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.
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.
