The Perfect Windows XP PC? 

Interesting how at each point in time 5-10 years old hardware is seen as "old junk" and usually goes straight into the trash can... But when it reaches 15+ years of age, it's suddenly "retro", "vintage" and cool and valuable again.

My main XP system is a: * Core 2 Quad Q9550 processor * Asus P5K-E Motnerboard * 4 GB RAM * 128gb SSD. * ATI 5850 1GB graphics card. * SB Audigy 2 PCI sound card * Intel Wifi-N Pci-e card. * 2 x DVD burners (Pioneer 218L + Optiarc AD-7200S) * 22 inch widescreen monitor (1680 x 1050 resolution, as was popular in the day) It rips pretty hard for the era of games it needs to run, plus lets me burn DVDs for other systems. I don't have a floppy in it, but can plug a USB floppy drive into it easy enough. You can generally set core affinity for any games that don't like quad core.

When I ran XP as a daily (all the way up to about 2012), my last system had an AMD Phenom x4, 4 GB RAM, and a GTX 700 series graphics. That was a beast. Now, I have rebuilt an XP PC for some 95-XP era gaming, and it's running an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3 GHz, 3 GB RAM, and GTX 950 with 2 GB vRAM. I've also got an eMachines Monster PC running Windows 98 with an Intel Pentium II (or is it a 3? I don't remember), 64 MB RAM, and some random ATi graphics card that I got before building my recent XP machine that was for 95/98 PC gaming. I'm actually trying to start a channel around 95-XP era gaming, and Linux gaming. Not this channel, I created another channel. Just need time to focus on it.

the good old core 2 duo you gotta love those bad boys.

Windows XP Professional 32 Bit SP3 in 2024

Stumbled upon your channel 2 days ago and have been bingeing like a madman lol. Absolutely love these older hardware/retro tech vids as it brings back so many fond memories of PC's I owned in the past especially these core 2 duo and the Pentium 2 vids. Keep up the good work man you have my sub👍🏼👍🏼

For more information on Asus ExpressGate, Cathode Ray Dude did a video on it as part of his Quick Start series.

The first PC I built was in 2006, I was super on top of hardware in this era.

Amazing video tutorial dude, learnt alot about xp on this vid, great indepth tutorial

I've got an old Medion brand XP Pro laptop running all my ham radio software, never misses a beat

In my opinion the "perfect" Windows XP PC (if you are only going to have one) is something with a 3rd generation I7 CPU. Something like an OptiPlex 9010. They are technically built for Windows 7, but are the last generation to officially support Windows XP, and all of the drivers exist and are stable.

Great video as always! just keep it as it is and do some cleaning, cable management and perhaps renew the paste on the coolers!

When vista came out, before sp1- many people reverted to xp and xp was still offered as a factory option, until windows 7 was released

Supportive Fan here ! :)

A system like this was a dream for me back in 2009 when i was still using an Athlon XP system. Sometimes i can't believe how fast time went and how such a nice system from back then is pretty much worthless in this day and age

Wow, that's quite an XP machine! And very professionally assembled too. I would add the Soundblaster Live, but I wouldn't change the 9400 video card

I still have 3-4 XP machines floating around in my basement. Sometimes I'll pull one out and play with it for nostalgia's sake. I had a 9400 GT card for a while and I loved it. It played all the games that I was playing at the time and it did just fine. I actually built a few computers for some coworkers and used the 9400 GT in them, couldn't beat them for the price at the time.

I have three XP machines currently. I had my 11 year old daughter build one as a learning experience. We connect them up and have been playing some Command and Conquer Generals on it. She loves that game and we have a great time.

Built my first PC in mid-2009, which then ran Windows XP for the first 2 years of it's life. After carefully considering performance and price, I went with an ASUS P5Q3 motherboard, 2 X 2GB DDR3 1333, and a Q9550 in a beautiful Thermatake SopranoRS 101 case with a 500W Thermaltake power supply. Topped with a 500GB Western Digital HD, DVD drive, and a Sapphire HD 4850 GPU. Played all the games I was interested in at the highest settings (in 1680 x 1050). Before the lighting struck and ended that wonderful motherboard sometime in 2018, I had maxed the RAM to 4 X 4GB of DDR3 1600, easily overclocked the Q9550 from 2.83Ghz to 3.4Ghz, upgraded the HD to a 1TB SSD, swapped the DVD drive for a Blu-ray, upgraded to the HD 6950 (unlocked to a HD 6970) GPU and Windows 10. A BEAST!

It's nice to see that.

I love those thumb screws as it makes getting in to systems so much easier. Every system I've built, and my retro systems I replaced the normal screws with thumb screws. I've also got some case locks that screw into the case and have a round key lock that covers the screw port. I only install them on my high end systems, and on my Dell PowerEdge server.

Very well presented and detailed breakdown of this Asus motherboard computer. One of my computers designed for Windows XP and currently with Windows XP on it of the same vintage (2008-2009) has the Gigabyte ga-ma790x-ud4p motherboard. I like it as I think it's well-built and still runs well. It has an AMD Phenom II X4 940 processor with DDR2 RAM. I wish it had DDR3 RAM and SATA3 rather than DDR2 RAM and SATA2 but for its day it was the norm. It's a fast-running XP-based system and could be much faster if I used an SSD for the system drive. As for operating systems, I think you'll be limited by the device drivers that work on your hardware. My Gigabyte motherboard is supported with drivers for Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 by Gigabyte. I don't know if Windows 10 will run on it (or run well) but I'm skeptical. XP is a good OS and your motherboard was designed for it so it seems a good choice. On the other hand, taking Vista or Windows 7 for a test drive on it may prove to be worthwhile.

I had the same Asus mobo. That P5Q was a really good board. I recognized it instantly from the heatsinks, but the back panel and the firewire PCI slot addon made it sus from the beginning. Unfortunately this mobo was made too during the capacitor plague and mine got victim of leaky caps. It served as my first NAS at the end of its lifecycle(8Gb DDR2 1066MHz, Q9550).

My retro PC is from 2008 too! It contains: 1. Core 2 Duo E8600 @2.80 GHz (OC to 3.00GHz) 2. Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L 3. 4 GB DDR2 @800 Mhz 4. 1TB Seagate HDD 7200 RPM 5. Nvidia GeForce GT 710 (Was put into it recently in 2023) It was originally with Windows Vista... Upgraded to Windows 7 in 2013...

I have a gigabyte 945-s2c motherboard. I upgraded it to Max core 2 duo cpu and 4gb Ram, with an SSD and a graphic card, Windows 10, and now it's my main pc ❤

Amazing build! I would like to have one of these at home, but atleast I got my Acer Travelmate 240 laptop from 2003 I got for 2 bucks. Even with that old Celeron CPU, I can actually use that for web browsing with Supermium browser and with some ms office suite (2007 for example), its not a bad machine for basic home web browsing and office tasks. Its a great retro gaming machine.

I have a similar motherboard to that in your computer. I want to upgrade it with a Quad core CPU and something like a GTX 750, that would be about the max gfx not to bottleneck performance between the gpu and cpu. Overall you have a great system right there. It will plow through most games and software of the era like a charm.

Well for an XP machine this damn thing is beast, A BEAST!! the only upgrades I would suggest is looking up/into a wifi/Bluetooth PCI/PCI Express Wi-Fi/Bluetooth card and a 52-1 memory card reader..

What a great machine. This comes from a unique place in time when average PCs were finally fast enough to run Windows and anything else, with a satisfactory experience rather than struggling. Definitely worthy of preserving. The ONLY change I would make is clone both drives to SATA SSDs. Those drives have a lot of years behind them and will probably be the first things to fail. So swap in two SSDs and keep it in RAID for fun.

This one brings back alot of memories. Had a very similar system back in the day, which was my first fairly decent pc. Mine had the Asus P5Q Deluxe with a Q8200, 4gb of 1066 OCZ Ram, a 9400GT, 160G HDD and Windows Xp. That 9400GT wasn't too great so I quickly upgraded to a much faster GTX470 and also upgraded to Windows 7. I used that system until the end of 2012 when I finally replaced it with something newer.

What is the interesting thing to be here - is a working "silent" GPU!! Usually, they are toast now,but you got lucky!!

My first pc build was in the summer of 2007. Great times! Had a Core 2 Duo E6320, 2GB DDR2 667MHz, and an MSI 8600GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI-E. Absolutely massive upgrade from my Pentium 3 1GHz machine I struggled with until then. Went straight from Win 2K to Vista and back to XP because Vista ran like crap 😂 solid mid range pc for only $650 back then. Now it would be like $1800...

I think you should put an ssd in it.

Ok, Top of the line graphics for Nvidia that year was the 9800 GTX+ (or the GX2 if you feel like dealing with a dual GPU card) But you can probably put in a midrange 200 or 300 series card before you run into a bottleneck. The 700 might be pushing it, but it'd be interesting to see.

I still have this mobo since 2008, today I use it as an emulation platform. The specs: CPU: Xeon E5450 Ram: 8GiB DDR2 GPU: HD4870 Storage: 64GiB SSD for the system and a 500GiB for games O.S: Windows 10 X64 Monitor: CRT TV connected via S-Video (looks like Ati HD 4000 series are the last with good s-video support).

Ahh another great Vid.. AND I noticed you are original/canon Star Wars fan???

I eventually want to get around to building an unusual XP build on the budget. My plan is to use a GT 730, C2Q (or possibly a Pentium G2140), and a SD to SATA adapter with a SanDisk 256 GB SD card.

Awesome pc and can run any os depending on the use xp for retrogaming, and even w10 or Linux for web browsing

Leave it as is, to enjoy those old retro games on... RA-2...

I have that same board, It's pretty nice. I recommend updating to the latest non beta bios, it fixes some memory incompatibilities that cause crashes with some Kingston ram(like the kit was using) I have a Core 2 Quad Q9550 and 8GB of ddr2-800 in it, it can take 16gb though. Another nice thing is that it supports PCI-E 2.0, so you can put better graphics cards into it and not lose as much performance.

this is fairly close to the stock specs on the work pc my dad brought home when they closed. it even came out around the same time. sure it didn't have a floppy, had 2 gigs of ram, and no surround sound or dedicated video card, but other than that it was pretty close to this. after i made some upgrades to it, it became capable of running crysis at a reasonable fps. even the heaven benchmark runs fairly well all things considered. yes it still works under xp believe it or not although i needed to specifically search for a version that would

Core 2 duo's make really good systems for windows xp. The key thing is they have good drivers and are still available for good prices. I run mine with a Nvidia quadro k620 for graphics. Performance is great it was cheep and the drivers are stable and easy to find.

Top of the line motherboard, built many systems with that reliable and stable board. Nice high quality GPU.

I ran window XP on a first gen core 2 E6300 1.6ghz with an 6600GT graphics card, happy days. IMO, win XP is at the moment the newest O/S which should be considered Retro.

I love systems like these because they will support W10! all it takes it the right processor, enough memory and and a 500 to 1TB hard drive and you're good to go! love the chassis! I just wish these style chassis were still available! too bad the industry went periphial free chassis.... systems don't die anymore, they just get reborn!

A nice computer system. You can use Zorin OS. Version 17 is for newer systems and 16 for older systems. It look like Windows but fast and more options then Windows. Probe it. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands.

Looks like a really nice PC. I would love to see Windows 10 on this because, if it is possible, it would allow a huge amount of possibilities. Like, the ultimate PC. And, put so-called "modern" PC's to shame. Also, it's so clean!

wow all that hardware for XP.... it's crazy I'd have loved that system back then. I'd keep this system as is.

I think a dual-boot system makes sense. I'd keep XP, maybe add a Linux distro like Ubuntu. It just depends on how you want to use it.

Definitely looks like a well-rounded system for whatever path you take. This could probably run modern Linux & do modern web browsing! 😉

Also depending on the cpu you can still use supermium that is a chrome fork for xp and mypal one of the Firefox forks for xp

You can activate Win XP and Vista over the internet after installing Legacy Update so no need for telephone activation anymore! Here where i do live, there is something gone wrong with the telephone activation anyway. The audio is somehow corrupted etc so cannot hear the numbers for installation id. just BEEP comes right on some of the numbers :D

Cable management was not a thing back then. Yes I would know, because I was there :-)

...👀 Looks cool.👏👏👏 ... also for the algorithms.

I'm collecting some ddr2 systems first for xp vista compatibility and seven later because the video card is still cheap and you can do sli.

This machine might be a good candidate for a multi-boot setup. The trick is to install each OS on a separate storage device, install Linux last, it will detect Windows installations on bootloader installation. You could try an older Linux from the time like Ubuntu 8.04 LTS or 10.04 LTS (or the Linux Mint based on those (5 Elyssa; 9 Isadora)) with the proprietary NVidia driver from back then. And a modern one like Fedora 39 with the open source driver (it's pre-installed). Maybe a newer Windows too for good measure, but Linux last so it can detect that. 😉

Core 2 Duo / Quad is perhaps overkill for Windows XP. At the moment I am building a Pentium 4 (Socket 478) I plan on using for retro Win XP applications and can't wait to finish the build. One question though. Is MS-DOS also included in the Windows XP installation or should I configure a dual boot for that?

My perfect xp pcs are a phenom II x4 965 at 4.25 ghz on a msi 970 gaming and radeon hd 4870x2 next to a xeon 5470 at 4.4 ghz on a asus striker 2 formula and a geforce 9800 gx2. Express Gate is a linux environment integrated in the motherboard. Maybe cool to take a look. Yes a gtx 700 series introduces too much of a driver overhead. That cpu will do good with 8800 gtx though.

A fine donation.

I have a dell workstation laptop that has a core 2 duo that came factory with xp pro...nice machine there

Had some nasty tearing in Doom 3 with that card. Probably could set the options to vsync and fix that though.

An X58 system from 2008 would be the ultimate XP PC, because it was pre-7 (most people ditched XP for 7, but most people stayed on XP when Vista was the newest) and the i7-920 was a huge jump from the Core 2 stuff...

My secondary PC is an Intel Core 2 Quad, GT710, 4gb of DDR2 ram and two 128GB SSD. I have installed Windows XP, Vista and 7 on one SSD and the other one runs Windows 10 LTSC. You could do something similar to what I have and have multiple OS installed, maybe replace Vista with Linux.

I have a old Core Duo macine with XP Pro, E8500 CPU, Asus dual fan 750Ti, 4GB DDR3 1600MHZ memory, Floppy drive, DVD multi drive, Creative Audigy 2 value PCI sound card, on a AsRock motherbaoard, MATX. System if fast. Have a Smsung 1TB SSD for a boot drive. Should be a nice reliable system for me. I also have on the other exteme, Ivy Bridge I7-3770 CPU 16GB Corsair Vengance memory at 1600MHz mainly because I left it in the board. AMD HD 7970 GPU Creative RX 5.1 PCIe sound card This one is a beast for XP. As for your system, 700 series GPU might work, You can run all the way up to 980Ti on that thing. Drivers are better on AMD HD series GPUs. New Nvidia drivers don't allow for proper aspect ratio on wide screen monitors.

I have a custom built Windows XP PC with these specs: MSI P35 Neo Motherboard Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 2.00 GHz Processor Transcend 4 GB of DDR2 RAM (2x2 GB) Western Digital 500 GB SATA HDD nVidia GeForce 8600 GT 256 MB Pioneer DWR-111D DVD-RW Drive Sony Floppy Disk Drive Chieftec GPS-350EB-101 A PSU APEX PC-115 (Beige/Blue) Case

My XP super system is an Intel Xeon E5-2667v2 on an Asus P9X79 with a GTX 650 and multiple SSDs, I know its overkill but it was also destined originally to dual boot W11 for use as a streaming PC until I saw the cpu was still too weak for OBS at a decent quality

The other thing I would really suggest for this system is a CPU upgrade. Q9650 would be niiiiiiiice... add two more cores and get a modest bump in single-core performance. And the 1333MHz FSB. Probably more cache per core too, I'd have to check the specs. It's funny, the person who built this PC did the same thing I did back in the day - high-end motherboard (mine was less high-end than this one though), but relatively low-middle-end processor by comparison. Easy to upgrade 15 years later thanks to the miracle of eBay :)

My Windows XP PC is a: Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33GHZ Gigabyte G31M-ES2L Motherboard PNY Verto NVIDIA 9600 GT Sound Blaster X-Fi Extreme PCI 4GB DDR2 800 Ram 250GB Samsung Spinpoint (OS) 320GB Western Digital Cavair Blue (Games) Sata DVD Burner Floppy Drive Thermaltake 430W Power Supply Fratcal Design Core 1100 Dell E1908 19" 1280:1024 Monitor Overall, nice system. If anything I would replace the power supply because Codegen power supplies are not very reliable and are built pretty cheap.

I would love to see the latest Debian Bookworm with the XFCE desktop running on here with Google Chrome. Or maybe even Kali Linux.

Yeah, I think that I’d take my chances with a SFF Optiplex 745.

Still use a i5 2500 for old Windows XP games and it's really fast for games 1998-2014 lol.

Nice machine that's got so much room for activities! As it is, for retro uses it's already very capable, while also being ready to be made even more perfecter with being upgradable to the max thanks to that sweet Asus motherboard as a foundation. With a multiboot configuration alone, the answer to what OSes to install on this system is: Yes!* Then there's throwing in SSDs & big HDDs, changing up the processor to Core 2 Quad, all sorts of graphics and sound cards like GTX 750 Ti's, ATI HDs, Live!'s, Audigy's & X-Fi's at will. Also more RAM & beefier coolers for overclocking. Also, drive bay options too! *(Although 10 & 11 isn't so doable anymore since Microsoft moved their codebase for Windows Store apps to SSE 4.2 with the latest updates, which effectively means that essential everyday apps like Windows Photo Viewer, the Calculator or Paint no longer works with Core 2, which maxes out at SSE 4.1, depending on which Core 2's in there. Still XP, Vista, 7, 8.1, Linux, plenty doable still).

A Nascom 1 was my first computer, it would be worth a lot of money now but after moving a few times things get thrown away instead of being put in a box in the attic.

I need to pull it back out again to finish it, but my XP rig is insane overkill, being a Asus Sabertooth Z77 board, i7-3770K, 16GB DDR3-2133, 512GB SSD, and a EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Classified 6GB for graphics (of which only 4GB of the 6GB vram is seen by windows xp) So yeah, it’s a ridiculous machine. Hoping one day to get it finished, but I’d like a more airflow-focused case for it that still has a DVD drive, I rebuilt it into a different one than what was shown in my prior videos, and thermals are poor, so I’ve held off for now until I make my mind up on what I want to do with it.

if you adjust your FSB to 333 and core voltage to 1,3625V you can run your CPU at 3,33Ghz no problem with this board. I actually have one of these motherboards and pretty much have my OC PB with it getting a CPU to run over 150% of it´s stock speed and had a GTX260 and XP on it. However being Asus this specific board can be sooooo temperamental and flaky when it feels like it for no obvious reason but it is worse when you want FSBs above 1600mhz so I don´t think you would notice that many problems with 1333 but mine gives issues out of nowhere every now and then even on lower speeds. I used mine with a Raid 0 configuration and used it for playing music in my old garage before I moved out and it mostly worked. I suggest you try running it overclocked because the gain you get is absolutely insane and it probably even work with the stock cooler too. but I recommend one of the bigger anyway.

“Heat pipe”

Great✌

Motherboard is a n ASUS P5Q I have the exact same board in my Vista machine. Running a Q2Quad CPU

Swap out that codegen powersupply, they tend to explode & kill anything that's on the 12v rail.

Mostly a very nice machine, but I think the GPU does disqualify it a bit from being the "perfect" Windows XP box ;-) A 9400 GT was really more of an Office card when it came out, as also indicated by using DDR2 instead of GDDR3 like all cards from the 9500 GT up to the 9800 GTX. Nvidia Cards come with Windows XP drivers all the way up to the GTX 780 Ti or GTX 950. Even getting something like a used GTX 750, which still comes with no need for PCIe power, and outperforms the 9400 GT by roughly 3000% would be an enormous upgrade for this machine, and can probably be done for around 10 to 15 of your favourite currency units. Edit: Just realized that I randomly stumbled over your Video, and don't actually know if you are focused on Gaming like most Channels I follow. Maybe you are entirely happy with an Office classe GPU for your own needs, in which case kindly ignore my irrelevant ramblings ... Edit2: Continued to watch the video, and you brought up the question yourself. So yeah: Definitely go for something along the lines of a GTX 750. I'm curious about the card you quickly showed, because a GTX 700 doesn't really exist, according to Nvidia / Wikipedia? Anything from a 710 to a 780 Ti, but no 700 ... And the 780 Ti marks the absolute top-end of what an XP PC can achieve, but it's probably overkill, and you'll have to check if the PSU will be happy with that many PCIe-Cables being required. It didn't look like it to me at first glance ;-) A GTX 950 with a single 6-Pin may be a good alternative, or maybe a 760. But honestly, the 750 is generally more than enough for anything that you really want to run on a Windows XP PC and a DVI-connected monitor. Anything that wants more GPU power probably loves a bigger screen as well. Plus the cost of a used 750 doesn't turn the free PC into a money-sink immediately.

GTX 960 970 980 with supported drivers and Core2 Extreme...best gaming for XP.

A q9550 cpu would be nice in that system 🙂

What keyboard layout is that?

Damn, that's almost my old box, which was my daily driver for about a decade or so... The gfx card will hold you back, that's for sure, had a 9600GS and even that wasn't all that much. If you have anything better, it's worth it. You can get a bit more out of the 7300, 2.9-3.0 should be easy, anything over that might need a non stock cooler. The P5Q was a bit "touchy" as far as RAM goes, if you loaded all slots, but... XP is limited to 4GB so shouldn't be too hard hitting at least 3Ghz on a 2x2GB. p.s. i still got it in a box (mobo/cpu/ram), even if i don't have a use for it, it just seemed rotten to throw it in the bin...

It's got a floppy drive it's definitely retro.

My main PC has Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, a Core 2 Quad Q8300, 4GB DDR2 RAM and a 256mb low profile Radeon HD 3470. Need a GPU upgrade, but I guess it's good for the rest.

very nice build, but actually changing the graphics card to the Geforce 700 series, i think will not give to xp a lot more, because already the gt 9400 it's a direct x 10 card :/ and xp can only use up to dx 9, thing will change if go to windows 7 than that card will be i nice upgrade for that cpu, i had a similar system, in my house. Cpu: intel c2q 9400 M/B: ASUS P5G41T -LX with broken audio integrated chip :( (but working fine without audio) RAM 4gb ddr 3 1333Mhz, VIdeo card: AtI radeon HD 5670 1gb (DX 11 Card) with a little 160gb sata drive recovered from another pc i had test with windows 10 but after the latest update it was too slow, probably 4gb are not enough for the new win 10 update :( than i think the best os for that will be windows 7 or some linux distro to get the most updated os, to use on the internet. NIce to see this old system still up and running after all this year :)

its a very good xp machine , however ive found haswell ,ivy and sandybridge i5 xp systems with terrascale cards like a hd 6950 or 6970 radeon card to be the ultimate windows Xp systems , 4 cores does not break compatibility with old games and for some reason i get more older games to run on these systems than even my core 2 duo or quad xp systems . ive found 4 cores is the cutoff though when you try like a i7 2600k etc then several things act up in xp so i found i5s from these eras to be the ultimate sweetspot . i personally would use your system for a time capsule windows xp system for late 90s to mid 2000s games , or even try windows 2000 which it would be a ultimate system for 2000 if the chipset has compatible drivers for it

One comment: if you want to install a nice sound card, you want a SoundBlaster X-Fi or, even better, the PCI-E X-Fis. Those are the period-correct Creative cards; I think the PCI X-Fi came out a few months before the original 65nm C2Ds in summer 2006. The SoundBlaster Live is... well, almost a decade older than any of the components in this system. You had multiple generations of Audigys in between, too, but for a lateish XP machine like this, X-Fi is the way to go.

If you want to game with this machine, then replace the 9400GT. Those were pretty weak even back then. A 9800 GTX is what I would add if you want to keep it more period correct. But a GTX 750ti would make that system perfect for XP gaming.

I build a machine with windows xp on it. Core 2 Duo E6600 paired with an GeForce 8800 GTS. I have yet to find a game from the time it doesn't handle. Might upgrade to the GTX and a Core 2 Extreme QX6700 or X6800 eventually. But I wanna keep it in 2006. Ah yeah, and a Asus P5N32-SLI Deluxe of course. For the ultimate 2006 high end experience.

My Windows XP machine is running a Core i5 2400, 16 GBs of RAM (although 32 bit) and an AMD HD 7850 OC.

This is exactly like my brother's desktop PC configuration, and still the best! But my brother uses ABIT IP35P motherboard, not from ASUS.

Test video cards and XP games. Power may be a factor for video card choice.

I think the ivy bridge processors are the best windows xp machines

My dell workstation is now working as it should

What A Sweet XP Computer . . . 🙂 I Will Take XP, XP-Media Center, 7, And 7 Media Center, Over 10 And 11 Every Time . . . :-)

My XP box is based on a AMD Phenom X3 at 2.4 GHz. Should have 2GB of ram and a Nvidia GTS 250. It had a GT9500 previously. All based on a MSI Mainboard that has a beta BIOS on it that does not on the MSI website. Reminds me to dump it for the Retroweb when i have some time. Yes. Mine boots in AHCI mode! And it is in a silver case. I keep my Core2 Duo on Windows Vista, thank you very much! How is the SMP Windows 2000 box doing? I just repaired mine 2000 based laptop. The solder of the power jack was cracked. And no that RAID is not hardware based. It is all smoke and mirrors in the driver & firmware. Look up "fake raid".

My xp machine runs a Asus ROG G73SW Laptop 2nd gen i7 took off POS 7 and installed xp Mce 2005 gtx 440m with 4tb ssd 16gb ddr3 ram xp Mce 2005 Best System would be a 4th gen i7 Gtx 960. XP and still be Activated online no Telephone required Just activated today. Your System will also support Windows 2000 Which is what I would use on a core 2 duo.

Leave the system as is, but change the graphics card to the one you showed in the video. By the way cool memories from seeing quake 4 or is it doom 3 ? , they very simular.