Core 2 Duo E7200 and GT 630 for Windows XP Retro Gaming? 

The sad moment when a man's retro machine is in a similar level to your current build.... T_T

Really enjoyed that video, Phil. The old office computers seems like a great, cheap solution for an XP rig.

It's worthwhile throwing in a sound card too for EAX support, makes a big difference in games like FEAR etc.

I recently assembled a rig (yesterday): C2D E8600, GT 630, 4 GB RAM and Windows 10 Pro 64 bit. And now I watched this video. With it you brought back my belief in those old machines. Quite happy. thank You. Work also isn't wasted. Greetings from Bosnia.

Nice video, and good timing - I've recently received a socket 775 small form factor Dell Optiplex from work and have been pondering about what to do with it.

More and more I'm liking horizontal PC cases like this rather than towers. Had some back in the day, but there came a point when a horizontal case was considered "old" and "ugly" for some reason. But now that I'm into different eras of PC gaming, horizontal cases are just more convenient. You can stack them with no impact on cooling, since they were usually designed to have a monitor sit on top of them and thus little to no air vents on the top of the cases.

I've FX 6300 and GT 630 Win 7 build works fine as basic stuff

Great vid, it's refreshing to see a tech youtuber cover the low end.

Oldie but goodie thanks Phil!

I had a Gigabyte GT 630 (paired with a Pentium D 945 later an C2D E6600) for forever. I bought it to replace an ancient Nvidia GeForce 7300 GS (salvaged from an old custom office PC) back around the time Minecraft was released. It now proudly sits in my 10 year old sons PC as I had built my own rig a few years back with a FX-8320 and GTX 970. (Later he got the FX-8320 too and I have a Ryzen 1600x currently. Man I actually liked my 8320 but this Ryzen chip is something else! Sooooooo smooth....)

Not sure why...but I love that chassis design! The clear blue strip and black/ white motif is so cool.

I did something similar to this project with a low profile GT220. Bit of fiddle and drivers were happy in XP. Quadcore was niceish but does cache thrash. Very nice.

Your videos are the best Phil!

Great job. I was thinking of buying an old 700MHz computer for some older games. But you convinced me to do just like you. I know this computers are cheep all I need is a graphic card.

New subscriber here. Loving the content. I look forward to trying to build something like this over winter. Want to do an all AMD build.

I've just OC a AIO PC with an E7500, I used the bkclk method OC which makes the mobo use a 1333 bus this with the voltage pin short (soldered the pads of the CPU) This made the 2.9ghz run at 3.6ghz.. Great result for a non-overclocking board.

Great video. That looks like a well made little machine, good to see a small form factor case with an exhaust fan as well! Out of interest, how do you capture the screen when you are installing XP etc?

You are awesome at gaming skills

I recently acquired a motherboard from eBay which seems to be the same Intel board that's in this system. I have a red LED Cooler Master fan plugged into the board which seems to flash in time with the HDD indicator but when Windows installed the GPU drivers and the screen went blank, the LEDs on the fans went off too as if it's somehow linked to the GPU.

I have got Core 2 Quad Q6600, GT710, 4GB RAM, 300W PSU and it works perfectly.

Nice work on the C2D. I recently built a C2D system as well (E4500, 4gb DDR2 667mhz, Fujitsu G31T-M2), but since the only available card I have for this machine is the GTX750, I installed windows 7. I managed to run crysis on 1024x768 with a smooth 40fps. I'm now waiting for a Q6700 from aliexpress, only paid 12 bucks.

Ran a similar type build for a ht/living room pc for many years. Sported a pentium e5200, 2g ddr2, and a GeForce 730 1g, and win xp. Even ran vanilla skyrim for a while.

That case is also sold by InWin in all black as the InWin BL631, at least here in Canada. I've got two, use them for home theatre PC cases.

Cause of watching your videos, i am inspired to build a C2D for my basic college needs (as my college work still needs Windows but i use Mac for daily basis). And turns out that you build SFF machine just like me. My build is C2D E7400@2,8Ghz with 5,5GB DDR2 and my old Geforce 210 Silent converted into low profile GPU on a ECS/TGI DreamSys motherboard that placed on a IBM/Lenovo ThinkCentre SFF case (with front panel, USB, and HD Audio connector reworked. As the original Lenovo motherboard didn't boot at all) Limited option to get cheap second hand parts in Indonesia, so yeah. But, the system is great for my Office (via VNC) and playing games like SimCity 4.

With regards to the idea of Grabbing one for more modern games, make sure you can get a fast quad core Maybe even overclock. Make sure to research if it would bottleneck something like a a 1050ti. I love watching your videos and got started watching from Vogons(lurker) Keep it up.

What LCD monitors do you use? I'm building a retro win98 pc and CRT is not an option as I can't find any. I'm thinking of Acer V176L or Benq BL702A. Both are 5:4 17". Will this work for Win98 and Dos gaming? Thanks!

Considering that I have a core2duo with a gt 610 as W10 machine it was interesting to see what games you choosed. It's too op for XP and still gives a decent performance.

Phil i agree with you that low end budged GPU would be much more interesting for Retro gaming , i do watch another channel about budged building but i feel like many people have a bit wrong mindset when they testing low end gpu and they say older titles.. for me older titles are 10 years old games, other could be last year.. nothing wrong with it, but i think this is the right change for low end gpu to show, for older games that are 10+ years old :)

I have a very similar duo core that I run Ubuntu on with 8 gb of ram. Runs great.

how is a Athlon 64 x2 compared to a Core 2 Duo

Take care

If you dual boot with windows 7 would that take care of the lack of trim in windows xp. I assume that could be taken care of inside the windows 7 partition?

cool case. reminds me of hp sff case

So much fun playing F.E.A.R. back in the day. Was rockin' an AMD 4400+ with an A8n32-Deluxe mobo, paired with a pair of 7900GTs, and still....no soft shadows.

This intel motherboards are so nostalgic, is this a G41 or Q45? great memories

Hey phil,i enjoy your retro pc builds and testing etc,ive not seen you do anything on the old cyrix mii processors,although they are probably really hard to get now?

I've just put myself together a machine quite similar, q8400, 4gb ram, nvidia quadro 600 graphics card. Runs older titles really well, and was dirt cheep! By the way, a 750ti will run halo at 4k! Looks and plays great!

which GT 630 is this? Wikipedia says there are three basic models, with 96, 192 and 384 cores respectively.

What's the program you are running for the overlay? It's great to see how much CPU/GPU usage to figure out where bottlenecks are. I'm still working on my S939 build but haven't gotten to the Windows XP portion of it yet. With a 285GTX I wonder if using a single core like the 4000+ will have severe bottlenecking in late XP games. Is dual-core really needed? If so can the S939 X2 series meet the demands? I don't count Crysis really since it has no EAX and doesn't really need XP ... plus I suspect it can tax modern hardware even with 1080p and maxing all AA/Aniso.

Hey Phil :) I build a 2 weeks ago small computer like yours. Base on Msi A78 chipset motherboard with FM2+ socket, Amd Apu 6300 with 3.7GHz clock speed, 4 GB DDR3 2133MHz of Ram, External Gpu GeForce GT 610 (because computer have only 4GB Ram), Sound blaster X-Fi sound card and hard disk 2TB samsung 5400 rpm. Run quite well in older games but, the system boot pretty slowly cause disk is slow, but i grab what have in home :) Great video :D

how do I install steam and steam games on windows xp in 2017? worth the risk of connecting to the internet???

What I'm going to do with my old hardware I've collected or been given, a ASUS p5v lga775 mobo with SLI , got a e8500 & 6600 dual cores, 2 x 2gig & 2 x 1 gig of nice XMS DDR2 corsair ram, nvdia 8800 gt 512 or AMD 6670 4 gig, need to possibly get a SB audigy 2 ZS or -X-fi and ideally a i/o shield for mobo, but have everything else like wifi cards, USB cards I need & a nice retro case thanks for the video :)

I remember lusting after machines of this spec.

wow a firewire port, well at least you now have a PC to use for apple target disk mode on older mac's. what else would you use that for those days?

I'm building a "new" frankenputer for my everyday WinXP (32bit) that's pretty similar calibre overall. Q9450 CPU and an older vidcard (Asus GeForce G100) as I wanted fanless and choices were a bit limited, but good enough since it's not for gaming. 4GB RAM, and the boot drive is a 250GB IDE WD (mostly to put some hours on this one as it's sticky from sitting in storage) tho I might replace that later with a SATA drive. So far it seems pretty slick, and benchmarks in Everest are quite good even compared to newer PCs.

hi I love your videos, I'm currently planning on putting 2 voodoo2 in sli in a retro pc I'm assembling. what are your thoughts if I put them along with a processor Intel pentium D? will it burn the video cards? I will install 2 gigs of drr1 ram and windows me

I was thinking of doing this with an old core 2 duo hp sff system with a GT 730 I have in my closet. It used to be my mums, but we built her a new i3 system a couple of years ago. From what I remember, I think it needs a new hdd though, although that isn't a big deal.. I have a ton of xp era and 98 era games that I'd like to play again without jumping through hoops on my windows 10 machine.

Hi Phil, what program do you use to show the fps in the upper left corner? Is it fraps?

If you don't mind me asking, what is your background? And how did you accent develop? My girlfriend and I have been trying to figure both out for ages!

i have a intel 1155 motherborad with a quad core i7 3770k and a evega 960 gpu xp windows retro computer,,,,, ssd 500 gb running on it ,, i have seen forums saying that xp 32 bit windows dosent see 4 cores ,,i have not tyed any games yet ,, will my pc crash on some games or should i down grade to a i3 3220 dual core ,, really enjoy your you tube videos very imfornative

Built one similar to this years ago and its still in my possesion... Dell Inspiron 530(tower), took the running stocker and upraded the cpu with a c2d e8600, nanya 3x1gb pc2-5300, evga gtx 750ti 2gb/128bit pcie video card, a wd 500gb sata2 hdd and an antec 450w psu, it runs so much better than the vista system that originally came with it, my first upgrade video card had a bfg 9800gt 1gb/256bit installed, but as you can see, i swapped in a better one.

I do have a dedicated Windows XP machine to play older games that don't run well on Windows 10 64 bit. That machine has an Athlon II X4 640 (quad core, 3 GHz), 4GB DDR2 (more would be useless on XP 32 bit), and a passively cooled Geforce GT730 2GB, which isn't great for today games, but more than enough for XP era ones.

Another interesting video. I'm surprised that you were able to use such a relatively new GPU with XP. I thought there were no drivers available. Good information for when I build my XP machine.

Nice. I'm in the midst of restoring a Dell XPS 710 with a pair of 8800 GTXs in SLI. It's nice to return this system to its former glory or max it out according to the manufacturer configuration but now I'm wondering how long until those 8800s fail and would something like a low-end 600-series card (or cards) be a good replacement/upgrade? I'll have to research it.

My Pentium Dual Core E2160 remained totally fine for XP even at clock speed and even after Windows 7 was out (I kept XP until I upgraded to 10). I was happy to switch it for a Q6600 and squeeze a little more life from the system, but it was only when I was listening to streams where gaming that the cheap (however overclocked) dual core lacked enough punch. All that to say, whatever late Core2 model will probably be very performant to anything of the XP era.

I plan on building a 2indows XP Retro gaming PC. My goal ATM is a Core2 Quad Alias Xeon at 3.4-3.6GHz with 4GB and either a HD 5970, 5870 or a 5850. Together with an X-Fi Titanium it should do a phenomenal job playing all kinds of XP games.

Anyone think I should pair an old AMD cpu with a gt710 to get a little more preformance out of it to play old games?

I built a XP gaming rig way back in fall of 2006. I built it with a C2D E6400 @ 2.13 ghz, 2 gig of ddr2 ram and a Nvidia 7950GT w/512meg of vram. It currently has 3 gig of ram and a AMD HD5670 w/1 gig of vram. It runs everything before 2010, and quite a few things after, very smoothly with no problems. I think the fact that so many games were designed for the Xbox 360 first and then ported to the pc, extended the life of XP as a very capable gaming os.

I built a Business machine for a client with this same case here in the US, it is all black however. Very cramped. it currently runs a core i3-2100 with a Nvidia GT1030 and 8gb 1600mhz.

I also have a ancient gaming rig with a i7 2600k/4gb ram/ r9 290x/ x-fi fatality sound/ XP pro. Runs serious Sam at acceptible speeds. Thinking if XP 64 bit is worth the effort so I can add the much needed 16gb of ram.

Most modern SSD's have garbage collection enabled on the controller level, so you should be fine putting one in for an older OS. TRIM does help expand the life of SSD's but it's not really a requirement.

That Intel DQ35JO is making it's rounds on Ebay. UXWBill got one just like it by Prime Systems for 40USD + Free Ship. It was a core 2 duo 3GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, and CDRW/DVD ROM. I bought on as well upgraded to a Xeon Quad Core 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, and a HD 5450 1GB. Yes this motherboard is a beast, I think I can go to Core 2 Quad 3GHz but you'll more Cache with a Xeon. I love mine as a HTPC but the Prime Systems machine is a little harder to work with, it uses a SFX Power Supply. SFX aren't bad but can get expensive, a non-modular Silverstone 450W Bronze can set up back about 75 dollars and an EVGA ATX with the same ratings can be found for less than 40 bucks. I got a EVGA 450BT for 22 bucks in June 2017! The only drawbacks with desktops is low profile, psu, and cooling solutions (upgrading that CPU Cooler in a must IMHO). When dealing with such smaller form factor PSUs, calculating wattage/TDP for each item in a must.

I wonder how the GT 630 compares to the 9600 GSO which has the same number of CUDA cores

do you ever use v-sync or a frame limiter ? those fps are all over the place

i have an old Pc still working great with an Core2Duo E8400 and a GTX580 and 8GB of DDR3

I run a bit older on my XP rig. I have an 11 year old card on it. Geforce 7800 GS works just fine with the titles I play on it "last AGP card nvidia made iirc". As I tend to stick to titles that don't work to well on Win 7 or newer. And thus it runs everything just fine. Even NFS2SE via 3dfx emulation in 1080p. Can't ask for more. As that is a pain to get working in Win 10 on my modern rig.

Funny thing is, the exact machine also available here, imported from Straya.

The advantage of using these older Nvidia gpus is that they support the drivers after the Wonder Driver (337.50) that reduced CPU overhead so a Pentium 4 can still play some games previously unplayable.

My XP machine is a Phenom x4 9550 @ 2.2GHz with an R7 240 @ 250 speeds... Definitely going to benchmark and see how it compares to this. I'm guessing the R7 will win but the Core 2 Duo will also win.

I have an Intel DG31PR and it might as well be good for retro gaming! Mine has a C2D E8400, 3 SATA II (it may be III) and, well...... IDE PORTS.

Phil what program do you use for showing FPS? FRAPS do not work for some reason..

yea tha GT 630 was badly punned on forums but i knew it could be a great GPU 4 a Windows XP retro gaming machine and thanks 4 tha vid :)

E7200 is a pretty good cpu for late 90's early 00's games i ran on back 07~08 or so

I did a similar project, I upgraded an old Lenovo machine from a pentium 4 3,06 ghz (I reused the old cpu and mobo), and I put inside a machine with pentium 3420 and gtx 750ti low profile I got used for 60€, for the motherboard, I used an Asus h81m-d plus and the intel stock cooler, I also used 2 ssds inside the machine because I dual boot windows 10 and macOS Sierra , and everything works fine, lot of the parts I used for the upgrade where just spare parts I already had, so I only bought what I need to complete the build, that where mainly power supply extension cables and molex to sata power adapters, and a new optical drive bacasse the old one was broken, I'd like to upgrade the ram from my current 4gb to at least 8gb and also to use a more capable power supply, because my case uses tfx power supplies and I am using the original power supply of the machine, but 250 that I gives to me are just not enough and I am having some stability issues, but at the end I really like my little sleeper pc build

Curious if DX10 patch or Unofficial SP4 could help the Crysis Performance.

You could try upgrading the gpu to something like a 730 or 1030 as it's quite often on very high percentages

Phil, an idea for you: HP Thin Client t5730 - it has integrated ATI card, possibility to upgrade CPU, RAM and HDD. Cool little device, albeit slow :)

I bought an Optiplex SFF with similar specs as an XP box! It runs like a champ with an SSD in it (the SSD is a piece of junk I paid $20 for, so I don't care about wrecking it) and I'm looking at getting an HD 6450 (because they're dirt cheap around here). It was really reluctant to take XP, though, and kept booting the Windows 10 install on the SSD before I managed to blow that away. I actually bought it to write floppies and interface with legacy hardware, but I'm now looking for games and other cool things to try on it that won't run on a modern Win10 machine. Any suggestions?

How do you actually capture your old pc systems, i hope i don't have to spend so much, just to get 60fps 1080p quality.

I wouldn't mind a video with the core 2 duo,combined with a newer card like a 650 ti, 750ti ,1030 gt with windows 7 or 10 in newer and popular games like warthunder,world of tanks,world of warships etc.

i made an athlon x4 640 and 9800gt build and a optiplex with an x2 3800+ and integrated nvidia 6150le

If the ram is the same speed (even if they are not) then put in those other sticks, you can do dual channel with 6gb. (2x2gb, 1x1gb)

Ever try to make a Computer as a Video recorder/player...for DVD/FLASH/any input.. It really sucks. Iv seen Security camera systems with 8 cameras at 1080, and running linux..that do a better job then CHEAP hardware.. I tried using a celeron, and it couldnt keep up..even with Linux..

In your opinion, what is the ultimate Windows XP video card? I have a build with an E8600, locked down to a single core since a good deal of what I want to play freaks out when there is a second core... and a Radeon HD 6670 and it runs everything like a champ.

Does replacing old thermal paste really make much difference?

Hey Phil, what about installing Windows XP on a modern-ish machine? I have an Asus P8Z68 that has drivers for XP. I think it would make an interesting video... :)

Why not put the 512 sticks in the vacant slots for another gig tho? Will work fine in dual channel, and possible lower ram speeds doesnt make a noticable difference anyway

Why didn't you leave the other sticks of ram inside? Were they of lower frequency or did you go for XP 32-bit rendering them pointless?

I planned to use mini ITX socket p (775 "mobile") with 4Gb and one nvidia GT710 to do some retro gaming ;)

Need to find SM Bus driver for my HP Compaq 3500 Pro. Any ideas? It has a I3-3220, GTX 750 TI, 4GB DDR3 @ 1600MHz. Would be nice to have that driver, but ya the system works. Might throw 8GB Memory into it to see if it will run quad channel. 1 GB sticks are hard to find in DDR3 1600MHz. A 3770 will probably wake it up. CPU in it now is a Sandy Bridge running at 3.3GHz. Installing 8GB will maximize what Windows sees or allocates. I would say to use 8 GB because 2GB Stick can still be found. Plus different OS can be installed later. I think my Q9650, 4 GB memory @ 1333MHz, and HD 7970 wins over what I am working on. HD 7970 is a beast for 1080p gaming believe it or not. Also, more periode correct. In the end I would say to use a HD 7970 over a GTX 750TI and also maximum channels of memory, over amount is fine on a Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge CPU. Might get better results. I'll have to see if I can find my PSU adapter for the HP Compaq Pro 3500 so I can upgrade the PSU to run the HD 7970 instead of the GTX 750 TI. Only problem with the HD 7970 is fan ramping, it gets hot. Oh wait, Clearance is a issue. Wouldn't Clear CPU Heatsink. I would need a PCIe extension cable to space the card. Interesting though.

Intel hd intergrated graphics will bring back land mass reflection in windows 7 though it misses other graphical elements.

My XP machine is not a standalone machine at all--it's installed inside of my main PC! I gave it an Nvidia GT 740 (EVGA single slot) and two Sound Blaster cards to play with--an X-Fi, and an Audigy 2 ZS.

can i go with a gt 1030 on a system like this. Would it be recommendable or just a bottleneck overkill?

Which high res pack for farcry do you use ?

This is actually rather similar in specs to a spare parts PC that I have at home. It has a Core 2 Quad Q8200, 8 GB of DDR2 RAM and a GT630. It currently runs Linux Mint and MacOS in a Hackintosh setup, but to be honest I don't use it all that much. The GT630 is kinda shit considering it was released in 2012, but for running early 2000's games on Windows XP I guess it's pretty okay.

Intel GMA GPU graphics better inside the CPU? 🥔

I'm retro gaming on Windows XP with this card, 4GB RAM and an Intel Celeron 430 processor.

Is Core 2 Duo is really retro? To me, p4 and before is retro.

How does it record game on windows xp

There is also another CPU alternative: using a socket 771 Xeon processor modified to fit on a socket 775 motherboard. Have one of those in my main rig and works pretty flawlessly. Though, for Windows XP it might be a bit overpowered. About the RAM being cheap, here in Portugal the price difference between DDR2 or DDR3 is almost non existent. Still very expensive.