Even more exotic Windows XP build

Well Y'all seemed to like my post of the rebuild of the other crazy XP build. I have something even crazier cooking right now. It's taken a long time (spring of 2022) but I've slowly had my eye on ebay and waiting to get finances in order. All the stars Aligned and I finally have the ultimate Intel X79 motherboard and I plan to dual-boot Windows XP and Windows 7 on it. It's primary use will be XP gaming though. So this will be the "Ultimate and final" Windows XP build I'm ever going to have.. and quite possibly the fastest ever XP build. I'll post the build log here I suppose and post some updates if y'all want but I figured I would share here.

The motherboard I ended up with is the MSI X79 Big Bang Xpower II. Right now I have two CPU's for it: I7-3820 and a Intel Xeon E5-2696 V2. You can look em up in google but I will summarize:

I7-3820: 4 cores, 8 threads, Sandy Bridge, locked multiplier of 3.7 Ghz, I currently have it stable at 4.8 Ghz & Memory at quad channel DDR3-2111.

Intel Xeon E5-2696 V2: I can lock the multiplier to 35x (but it only seems to run 3100 Mhz, not sure and I will have to fiddle with that later). It won't overclock (Sadly, even in this board) and only runs a maximum ram speed of 1866 Mhz.

I will be doing some "internet reviewer style" testing of games and synthetics and benchmarks (even in-game benchmarks) to compare these two CPU options. You would think the quad core at 4.8 Ghz would be faster for gaming but it only has 10MB L3 cache vs the 30MB L3 cache on the Xeon and I saw the Xeon doing roughly +80% faster L1 Cache in AIDA64's benchmark already in early testing. So I want to do extensive testing and figure it out. Right now this is a mess of a system set up on a "test bench" that is a motherboard box with wires everywhere because I'm waiting on a VRM waterblock to arrive from The Czech Republic so I can do a final build into the big computer case where that other system was. Also right now I'm testing it in XP with a Dual-GTX-295 / Quad-SLI Setup just for playing around and testing. I did use a random windows 10 install for initial testing and overclocking with this system and now tonight I put XP on it for some "Real testing". This is the last and fastest system made by anyone that is "Fully Windows XP Compatible with native XP Drivers" by the way.

I might some day get a I7-4960X for this system instead, try and OC that to the max and use that. But right now these two chips are what I'm dealing with because the I7-3820 was $10 on ebay used and the Xeon was $35 used. So these are what I'm starting with.

 

Some images.


Current status on test bench so I can change hardware quickly and easily to try different things before the "final build".

That's a GTX 750 Ti in there with a radon heatsink/fan on it. I come up with some weird things. It's just for testing.


System is running XP. I'll change the registered name and company later. I was just lazy and typed in something random when customizing the ISO to install from with n-Lite.

 

I forgot to edit last night: I ditched the Quad-SLI / GTX 295's for the 750 Ti for testing after realizing that I can't turn on Quad-SLI in WindowsXP for some annoying reason, even though the cards are supported in the driver.

 

Nice XP system. Aahh the days when I used to have the patience for building my own PC and mixing/matching components. My hats off to you!

 

After talking with some friends and some googling I finally found a game that has a built in benchmark function and supports dropping down to 640x480 so I can test CPU performance properly. And here's the results:

This is the 12 core xeon chip @ 3.1 Ghz


And here's the overclocked I7-3820 chip.

Summarized the results are:
+72% - Minimum
+76% - Average
+80% - Maximum

For synthetics I used 3DMark 2003, the results from that are here: https://www.3dmark.com/compare/3dm03/6554584/3dm03/6554603

So now I know the way forward with this system: Try and buy a cheap Ivy Bridge / 4000 series unlocked processor, clock it as high as it will go and then that will be the final version of this system. For now at least. Maybe in several years when used 4960X's drop to < $50 I might consider one of those but for now this should do. I'm mostly waiting on parts and then I should get on to "final build" of this system in a few weeks. If anyone wants me to run some tests for them in XP with the I7-3820 you're welcome to ask and I can do it and post the results.

 

Other updates about this build: I have a shipment notice for the VRM water block in email today so that should be here in 1-3 weeks. And I managed to score a I7-4820K CPU off ebay last night for $16.24 shipped, unlocked ivy bridge chip so we'll see how that goes. I'm hopeful with this system to have a 5+ Ghz Windows XP rig again based on Ivy Bridge. I had one with my Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 system many years ago and I have missed that a lot.

 

Alrighty finally an update. I have been trying to buy some dirt cheap used processors for this system off ebay and I've had bad luck twice then good luck. I bought an I7-3820 processor for $8 on ebay and for some reason it died within about 5 days of me having it here during testing. Then I bought an I7-4820K processor for $16 and that died in about a week. Well both of those didn't "die" they still work.. they just don't overclock anymore and I need that clock speed for single-threaded XP games. So finally I picked up a Xeon E5-1650 processor. 6 cores, 12 threads with hyper-threading. It was only $12 shipped and I finally got lucky with this one. It overclocks a lot to 4838 Mhz and (so far knock on wood) It's been fine for about 2 weeks on the test bench playing with it and seems to be perfectly fine. So that's what I ended up with. See here:


And seeing as this is stable I started the process today of disassembling the test bench and working on building it into a computer case, the same as the last XP case. If I haven't said it already this is not a "Beauty Build". It's some random parts that I have left over from other water cooling systems and whatever I could find cheap on ebay. Like this 4 x 4GB DDR3-2133 ram set I found on ebay for $25 shipped that happens to run at 2205 Mhz just fine. I'll embed some smaller versions of the photos here in the thread and then post a link underneath each one to a larger version you can view for all that zooming if you're interested.


https://i.imgur.com/yO6XKSW.jpg


https://i.imgur.com/LldHFsS.jpg


https://i.imgur.com/MuK1DI4.jpg

This is not going to be just an XP rig. Because this system supports two 16x PCI-Express slots at full speed 16x-16x I plan to dual-purpose this system. It will run Windows XP on two SSD's in raid-0 on the intel chipset using the Sound Blaster X-Fi add-in card (not the onboard.. that's a lie, it doesn't have X-Fi onboard, much to my sadness) that I'll add later and the GTX 780. Then I plan to put a modern video card in there and boot to a different SSD for windows 10 and with the wheels I will want to wheel this into the main room and use it to watch movies on our new 4K HDR OLED we just bought on Black Friday 2022. Yes this is a very old case I've had since the early 2000's and I modified it and bolted in some caster wheels from harbor freight and now it's mobile.

I'm having a lot of body problems lately (muscle weakness, severe chronic back pain, etc) so this build will be going slow with a lot of time between updates. Although probably faster now that I'm done testing, know it's stable, and getting close to being able to use it as a real computer.

Also it took me nearly a week to track down drivers for and research how to get XP installed on two SSD's in RAID-0 on the Intel chipset. I was successful and it works. In the process I did find out that Intel's X299 platform is supported in Windows XP with modified community drivers from the WinRAID forums and I even found someone that wrote working NVME drivers on XP and outlined a process to get XP installed, running, and booting from an NVME drive ... !!!!!!!! That's all way in the future as those parts are still pretty expensive to me today. Maybe in another 3-4 years I'll upgrade this system again and figure out how to get XP running on an X299 system with an NVME drive. That would be awfully sexy. This system already is pretty damn insane that I got XP working on it and I love this already.

 

Water cooling. Always wanted to do that someday, when I got older and wasn't poor anymore. Now that I have a decent job, processors are so efficient (like 0.13 um instead of 160 um) that they run pretty much silent with the stock fan at all times lol