Exotic Windows XP Build

That's a cheap chinese knock-off / off-brand motherboard. In general most of those boards are to be completely avoided and never used for any reason. They are not stable. They crash a lot. they miss features of platforms (quad channel ram only running single or dual channel, CPU's don't have overclocking or turbo boost, etc). Machinist is not a real motherboard brand. I would strongly suggest you *NOT* spend money on those. You would be sad if you did. Besides all of that one of the big reasons for using Intel's X79 system is that it has 40 PCI-Express lanes from the CPU. If you use that motherboard you only get access to 21 (16x GPU slot + M.2 slot @ 4x + 1x slot). Which would be really silly to intentionally handicap a platform like that for no reason.

 

I bought these cheap Chinese lga 2011 just for mining. They have 5 x8 lane full length pci-e slots. But gaming is way different than mining. And they only support single channel memory.

 

And they look so tempting with the low low prices and supposedly rich feature sets. To find motherboards like them from reputable manufacturers is very expensive.

 

And it's a typical case of "You get what you pay for". Most of the time when something is cheaper than "The real thing" it's cheap for a reason. This is also why I went with P67 + 3570K for my XP build in this thread. As I stated before: For a gaming rig in XP that is focused on single-core performance in DirectX-9 games a high clocked 3570K (Ivy Bridge, as close to 5 Ghz as possible) is going to be the absolute fastest possible for WinXP gaming. X79 might be a *SMIDGE* faster but most X79 CPU's aren't going to do much more than 4.2~4.5 Ghz even with overclocking and custom water cooling. The only real advantage an X79 system would have over mine is the higher ram speed from quad channel memory. I don't even know if games would take advantage of that in XP. That's probably more of something a modern multi-core game might use in Windows 10 for example. Some day I did want to try and play with an X79 system for XP gaming but only if prices get really low for X79 hardware as I don't think it will be much better than what I already have.

 

I'm not huge into overclocking.. but the turbo and quad channel ram is a must. I might still buy one to play with. But I will definitely do some more research into them before I buy one. And they also have a model with 3 16 lane pci-e slots.

 

The thing with quad channel ram is we have to run with slower ram speed and higher latency ram to make quad channel work correctly. Where as on desktop with just 2 sticks of ram we can run with higher ram speed and tighter ram latencies. So in the end yes we get a higher bandwidth number with quad channel but it might not be actually faster for gaming in XP because I think most games respond better to lower ram latency than they do overall ram bandwidth. But if you're doing something like CAD work, scientific calculations or something else non-gaming then a system with quad channel ram might be more your thing.

I do have a rather rare set of ram in the other room I want to use in an X79 system some day if I ever get one. Corsair XMS ram that runs 1800 Mhz @ 7-7-7-20, which is incredibly tight / low timings for 1800 Mhz. It's the only kit I've ever seen sold that could do that speed at those low of timings. I don't even know if x79 could do ram that low of timings in quad channel though. Also that ram requires 2.0 volts and I'm not sure if X79 systems can provide that so.. it would be a big "Gamble" for me.

Even with this super overclocked GTX 780 in my super XP build here and the high clocked 3570K, high speed and low latency ram, I can still barely maintain just about 55-60 FPS in certain parts of Fallout 3 for example with about 5-6 mods loaded @ 1080p.

 

I only ever really played FFxi online on xp. But I found a steam hack for xp and I will soon be trying out a few "xp" Era games on some of the xp builds I'm doing.

 

It seems that a lot of my images on page 1 aren't loading now for some reason. I checked and all of the imgur images are still there and at the same imgur URL's (that hasn't changed). And we're unable to edit our previous posts in this forum (For some stupid reason?) so I can't fix it myself. Could a moderator look in to fixing it for me maybe since I can't fix it myself?

 

they are loading now, just takes awhile since there are a lot of images

 

When I wrote that message yesterday they were broken with a red [X] image instead and I refreshed a few times. Seems to be working now. I think whatever forum software they use here is kinda wonky / flakey.

 

I've had no issues in 6 + years, , , ,

 

Imgur is the problem as this is what happens when things on their end get flaky. It's to be expected for 'free'.