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Which retro Pentium for Win XP?

EverStaR said:
Thinking about an XP build, but my memory off that era is a bit Foggy, and I thought I might get some really good perspectives on what to look for in a Pentium Retro PC.

What are your thoughts for a Pentium System, highly compatible for games system?

Thanks in advance for your input!

E
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My XP build is an HP Workstation xw4600. Core 2 Duo. It has a Vista business (aka "downgradable to XP") license key sticker on it. So it would still consider as an XP-era desktop, imo.

I made it a dual boot machine, 32-bit XP and 64-bit 7.

There were a lot of Core 2 Duo desktops from Dell in the office of my previous job, with XP license key stickers (not the "downgradable" sticker I have on my HP). So I think Core 2 Duos are era-correct.
 
h2ospa said:
There were a lot of Core 2 Duo desktops from Dell in the office of my previous job, with XP license key stickers (not the "downgradable" sticker I have on my HP). So I think Core 2 Duos are era-correct.
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Agreed. Core2Duo is the tail-end of the XP era, and still firmly in said era for those who refuse to recognize Windows Vista.

Seriously, does anyone ever remember a friend excitedly saying "I'm gonna build a windows vista gaming rig!". Not me :p
 
hunterjwizzard said:
2k3 had the exact same GUI as XP. The only difference I can name is that it had a different "theme" load by default. Otherwise you cannot tell the two apart. I used 2k3 x64 as my workstation up until 2018. Could not tell it apart from my XP builds.
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It did not have the same GUI.

Windows Server 2003 does not come with the themes service enabled and/or installed by default, it also does not have the welcome screen, fast user switching, system restore, messenger and a few other things.

If you installed OOBE versions of Server 2003 and XP, they do not remotely look or behave the same. Can you force one to behave like the other with unsupported modifications and hacks? Sure, but that's not the scope of the discussion.
 
So I think the new machine I got has all the hardware upgraded is nearly done with GTX 8800 and Soundblaster X-fi Extreme. Pretty nice Audio Card, some of my favorite midi's sounded great. the card has some nice sound, it will be fun to compare down the road to the 486 I am revamping. I will get some more ram for it, not that it really needs it as of yet. I did have a bit of a time getting this machine stable though, its running XP SP 32bit and I had to manually update quite a number of drivers to get it all smoothed out. While I do plan to keep it off the network for the most part, I did get modern AV for XP installed and a Melon and Firefox browser that made it easier to go retrieve some things.

On this machine, next up is installing some games and such. Building a USB drive with the things I want to make it easier when I go to install it all.

The Dell new Power Supply should arrive this weekend, so I will see how that goes with one of them and a nicer video card I got out of the machine above. All this is quite a fun journey!

E
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Did you load up Riva Tuner and get the fan on the 8800 turned up to 100%?
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Not yet, but that's a great idea! Thanks!

The new power supply in Dell works great! That machine is nearing completion as well, it has the SB Live in it and a 7950 GT OC for Video. Only single slot video card I had available. I need to try it out after I am done sorting out this new machine. Bought a pack of USB Thumb drives to load up with goodies.

I ordered another power supply and ram for the other Dell. I will have to determine how I will deck that one out. I might see if I can get that other video card in it by modifying the back plate and maybe performing a little surgery on the plastic cover for the cooler. If I do it right it will cool the video card as well.

Different thread for the 2 486 DX/2 66's I am building out.

E
 
So I thing I completed the mod to fit a double wide card into the case, just need the new Power Supply. This required two ugly move to complete. Once I had to cut the cooler vent shield to enable the card to fit in. Next I had to cut the video card outer plastic, so that it would give the final needed clearance for the card to fully seat. Pictures to follow when I have the new PSU installed and see if this all actually works. If so, I will clean it all up and sell it. Might put a GoTek drive in for fun!
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Did you load up Riva Tuner and get the fan on the 8800 turned up to 100%?
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Why is this necessary? It's just putting extra wear on the blower motor and creating a lot of extra noise. These cards are designed to run hot.

If you're concerned about the BGA failure issues on cards from this era, temperature is less of a problem compared to thermal cycling. Keeping the card within a consistent temperature range will greatly increase its longevity vs. just blasting it with air. Going from 0C to 60C is far more stress than going from 60C to 80C. While not practical today, keeping the card powered on 24/7 reduced the stress on the card considerably than turning it off and on every day or multiple times a day.
 
I don't know who told you these things are "designed to run hot", they run hot because of a design flaw.

First off - the built-in fan control code is bugged and will NEVER run the fan the fan above 60%, even if it really, really, really should.

Secondly, blower motors are infinitely replaceable. The cooling solution is the one part of the card that if it fails, you can rig up a new one.

And thirdly, if you are concerned about thermal cycling, going from 0 to 60 slowly and staying there is a lot less stressful than doing it fast. Also less stressful than going from 0 to 80, then going back down to 60 and back up to 80 multiple times as the card's crappy fan controller bumbles drunkenkly about.
 
Would be cool if someone would make some clone video cards and implement some better specs and cooling wouldn't it? But, for this era PC I don't see that happening like it has for ISA sound cards on 486 systems.
 
EverStaR said:
Would be cool if someone would make some clone video cards and implement some better specs and cooling wouldn't it? But, for this era PC I don't see that happening like it has for ISA sound cards on 486 systems.
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I imagine this will happen for at least some cards sooner or later. Patents expire eventually, which is why we have clone nintendos and segas.

I doubt it'll ever happen for anything from the PCIe era since available backwards compatibility is generally accepted as "good enough", but we'll see PCI and AGP clone cards eventually. I know there's already been some semi-clones for voodoo cards using leftover chips. Won't be too long before someone opts to do a new run of chips and make whole new cards.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
I imagine this will happen for at least some cards sooner or later. Patents expire eventually, which is why we have clone nintendos and segas.

I doubt it'll ever happen for anything from the PCIe era since available backwards compatibility is generally accepted as "good enough", but we'll see PCI and AGP clone cards eventually. I know there's already been some semi-clones for voodoo cards using leftover chips. Won't be too long before someone opts to do a new run of chips and make whole new cards.
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Probably a lot of the supporting chips and circuitry can be emulated in a FPGA as well to some degree. Not sure if the main video processor would be a good fit for that though.
 
I don't see the point of such project if it's commercial. Too costly to develop and sell to be used as a replacement component if one is building a period-correct PC. And people with budget and hell bent on period correctness won't buy a hardware emulator card.

Soundcards and sound in general are another beast.
 
EverStaR said:
Probably a lot of the supporting chips and circuitry can be emulated in a FPGA as well to some degree. Not sure if the main video processor would be a good fit for that though.
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FPGA is not just emulation, it lets you build an effective hardware copy of any chip. Check out the "MiSTer FPGA" project for an example. Its bit-for-bit hardware emulation of many retro consoles. Assuming fast enough PFGAs exist, a single card could potentially "become" several different cards. Certainly an interesting project for any willing to take it on.

Zare said:
I don't see the point of such project if it's commercial. Too costly to develop and sell to be used as a replacement component if one is building a period-correct PC. And people with budget and hell bent on period correctness won't buy a hardware emulator card.

Soundcards and sound in general are another beast.
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Well there's "commercial" and then there's commercial. The people making soundcard clones are doing it because they love these cards. They sell them for enough to cover costs and maybe a little extra for their time, but no one is getting rich off such a niche product. The cloned voodoo cards are the same. The cost is entirely about the materials and time.


Cloning sound cards became viable because there simply aren't enough of them around anymore to meet demand. People want to experience these cards, and for some a clone is all they will ever be able to touch.

I think it won't be that many years before we start to see the same thing for PCI and AGP graphics cards.
 
Oh it certainly won't. You mentioned patents and I hope there will be a company that will mine those patents into cheap ASICs.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
I don't know who told you these things are "designed to run hot", they run hot because of a design flaw.

First off - the built-in fan control code is bugged and will NEVER run the fan the fan above 60%, even if it really, really, really should.
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It's straight from Nvidia, on their website. The 8800 series has a TJMax of 105C. They are designed to run hot. The GTX page wasn't archived, but the GT was, with the temp spec. GPUs have been designed with thermal junctions over 100C for a very long time. Should you run it that hot? No, but you can safely.

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
web.archive.org

The bugged fan ramp you speak of only affected some models of cards from some vendors, and it was fixable with modified firmware on some of them. I've had over a dozen 8800 series cards of all types through my hands over the years, and only a small number of them had bugged fan curves that were concerning enough to fix.

Bad fan curves is not a problem that only affected the 8800 series, it has affected cards in every generation. I had an HD5870 and an R9 280X that had bad fan curves. The HD5870 still survives today, the R9 280X died from a PSU taking it out.

hunterjwizzard said:
Secondly, blower motors are infinitely replaceable. The cooling solution is the one part of the card that if it fails, you can rig up a new one.
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If you have a reference card that uses a reference blower, yes. If not, no. You'll be playing the blower wheel lottery, or hours of fiddly surgery to transplant blower wheels on different motor assemblies. Been there, done that.

hunterjwizzard said:
And thirdly, if you are concerned about thermal cycling, going from 0 to 60 slowly and staying there is a lot less stressful than doing it fast. Also less stressful than going from 0 to 80, then going back down to 60 and back up to 80 multiple times as the card's crappy fan controller bumbles drunkenkly about.
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What you're talking about is literally not possible. Even if you crank the fan up to 100% and leave it there, you're still going to have a constantly fluctuating temperature delta between idle and load, and also between different loading scenarios. Games are perpetually dynamic loads that are never the same, and are going to cause temperature fluctuations on the card, 100% fan isn't going to change that.
 
GPU load depends on the game and the CPU/memory bus limitations along with the GPU design. Older games will probably not make a GPU work much, and newer games on an older system could be too slow to feed the GPU enough for full power.

As far as fans go, I have a Gigabyte Radeon HD 7950 OC WindForce edition with 3 fans instead of the reference card blower. The card had a blown trace on the fan power line and when I fixed it the fans are 100% on. While it's not blower loud it is fairly loud and the other copies of the same card I have never go full on fans even in demanding games while running cool.
 
There are some older games that put heavy loads on GPUs when rendering certain effects. One example is Source engine games. If you have any large particle system on the screen, it's going to load the GPU down heavily. Smoke grenades in CS:S or random particle systems in Garry's Mod would load cards to the max while they were on the screen. Same with dynamic lighting.

I remember that I used to have to avoid getting close to those effects in-game, or it'd cause my card to pull 250W and crank the fan to max volume.
 
Unknown_K said:
GPU load depends on the game and the CPU/memory bus limitations along with the GPU design. Older games will probably not make a GPU work much, and newer games on an older system could be too slow to feed the GPU enough for full power.

As far as fans go, I have a Gigabyte Radeon HD 7950 OC WindForce edition with 3 fans instead of the reference card blower. The card had a blown trace on the fan power line and when I fixed it the fans are 100% on. While it's not blower loud it is fairly loud and the other copies of the same card I have never go full on fans even in demanding games while running cool.
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I would concur with that. I've had two 7970's in Crossfire and never had any abnormal fan activity with any game. Always whisper quiet.
 
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