen, but I am honestly more excited for my retro machine XD. Very informative and helfpul video, thank you!
I just remembered. If you wanted a CPU that would be ever more suited for the "ultimate" title, make use of the K variant of the 4790. Just disable the hyperthreading and you could push it to 4GHz.
It could be worse, you could be one of the unfortunate people in this world with no ability to have a computer at all. So hang onto that Phenom system and be happy to have it. If it's lasted this long it deserves some respect and can be quite humbling to keep around and realize some people out there could only dream of having a system like that.
I have a GTX 960 2gb, same Gigabyte Windforce edition. Before i ran it with i5 3470 and it was awesome, but now upgraded to Ryzen 7 2700, just upgrading slowly, I know I need better GPU for this CPU but, GTX 960 still goes through a lot of new games really good.
Yeah, i have an i3 4150 in main pc, and a c2q 9200 sitting in storage for an "ultimate" win xp rig. To me its about period correct hardware, with native support. Going over, you are into the same as with later software. It might work, it might not, or with hidden issues and bugs. Better to keep it native, and only deal with period accurate issues accordingly. PC gaming is such a bitch, with so much false and shitty advice flooding the internet. Mouse control especially is such a pain with usb mices using that 500-1000hz hack too by default. Shit really fucks with many older games
@@lopwidth7343 I never realized how subjective mice can be until I got a Razer DeathAdder. I really had to mess with settings before I got it where I could use it. Turns out I am not a big fan of high DPI.
Lol, this is great, I had upgraded my friend's i3 to this i7 4790 cuz he has a Haswell motherboard and could not afford a full platform upgrade, he is already commenting how snappier his system is. And he is still rocking a EVGA GTX960-2G SSC from 2015 cuz HE IS a retro gamer mostly ;)
Wouldn't a 780ti be more powerful? I also checked they still have drivers. I know 300fps is massive but you said Ultimate which I would assume super overkill.
If you can find a good CRT that can do more than 60hz at 1600x1200. Oh baby. A good Trinitron or Diamondtron display. That's where this setup would be absolutely lovely.
Maybe you could benchmark that system as you have it now and then put windows 10 on it and run the benchmarks again? The main use case for XP retro pc in my eyes is to run games that won't run on windows 10. However you said that this setup may run games faster under XP. I'd like to see if there is a difference.
This is actually a really fun idea for a retro XP Gaming PC. There are a lot of games I love from that era and I just happen to have an i5 4590 sitting around and an R9 270X which happens to be AMD's last GPU with XP support. I just don't have a sound card... well, I do, but it is an Audigy 2 ZS Platinum, and the motherboard I have doesn't have a PCI slot.
Superb video! A Haswell platform for Windows XP feels a little strange (it’s not exactly period correct) BUT it’s technically fully XP compatible so 🤷🏻♂️ However, if you’re going to disable two cores...how about using a G3258 instead? You can easily get one of those past 4GHz by only adjusting the multiplier. Edit: Nearly forgot to thank Phil for the snappy drivers recommendation, it’s absolutely saved my ass!
A good option for the motherboard is the asus B85m-e, I haven't found another one with all supported drivers, and this motherboard has very useful ports, LPT, PCI, COM and 4 slots for RAM
I think one of two cpus would also be appropriate and worth revisiting later for a video. One is any of the Kaveri or later FM2+ APUs from AMD. They have built-in graphics that should run quite well without the extra expense and hassle of buying another graphics card. The other cpu is the Intel Pentium G3258. They're stupidly cheap, and they overclock like crazy. For the anniversary of the Pentium, Intel released these chips as the last overclockable Pentiums you can buy (for now, who know about later on). I think it would be really appropriate that you run games on such a fast Pentium. Also, a really good game to run in XP for graphics and sound (even if it doesn't push hardware) is Bioshock. It has a wonderful art style, and it was one of the last games to support EAX with EAX v5.0.
I have the Anniversary Pentium, but no Z chipset motherboard for overclocking. I plan on doing more APU videos, so stay tuned! Still got to find some really fast DDR3 RAM to do it justice.
Maybe I should rename my listing for an office PC to Windows XP gaming machine instead... Also I have a question or two. if the CPU is already a dual core (my case its the G3258), can I just skip the disabling of cores? Also, is it better to remove 4GB, or go for dual channel power by keeping the other 4GB of RAM?
Another GREAT build. I like the fact that the board takes more modern components so that by running a program like Virtual Box you could set up both XP and Windows 10 in virtual machines. I might be missing something though. Where can you get XP? Also, do you already have the games, or do you download them from a website? This may be a stupid question, but I honestly don't know the answers. Thanks
I actually wanted to build one myself. But I got a good price offer with i5 3570k, 4GB 1600 Ram and a cheap GTX780 with 3 GB for 20 euros... I don't think there is a big difference anymore. I took an old gray ATX box from 1998 as a case and mounted an RGB fan on the front and rear as a little embellishment. The RGB effects shine through the ventilation slots of the old tower.
that is a fast one! if you want another heavy XP era game, try CMR Dirt (2007) on ultra settings, it makes my HD 7850/C2Q work hard (also it's very heavy for core2s on the game mode with multiple cars), the 960/i7 might be a lot better with it,
Yeah, CMR Dirt, I used to load that up on systems that should easily have run it but seemed to stutter badly, especially AMD systems, only system it ran fine on for me was a 1366 i7 920
It seems that like a bunch of the other commenters, my main PC would fit the bill as well. I know I have a 4th gen i7 in there, but I don't recall if it's the 4790K off the top of my head. The 960 is even newer than my Kepler Titan I have in there! Good to know when I finally upgrade I have good use for my existing parts!
The Nvidia drivers used in the video (the very last one that supports Win XP) supports the Titan as well. The GTX 960 was the newer card, but the Titan should be much, much more powerful than it. Wonder if there would be any difference using it rather than the 960.
@@talvisota327 Mine is a P4 670 but water cooled. I duno if it could be air cooled, I never tried. What stopped me going higher was always motherboard instability issues as oppose to the CPU itself
@@talvisota327 Currently an ASUS P5Q SE/R I have another board I want to try eventually that has SLI but its currently in storage. I duno if it'll be faster though seen as its a DDR board. This one is DDR2. If I remember it gets somewhere around 650ish passmark
You can force 32 bit to use full amount of ram graphic wise gtx 900 series is the way to go Cpu wise,xp uses two cores,so have them as eficient as you can,haswell or maybe even broadwell,with ddr4 support
@@tobiaspedersen5427 meh someday I'll have an i7 4790K. When the prices drop. AMD Ryzen 7 2700X is cheaper today with twice the cores and faster clocks.
I picked up a Dell XPS 8700 that had a i7 4790 and everything else, I picked it up for $4 bucks at an Auction that had mostly tools and other old house hold stuff with a bunch of older people, they didn't know anything about the system. I'm just glad it was dusty as all hell, if it was shiny or I'm sure some 110 year old man would of bid me up. That system is currently running a GTX 1660 (I bought off amazon) and it games and keeps up really well today.
that snappy driver is really saving the trouble of searching for drivers of old devices Hell it can even install drivers of latest hardware no issue One hell of a installer
I’ve been using snappy religiously but finally ran into the first time it did not have a driver for me. It was for a pci to pci host bridge when I installed a pci x1300 GPU
@@mesterak I tried finding a snappy driver executable but the one I found was from the driverpacks website (drp.su), and I feel like I didn't download and use what everyone else is using. Cause, when I ran it on my PC nothing happened haha, I guess I just don't know how to use it. Could you throw me the snappy driver installer?
I've wondered what the best setup is that properly supports DirectDraw. It should be in the XP era given that, while deprecated, the API was still properly supported, at least up to a point. I imagine that the GTX 960 likely has deficiencies given that the oldest API it was validated against was probably DirectX 9.0c, for Unreal Engine's sake. I've hypothesized that the answer is the GTX 280 or Radeon HD 4850 given those were the last cards produced while XP was relevant in the enthusiast gaming space, but the actual answer may be substantially older than that.
I have a Haswell system as well with a 4790k and has been a sold system. And it's my Windows 10 system as well. My ideal WIndows Xp retro build would have some kind of Pentium Dual core or or a even a Quad core system of some kind. You Could have left the 4790 alone in terms of disabling cores and just disabled Hyperthreading and have a solid Quad core system.
A bit weird is that your board is detecting the CPU as i7 4790*S* with a base clock of 3.2 and max Turbo of 3.9 and not 4.0 as it should be. There are 4 Types of the 4790: The standard 4790 with 3.6 - 4.0 GHz 84 W, the unlocked 4790*K* with 4.0 - 4.4 GHz 88 W, the low power 4790*S* with 3.2 - 4.0 GHz 65 W and the ultra low power 4790*T* with 2.7 - 3.9 GHz and 45 W.
This system would probably even give a pretty good desktop experience in Windows 10, maybe not so much for modern AAA games, but it'd certainly be fine for web, email, youtube, etc. More casual games like Minecraft or Fortnite would probably be fine though, so it would definitely suit as a shared family computer for kids to play around and do their homework. Anyway, I'd also be interested to see what the equivalent AMD system would be.
I have found with some after the fact research that a lot of the 80 series main boards still have drivers for XP, but my Z97 Fatality has like no drivers for XP. Everything works, I just can't use the LAN port, special sound card features, or get usb 3.0 speeds off the board. But that doesn't matter to me at this time.
Lately I've been considering a highly-efficient XP build that can also run modern games, and one of the most efficient motherboards out there supports Haswell CPUs and up to one PCI card! However, I'm still deciding between the i7-4790S and the i7-4790T, and between the GTX 960 4GB and the GTX 950 75W. If my estimates are correct, my power consumption should hover around 150 - 200 watts-probably even less-depending on the chosen hardware and the software settings, which can compensate for the immense power consumption of a CRT monitor, if I get one later on. What are your thoughts on this?
Hmm. I'll have to look into the driver situation with my z97 board to see if I should use an i7-4770K I was gifted. Instead for XP I've been toying around with an i7-4690X (also free with free super-expensive Asus x79 mobo!), but most games of the XP era are single or dual threaded, so the better per-thread performance may be worth it. That and I want an x79 server, but my other free x79 board died.
Erik Britz Your system and his system isn’t retro. He’s using newer hardware to run a retro operating system. If you put a 1970s motor in a 2020 car, it doesn’t make that car retro.
Nice push for xp there but imho going with x79, a xeon e5-1620 v2 and an HD7970 (even standard edition) brings you a little further. I'm currently waiting for a 4x1gb 1333-kit to arrive since I only have 4GB-modules or 8GB-modules to thoroughly test it out. In 3DMark03 I get slightly higher results whereas in 3DMark01 I get way lower scores. And seing the X-Fi... Creative released w10-drivers last summer. Never been happier to reinstall my Xtreme Gamer Fatal1ty 😇
Thank you for this great video. For those interested, you can get the Geforce 970 to 980ti/Titan X Maxwell to work under XP with a slight tweak, here's a link to do so: mattpilz.com/windows-xp-drivers-nvidia-geforce-gtx-970-980-980-ti-titan-x/ Confirmed to work on my Ivy Bridge + 980ti system.
