E8600@4.5ghz or Q9650@4ghz for Windows XP reverse sleeper build ?

yup i know, tbh i kinda rage bought it after having tried to remount the aerocool one about half a dozen times without thinking much about it,
it's only a couple days later i realised there was a reason i didn't went with a enermax one in the first place... silly me.


oh well, if it doesn't work i might aswell keep it for a next build, found out the last generation of chipset/cpu supported by windows XP was the X79/4790K,
there was recently a discount on aliexpress on GFX cards and got myself a pair of gigabyte 960 for 65€ each,
the 4790k price is 150€ but motherboards go up to 200€ for a good gigabyte sli enabled one, will wait for prices to drop a bit more i think.

or i also already have a X58a-OC mother board with 3x2gb of 2000mhz corsair dominator ram, the 6 core 980x is about 100€, can be oc'ed pretty well over 4ghz on watercooling,
and should work nicely with the 960 sli according to the bottleneck calculator 2 :

https://pc-builds.com/calculator/Core_i7-980X/GeForce_GTX_960/0dY0Oepn/8/100/

guess i can always get the EP45/E8600 with the 750ti in the older case, the only problem it had was that i couldn't fit the 470 in it but the 750ti should be alright.
can still be a somewhat decent web browsing/HTPC machine, if i'm not mistaken the 750ti should even play 4K movies without problems.

i know it might sound silly to go to such end to build a pc running on a out dated OS, but it's really just about nostalgia from what i consider the golden age of pc gaming,
the only point of making it so powerfull is to be able to really showcase the games in their whole glory,
and also kinda to see what i would have been like to play them on a nasa computer back then

 

yet another update, received the Enermax AIO today, and guess what ... it freakin' fit perfectly

temperature are 10° lower than with the Aerocool one, still have a difference of t° between the two cores tho for some reasons.
now just need to receive both the 750ti and the 960s from aliexpress as the 470 even on idle warm up the top mounted cpu rad.

then i'll bench both the e8600 and the q9650, tbh for single core games 4ghz is already plenty, and even if the 750ti is perfect for games up to 2005/2006,
onward it start to struggle a bit with super sampling on more demanding games. i'd rather be able to crank everything to the max for games up to 2010.

also received the logitech speakers, quality is nothing to write home about but heh, acceptable for the price i guess.

here's a pic of the setup, sorry didn't had the speakers yet

and here a video from the interior of the case :



(ps : yes i know my wallaper is ugly as sin, recently moved and haven't refurbished that room yet, currently being used as storage for my pc junkyard)

last thing i did was split the SSD in two equal partition and install a windows 10 dual boot, this way i can leave winxp completly offline and use win10 to swap files from my NAS whever i need.
might replace it with linux mint later on if ever win10 become too demanding for my little 4gb of ram, or might upgrade to 8 if i ever happen to find 4 matching 2gb sticks.

 

It's definitely a cool build, however you seem to be getting XP on purpose as a supported OS on it, because by the time the rigs like this did exist it was already well into vista/7 era. Higher end core2 duos and quads were already sold new with either vista or 7 and only those who wanted XP had kept it. In my (humble) opinion, this machine begs for Windows 7 to be run on it.

 

oh don't worry i know it's clearly overkill for xp, but as i said the only reason i'm going for XP is EAX games that got disabled with every version after windows XP.
also it run older 16bit era games without any problem, while being much more reliable than previous msdos based version of Zindozs.
not to mention i think it's the microsoft OS that had the longest life and for which people including me have the most nostalgia.

and tbh, by the time i'm done with this rig, meaning after i upgrade to 4790k+960sli, it gonna make even less sense to still run xp on it ... but hey who care about such details ?

again i'm just building this computer for fun, once i'm done i'll probably try to build the ultimate win98se 3DFX pc in a HAF-X or the ultimate MSDOS pc in a chieftec dragon for the lulz
funny enough i happen to still have both right in the corner of the room behind me

 

It would be interesting to know windows xp performance on 4790K. Have you tried that yet?

 

if you want an idea, here's a vid from PhilsComputerLab where he test the 4790 @ stock speed + single gtx 960


keep in mind he's only using 4x anti aliasing, once you go for 2x2 supersampling on top of it, GPU along with CPU usage tend to climb quite a bit.

i checked the prices on ali express for the cpu/mobo and they are still pretty steep :

around 150€ for the 4790k, from 150€ for the mobo to 250€ for gigabyte x79-ud7, not the cheapest by any means, but heh, overkill all the way am i right ?
also i need to fit the x-fi without choking the GPUs.

keeping an eye on the prices hoping they'll drop a bit with time, but will defenetly do the upgrade someday as i already bought the 2 GTX 960 in prevision for that purpose.
might be lucky and find it for cheap on ebay or something.

next upgrade will probably be a new SSD, currently using a 120gb as system drive but turn out 1to would be about enough to fit all the retro games i wanna use,
having pretty much no load times in games would be another great yet cheap upgrade ^^

 

You can get them for cheaper if skipping OC capabilities, even a low end i3 of first generation is likely complete overkill for anything from XP era. However I am looking forward to reading about your build once you do it.

 

well the entire point would be to make it overkill ^^
but funny enough, XP era games can be more demanding than you'd think once you start increasing the resolution up to full hd.
for exemple i reinstalled Unreal Tournament 3, well even if the GPU manage to keep 60fps the CPU is pretty much locked to 100% usage.

also i might be mistaken but it seem like games from the single core era like Return to Castle Wolfenstein are able to spread cpu usage on both core, or perhaps it's it the CPU doing it on it's own,
but same deal once you start enabling supersampling x2 cpu usage get much higher than i thought for such old games.

needless the say the dualcore will not last for long, shame as i had managed to get it stable at 4.5ghz with only 1.25v Vcore...oh well

i might keep it and use it later on a windows 98 build if possible, think i saw it done on philscomputerlabs, it'll only use 1 core but it should shred those 3dfx games pretty darn hard

 

Those performance problems are mostly related to different optimizations on older games. That's why they don't work so well even when they are not generally demanding.

 

older windows 98 era games work pretty great, it's just cpu usage that is a bit higher than i though given they were made to run on old pentium,
making me think CPU usage goes hand in hand with the resolution increase compared to back then.

to be honest if i was to stop to games up to 2008/2009, 90% of them can run 60fps locked, but heh, i'd like some headroom for supersampling and ambiant occlusion.
would defenetly already have swapped for the quad core if it wasn't for the 470 who is warming up my whole build, with the CPU @ 4.5ghz it already idle between 50 and 55°,
74° in burn test and somewhere in the middle while gaming, but far too much for my liking.

should get the 750ti within a week, given the max temp under load is 25° lower at least i should defenetly see an improvement,
hope it'll make enough of a difference for me to get the quad core up to 4ghz once i get the 960.

that being said i start to wonder if i did the right move going with aerocool fans, the look nice for the price, the remote controled 6 fan hub was perfect for my need, but one of the fan is already making noise and need to be sent back (yup, after the dead on arrival aerocool AIO), needless to say my first impression of the brand is pretty meh.

i bought another 3 fans kit as spare just in case, but if i see like a couple more crap out within 6 months i'll know i got ripped.
with the transport fee and the 3rd kit included, the money i spared not going for enermax right away is getting pretty darn slim ...

 

kept tweaking around and found out load line calibration enabled was also responsible for warming up the CPU by not dropping the core voltage along with the multiplier, eh, the more you know...

managed to get the E8600@4.66ghz 1.3v Vcore without it going over 70° under load and i start to feel like the 9650 should be alright with the 960 gtx.
tho looking back i should defenetly have gone for a 360mm AIO mounted on the intake fans like i did on my main build.

also checked what x79 motherboard i should get, and it seem the GA-x79-UD3 should be ok, tho the UD5 have 12 phases power supply and same color scheme as the 960, but 100€ more...
still pondering but i think i will order the 4790k+motherboard early next month.

 

Actually, you can use an GTX970. I had some spare parts around, and my son wanted to play some older games from the XP era. I put together an XP box with items I had around. Parts used I-5 760, Biostar P-55 Mobo, Kingston SSD, 1866 ram, Zotac GTX970, etc. It was a pain to get the XP to load on the SSD, but it works. Forgot how I did it exactly, researched on the internet, and made a disc intergrated with the drivers like you would for raid back in the day.

 

well luckily i had seen LGR video where he had the very same issue and solved it using Nlite to integrate the driver into the Windows XP installation,
now that being said i still have to switch the sata cables to get the XP setup to pick up the SSD aswell, once installed i can swap them back to whatever port i want tho.

i'm suprised the 970 work under windows XP, had read only the 960 were supported but i guessed it was only a driver lock issue. thanks NVIDIA...

atm i'm still running the e8600@4.5ghz+750ti, picked the wrong motherboard for the 4790k so i'm kind of stuck for like a month until the new one arrive (shame) ^^
will teach me to impulse buy hardware at 3am half baked i guess

once finished the next setup should be

Intel 4790k
Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H (hopefully this one will work...)
4x 4gb Corsair Vengeance 1600mhz DDR3 (already had a pair and one more was only 65$)
2x Gigabyte GTX 960 Windforce 4GB (might be replaced with a pair of 780ti)
Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium (might be replaced with a Titanium HD so i can get this one back on the E8600 build)

that being said the little E8600 have been punching pretty high above it's own weight, just finished Warhammer 40K : Space Marine, a game i shamefully missed on release,
and i was pretty impressed to see it and the 750ti keep up with all the carnage happening on screen.

did a quick bench using CPU-Z, and apprently it get about 85% of the 4790k in single thread performance ... using twice as much juice and producing twice as much heat .

pretty impressed with the windforce 750ti aswell, it's dead silent and almost room temperature at stock speed, but can take a pretty impressive overclock and still run at 65° max.
(would defenetly recommand to pair it with a I3 rather than a core2duo tho but hey, where's the fun in making any sense ??)

once overclocked the 4790k should increase that gap quite a bit and not to mention on two more cores+hyperthreading.
the 960 seem to be 50% to 100% more powerfull than the 750ti depending on the games from the benchmarks i found,

so at the very least i should get 25% more cpu power + 50% more gpu power on single core/non sli games (who are already running insanely fast), neat

 

I had a bit of a flurry building retro PCs a few years back, sounds like you're having a lot of similar thoughts that I had.
If I can give you any advice it would be try not to get bogged down with improving it's performance too much. Otherwise you'll never stop and you'll just end up with a modern PC.
There is always going to be something more powerful, just remember what it was intended for.

I ended up with a Q9650 and GTX 285. Then went back in time further and built a system with a Pentium 4 extreme edition and Nvidia 7950GT.
I haven't used the Q9650 PC in over a year now. I found anything that doesn't run on the Pentium very well, runs perfectly on any of my windows 10 PCs.
EAX sound on later XP era games woks fine on windows 10 through OpenAL. It's only the early ones that run perfectly on a Pentium 4 that have difficulty.

Stick with the E8600 and 750ti, anything that doesn't run on that will run fine on a more modern PC.

Also, the X-Fi Titanium HD does not work with Windows XP, there are no drivers available for it.
I made that mistake too.
The best XP sound card is the X-Fi elite pro or the Auzentech X-Fi prelude 7.1
It's a personal preference but I prefer the elite pro, far more neutral in tone, the prelude has far too much bass for my liking.

 

ah, very glad you told me about the Titanium HD, i thought it was in the list of the Daniel_K Support pack but i must have been mistaken.

i did consider sticking with the E8600+750ti, but heh i already had like half the parts for the 4790k build so might aswell make it now while the hardware is still relativly cheap.
also as i said some later XP era games were giving it a quite a big sweat once i started increasing the anti aliasing and details,

not getting rid of it tho, i might use it in a period correct build this time,

i actually happen to still have my xfi elite pro, but being PCI it's been collecting dust for ages,
guess it's a good idea to use it on the P45 board as it still have a handfull of PCI ports (thanks again for the advice )



that being said, would you happen to know if the Elite pro is compatible with windows 98 ?

i had the idea to try to use this board for a 98/XP dual boot, i've seen 98 run on PCI-e on philscomputerlabs tho i doubt compatibility goes up to the 750ti.

i'd like to see if i could use the second PCI-e port to plug an older, compatible GPU, and have 98 and XP use either card even if i need to disable one for each OS.
and if that work, i got a more than 2 decades old Voodoo 2 in it's box just waiting to be used again



also got an idea from linus tech tips to recycle my X58 board into something pretty cool, the 6 cores 980x is quite cheap on aliexpress, same as another 750ti, and i already got 12gb of ram on it.

i was thinking about using Unraid, have a NAS/Plex run on 2 of the cores,
then on top two virtual machines, each using 2 cores, 4gb of ram and a dedicated 750ti,
both running windows xp with their own screen, mouse and keyboard.

the point you might ask ? well playing old school shooters in LAN with just one computer and no network cables needed

as someone who remember remember how much of a PITA it was to bring my whole rig to a friend's place just to play some duke3D and quake together,
it's pretty darn awesome in my book


now don't get me wrong, i know i'm not inventing the wheel or anything, i'm just having fun with old/cheap hardware, and sometimes learn a thing or two along the way
again thanks for sparing me the trouble with the titanium HD

 

Yeah that's it, the learning process is incredibly helpful and it's great fun to play around with high end hardware that was once unobtainable.

X58 is a wonderful platform to mess around with, extremely flexible and tweakable. I was using X58 in my Living room PC up until last year. Would still be using it now if the motherboard hadn't fried . If you can't find a 980x at a good price, see if you can get hold of an X5675. It works in most x58 motherboards, is way cheaper and can overclock just as well if not better.

I don't think Win 9x drivers were ever released for the X-fi series. There may be some way of getting it to work but nothing official.
When I bought the Titanium HD in 2011ish I had two sound cards in my rig, one for Windows 7 and one for XP as I was dual booting (and still am).

 

At this point, x79+server pull Xeon is the best way to go.

At similar clocks, the 1680v2/1660v2 outperforms a 2x x5660 workstation, you get AVX which more games are coming out with by default (or switching to.... like Star Citizen did) and enough cpu lanes for a high end graphics card, several nvme or pcie ssds, etc.

 

With my sensible hat on I totally agree. I have a X79 build myself.
It is a far more viable platform for general use today and has many more useful features such as native USB 3.0, SATA 6GB/s, NVME, instruction sets, better IPC, far higher memory bandwidth, etc.

However, it depends on what your personal aims are.
If you enjoy the building process more than actually using the thing, x58 is a more fun platform I think.
If you're here just to get the best performance for your games, then no, don't buy x58. In fact buy literally anything else as long as it's newer!

 

update, finally received the mobo and got everything together, fired right up
haven't had time to overclock the CPU yet but it does idle at around 37° (was quite impressed myself)

GPU are about the same temp, needless to say compared to the dual core temperature it's pretty night and day.
just overclocked the GPU using the data from the guru3D review, fired heaven and got a very respectable 137fps with 65° max on the top card.
tried spec ops the line in 16xS with all max details, both gpu ran at 65% max with temp in the 50°

a pretty darn great improvement over the dual core build indeed.

so i went to do a complete sdd format and install both XP and windows 10 clean.

had to fiddle around a bit in the bios but managed to get the samsung ssd recognized by the windows XP SP3 install in IDE mode (couldn't find the AHCI driver for windows XP on the manufactuer website), same deal for the network adapter driver once windows was installed, ...

just great, on to a good start

i used a tool called Snappy drivers installer, managed to get the network drivers, from there it found all the other drivers online and managed to get every missing drivers in the device manager.

i went on to install windows 10, had to fiddle a bit more in the bios to turn EFI off completly, from there it finally agreed to install next to windows XP, had the right network drivers right from the get go, all the drivers updated without problem.

here's where thing got a bit more hairy, decided to restart and go back on windows xp to do some more testing, but the keyboard and mouse wouldn't respond anymore. i tried unplugging and plugging them back, couldn't hear the normal USB unplug nor plug sound.

kinda worried i restart the pc, both keyboard and mouse work again in the bios, boot back to windows 10, still working, reboot to windows XP, same as before, not recognized.

i reinstalled everything back again using exact same process, same problem appear.

that's currently the point i'm at, updated the bios just to make sure, didn't made a difference, so i guess tomorrow i'll reinstall/update windows xp step by step and see when the problem arise.

i kinda suspect it does when i install the chipset driver from snappy driver installer rather than from the manufacturer website, or perhaps when i install windows 10 next to it, far fetched but heh,
or lastly some setting i missed into the bios or windows xp or something.

but hey, where would the fun be if it worked right away, m'right ?

i'll post some screenshots and bench tomorrow, probably under windows 10 first but under xp aswell as soon as i manage to troubleshoot that issue.


PS : i'll start working on the X58 project next month, gonna take some time as i've cannibalized most of it for the z97 build ^^ pretty much all i got now is the GA-X58A-OC and the HAF-X+PSU.
as i said i'm gonna recycle the 750ti but i'm gonna need another one, 6x2gb of ram and the 980x.


also as my experience with virtual machine is limited at best, and with unraid absolute zero, i have a feeling i'll get plenty of head scratching (and banging into the keyboard) with that one too

 

yet another update,

done reinstalling/updating windows xp, fully updated, all drivers installed, rebooted a bunch of times, usb is still working fine.

so as weird as it sound, it really seem like it's the installation of windows 10 on top that F something up Oo

one thing i noticed tho, both GPU are recognized but i can't enable SLI anymore in windows xp (when i'm 90% sure it did work prior, and 100% sure it does work under windows 10),

(Edit : might have found why i can't enable SLI, the two cards have different bios, shouldn't be much of an issue to update it but guess what, it require windows 10 )

if all else fail, i'll get another SSD and make two completly separate installation and use EasyBCD to get a Grub based boot menu.

but if anyone have ideas on why it's doing that i'd like to hear them ^^