How To Build A Windows Xp Computer

Earlier in October, I blogged about building an athlon win98 PC which immune me to replay Quake ane, 2, and iii on original hardware. It is fourth dimension to move on from Windows 98 and accept the leap of faith, from DOS-based Windows operating systems, to 1 of the most popular Windows flavours of olde: Windows XP, released in 2001. XP was indeed a bit special becuase it was supposed to replace both Windows Me for "dwelling house users" and Windows 2000 for "profs" (although out of frustration, I ended upwardly working with NT-based systems more oftentimes than DOS-based). WinXP's legacy only increased due to the unstable mess of its successor, Windows Vista.

The classic Bone has had an extremely long lifespan, being discontinued in 2008, and having had the luxury of three officially released service packs. Generally speaking, there are also 3 "WinXP era" PC builds to be put together:

1. Early on WinXP (2001): 512 MB SD RAM, Pentium III/Iv 2 GHz, GeForce 3/4 AGP
2. Mid WinXP (2003): 1 GB DDR RAM, Pentium Iv three GHz GeForce FX AGP
3. Late WinXP (2006): 2 GB DDR2 RAM, Core2Duo 2 GHz, GeForce 8800 GTS PCI-E

Technology evolved rapidly (as usual) during these times: from SD to DDR, from single to dual core, and from AGP interfaces to PCI Express in 2004. Since I take a fairly powerful Win98SE build with 512MB SD RAM, I am more interested in era two and three. Dorsum in 2007, I completely redid my gaming rig, focused on noise reduction. I slowly but surely hated the noisy stock Athlon fans and had discovered silentpcreview.com and their first-class community forums. Based on silence earlier power, I put together a lovely horizontal desktop PC with a sleek looking Antec case.

So… Which specs?

In 2007, I had only begun to work, so I was still on a budget. The Core2Duo CPUs were condign mainstream and pushed out unmarried cores for expert, while the GeForce 8800 GTS was the summit of the line if y'all wanted to push those frames per second to the limit - including the excess noise and estrus generation. Since I wanted silence, I got a fanless passive 8600GT - a mistake, since in my microATX case I couldn't go rid of the oestrus. The GPU easily peaked towards eighty°C, non something I was comfortable with. I ended up adding another fan between the graphics card and my Boob tube card, losing two more slots.

GeForce 8600GT (left) and Radeon HD5570 (right).

When I rescued the PC from a dusty closet earlier this month, I went over the options again. I had spare parts lying around from a more recent 2012 Core i5 build, and ultimately decided to swap graphics cards. The AMD Radeon HD5570, as you can see from the photograph to a higher place, is a lot less bulky:

• It has a HDMI output port (Non very WinXP-ish but hey, it's there);
• It's a single-slot menu and my case is modest;
• Information technology's much more powerful (one GB DDR3 VRAM??), and much more free energy-friendly.
• It's gratis…

The biggest disadvantage is the whiny tiny fan that loves to make a LOT of noise - not exactly what I was aiming for. A 5V molex mod luckily shut information technology up. Also, buying a 8800GTS would force me to upgrade my 350W PSU. The full build looks similar this:

• Intel Core2Duo E6550@two.3 GHz
• MSI G33M MS-7357 DDR2 micro-motherboard, PCI-E 1.0
• 2xane GB Geil Dual Aqueduct DDR2-RAM
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 RPM 320 GB HDD
• AMD Radeon HD5570
• Integrated sound and network ports (I might change that someday)
• Antec NSK2400 HTPC Case Silent
• Coupled with the awesome Dell UltraSharp 2007WFP xx" broad-screen IPS monitor.

I'g not too worried most the retro-correctness "level" of things inside the instance, only the HD5570 is an $fourscore entry-level bill of fare from 2012, so it's non likewise unbalanced. A few days ago, I bought a Core2Duo E7400@two.8 GHz for only 5 EUR but sadly my motherboard refused to have information technology as I cannot seem to go past POST with it installed in the socket 775 holder. Oh well, the difference won't be groundbreaking.

Installing the core and mounting the cooling cake.

Every single fan inside the case has been modded: 7V for the 350W PSU and both Nexus Silent 120mm orange fans, and 5V for the tiny AMD thing. The CPU cooler was mounted with a silent 80mm Bapst fan. The issue? The GPU fan is still the noisiest! Nevertheless, Heat dissipation is skillful enough. The Nexus fans can't reach the back of the PCI-East cards so the passive 8600GT was never a good idea. The Radeon peaks to lx°C with a small 5V fan, nonetheless mode below unsafe levels.

Performance

Simply put: it's great. Until your heart desires playing The Witcher 2 on a decent resolution with medium settings: the game runs relatively smooth simply doesn't go beyond 18FPS. Still, for such a system, information technology'due south proficient plenty for me. Looking at the minimum specifications of the game, it seems that CPU/RAM is the bottleneck here. Whatsoever - virtually games I will be playing will exist either early on to mid winxp-era games anyhow. Unreal Tournament 2004? +100FPS. Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield? Capped at a comfortable 60FPS. Age of Empires III - a game I somehow never managed to run? +60FPS. Neverwinter Nights two struggles running smoothly, but that'south due to the sluggish engine implementation.

Age of Empires Iii, everything maxed, on 1680x1050: higher up 60FPS.

Even DScaler iv.x coupled with my trusty Pinnacle PCTV Rave PCI Boob tube-Card works like a amuse, connecting the Composite output of my GameCube to the system. That's how I played panel games in 2003… Fortunately, nowadays we can safely supervene upon a blurry mess with razor-sharp pixels outputted by FPGA-powered projects like Carby or the EON GCHD Mk-II adapter. That means I moved my trusty silverish GameCube to a newer HDMI-enabled screen. I might try HDMI PCI-E capture cards side by side in this build, but the motherboard is merely capable of PCI-Eastward 1.0 speeds (250 MB/s per pin instead of PCI-E 2.0'south 500 MB).

After installing some games and tweaking Windows a bit:

The WinXP Service Pack iii System Backdrop with a cold GPU.

So that'south information technology, now I own a 486 DX2-66 DOS 6.22/Windows 3.11 PC, an Athlon Windows 98SE PC, and a "newer" late era Windows XP car! I had to completely reorganize my office infinite to adapt all three computers including a newer screen and infinite for my work MacBook - merely information technology was all worth information technology! Peradventure i day I volition be brave enough to take photos of the infinite and upload it to Reddit'due south Retro Battle Stations.

Oh, and never install Windows XP on a hard disk that already contains a Linux distribution. Microsoft installers honey to overwrite the Master Kick Record without request…

Source: https://brainbaking.com/post/2020/10/building-a-core2duo-winxp-retro-pc/

Posted by: mileyclus1971.blogspot.com

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