Hardware PC build for gaming on XP.

[Deleted User]

Which part list is it in?

not your part list, i was reading through and saw what ThoD suggested, he was pretty heavily overglorifying what a pentium D can do

 

[Deleted member 388531]

Oh, my bad.

 

[kristianity77]

I had a good look around, and not really wanting to spend more than £200 on the whole PC, I went and got the following off eBay, making double sure the software and drivers are available for XP!!

Intel i5 2500 with 4gb ram and the motherboard combo off eBay which was £90

Gtx 750ti which was £50 off eBay.

That's the main innards sorted. The rest will be pretty straight forward I hope!

 

[ThoD]

not your part list, i was reading through and saw what ThoD suggested, he was pretty heavily overglorifying what a pentium D can do

Considering I used Pentium D mostly for a good 6 years around the XP SP3 time, I don't know what you are talking about. Average TDP was MUCH lower than Quad, with stock cooler it never got to above 70°C on full load for extended periods of time (eg: 6 hours straight) and could both play games at high-max settings or emulate at 60FPS for older systems just fine. Literally had NO issues with it. On the other hand, the Quad series was plain crap, having drivers that caused BSOD, didn't work well with games like the Dead Rising ones or any made with that engine as they constantly stuttered if you turned the settings up even a bit and generally were a mess, reason why it tanked in the market, Quad only got big because of the hype of having 4 cores, until you realized how quickly put together it really was and how little optimization Intel put into it.

I had a good look around, and not really wanting to spend more than £200 on the whole PC, I went and got the following off eBay, making double sure the software and drivers are available for XP!!

Intel i5 2500 with 4gb ram and the motherboard combo off eBay which was £90

Gtx 750ti which was £50 off eBay.

That's the main innards sorted. The rest will be pretty straight forward I hope!

Sounds good enough, if you found them for that price, might as well get them, although if you look for garage sales on old PCs, you might be able to get parts for WAY cheaper, so look for any if they ever happen where you are.

 

[Kwyjor]

but I find with my gaming laptop I pretty much can't get much to work without having to apply fixes here there and everywhere to get older games to work. So I figured it might be a cheap little project to build a machine from that era which will allow me to run say anything from 2012 beforehand at Max settings.

My best advice would be to pick one specific game that you actually want to run and build a machine that targets that game specifically. If you try to build a machine that will run everything, then you will probably spend more time and effort trying to build that machine than you ever will actually playing something. The particular problem is that there are some older games that are very picky about the 3D card and its drivers and you may end up having to apply more "fixes here there and everywhere".

Personally, I have a Pentium D (with a whacking huge heatsink), but I'm actually trying to get a Pentium 4 set up so I can run older Windows 98 games if I really want to. (I used to have an even older machine kicking around, but the Intel 815e chipset is only limited to 512 MB, which really isn't enough for XP SP3 to run comfortably.)

On that note, what's the best way to install XP these days? I was kind of hoping that someone would have put together the ultimate ISO slipstreamed with the idea combination of patches and fixes, but it doesn't seem that way. (There are some hefty unofficial Service Pack 4 packages.) Yes, I know about "POS-ready 2009".