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Which retro Pentium for Win XP?

hunterjwizzard said:
Definitely a good all-rounder. I'm curious how its possible to boot 98 on a machine like that. Curious in an "Oh! I gotta try that!" way.

You'll want to upgrade the graphics card to an 8800 when you get the chance. Sadly that motherboard does not appear to support SLI. /sad day
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Oh, we will make some potential changes, no worries there! :)
 
Ideal XP machines for gaming are single core Athlon XP or early Opterons/Athlon 64's depending on if you want AGP or PCIE. I do have some late model Core 2's or Pentium 4's with XP as well.

Most games of the era won't use multi cores anyway.

Windows XP Media Center Edition doesn't need activated.
 
So the first upgrade might be a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio SB0790 PCI 7.1. But I may even change the Motherboard since its a new case. We shall see! I am not sold on dual video cards. Someone help me understand why that would be worth the money and effort to find a pair? I recall doing SLI with a pair of NVIDIAs and not feeling like it was worth the extra dollars. Didn't see a lot of software able to leverage it.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Heck, I can run XP on my HP Neoware CA21 thin clients (1 GB memory; 800 MHz VIA Eden CPU. Runs fine--no fan and smaller than a cigar box.
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Like you I am not a gamer. My experience with XP was that it ran fine on a P4 with 1GB RAM. It was terrible on my P-III's with 512K unless I rolled back to SP2. SP3 will not run well in 512K or on a P-III class. For my file "Server" on my LAN I had an IBM ThinkCentre P-4 2.8Ghz 32-bit with 1.5GB ram. Workstations were P-4 2.6Ghz and 1GB RAM. All 32-bit. Ran my business with that for quite a while. But no gaming.

Seaken
 
syzygy said:
I have had a reason over the last few days to break out my Windows XP box Dell Dimension E520. While doing so, I could not resist playing a little "Serious Sam", which was about it for me outside of Chess or Card games.

A help link for registration is here not sure how useful it is though.

Funny, I just can't think of an XP machine as being 'retro', is still seems to be in the "obsolete" category....guess I am getting too old (chronological, not maturational).
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hunterjwizzard said:
Definitely a good all-rounder. I'm curious how its possible to boot 98 on a machine like that. Curious in an "Oh! I gotta try that!" way.

You'll want to upgrade the graphics card to an 8800 when you get the chance. Sadly that motherboard does not appear to support SLI. /sad day
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Which 8800?
 
seaken said:
Like you I am not a gamer. My experience with XP was that it ran fine on a P4 with 1GB RAM. It was terrible on my P-III's with 512K unless I rolled back to SP2. SP3 will not run well in 512K or on a P-III class. For my file "Server" on my LAN I had an IBM ThinkCentre P-4 2.8Ghz 32-bit with 1.5GB ram. Workstations were P-4 2.6Ghz and 1GB RAM. All 32-bit. Ran my business with that for quite a while. But no gaming.

Seaken
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I am not a gamer too, but I game. I always have a game or two that I play atleast couple of times weekly. Back in that age I used to use Windows 2000 SP4 instead of XP, first with G400, and then when I couldn't run games on that anymore, Geforce3 series.

Computer's primary use is developer workstation with digital audio second, and then desktop/games as third.
Never saw benefits of moving to XP.

Btw. appropos MSDOS and later-gen PCs, it were mostly about soundcards. As long as your UEFI emulates BIOS correctly, basics work, and pre-GPU nVidias always had a great VESA core. Today situation might be even better because there are some AC'97 drivers out there.

So when you installed DOS back in the day on Core duo or something alike, you didn't have sound, and you possibly did not have connectivity due to not having supported communication ports.

What I can't google now is availability of USB audio drivers for DOS. That should be quite doable and beneficiary because it covers a ton of devices in standard.
On FreeBSD we had issues with professional PCI card drivers, when they started moving to USB, situation magically disappeared - plug and play.
 
EverStaR said:
Ordered one! Thanks for the lead!, only $49.
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If you can afford it, pick up a second one now while they are still cheap. That way if you do pick up an SLI board later you'll have a set.

Second thing: get Riva Tuner and make sure to max out the fan. A ton of those 8800s burned themselves up because the fan never went above about 60%. I run all three of mine at 100% fan speed no matter whats going on, and it keeps the GPU noticeably cooler.
 
Okay, lol, I will have two dells (between the two I should get one working)! I found a local guy that refurbs these by accident on Craigslist and picked it up on the way home. So it will have the NVIDIA GTX 8800 640MB Card.

The new Dell is configured as follow;

Specifications of the machine are as follows:

Processor / CPU: Intel Core 2 processor

Memory / RAM: 4GB RAM
Hard Drive: 250GB
Optical Drive: DVD
Networking: 10/100/1000 Ethernet Port
Microsoft Windows XP Professional 32-Bit.
VGA
Parallel Port
Serial Port
8 USB 2.0 Ports
Audio In/Out
Microphone In
1x PCIe x16
2x PCI
16.1" x 7.4" x 17" (H x W X D)
I have a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio SB0790 PCI, however, not sure XP Supports that so I will have to see about that. I also have an XFI, might save that for the Gigabyte machine and Win98.

So I will see if I can make one Dell whole and sell and may switch the MB out on the Giga and see where that goes. Then sell off the one I like least.

E
 
EverStaR said:
I have a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio SB0790 PCI, however, not sure XP Supports that so I will have to see about that.
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It'll support it, don't worry. You may have to find drivers but all the X-FI stuff was XP and later.
 
So the memory was what was bad on the first Dell 755, and the General Protection Fault for installing Windows XP was simply resolved by changing the SATA Mode to Legacy back in the BIOS while installing XP. Learned that from the guy that sold me the second Dell. So not the First Dell has XP Pro SP3 on a Core Duo 3,1 and 8GB RAM. I have a Geforce 8800 GTX 640MB in route for that one, was only $50. I have a SB LBX I might drop in there, not sure there are XP drivers for that. Moving along, soon it will be time to sell one of these when its all upgraded and solid.
 
Well, this is interesting on these dells, the PCIe slot is so close to the CPU Cooler you really cant get a double wide card installed without modifying the cooling system. Then, even if you did the way the case is made you still cant get it installed because you would need one more slot cover on the rear to install it. See below, looks like I can only support 75W on the card as well. Its a shame I just cant find a new case for it.

So I cleaned off the heat sync and old thermal paste and put it back together. Bottom line here is I will need a thin single slot graphics card for this machine that supports XP. Any suggestions? The cooling on it is going to have to be really low profile.


20240202_135400.jpg
 
EverStaR said:
I have a Geforce 8800 GTX 640MB
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No such thing as a 8800 GTX 640. The 8800GTX had 768 MB of RAM. The only 8800 series card with 640 MB was the GTS 640 based on a cut down G80 core, it's considerably slower than a GTX.

A GTS 640 is not worth $50.

EverStaR said:
Well, this is interesting on these dells, the PCIe slot is so close to the CPU Cooler you really cant get a double wide card installed without modifying the cooling system.
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Those Optiplex models would fit single slot cards with dual slot coolers if they were under 6 or 7" IIRC. There were some GTX 600 cards that would fit. I wouldn't recommend anything higher because the power supplies in all of those units were IEDs and rife with capacitor plague. I've replaced or recapped well over a hundred PSUs for that era of Dell. The DT ones were recapped because they were proprietary, the MT power supplies were just replaced with normal ATX supplies after snapping the hook off the case so they'd fit. The original PSUs were something barely adequate, like 250 or 300W.

The DT versions of the case had an optional card cage to install full height cards, and those would accept a two slot card if it was short. The downside to that though is the card is directly in line with the CPU's hot exhaust.

You'll never find a case for those motherboards, because they're BTX form factor, the failed replacement for ATX that Intel tried to force down everyone's throat in the mid 2000s to try and deal with their horrific Netburst architecture.
 
There are 8800GTS 320MB cards, 8800GTS 640MB cards, and also the 8800 GTS 512MB which came after.

The last flagship single slot GPU I can recall is the 7800 GTX and those are great for XP.
 
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