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LGR - Building a Windows XP Gaming PC (Patreon)

Published:
2018-09-27 13:40:08
Edited:
2018-09-30 01:24:11
Imported:
2021-03

Content

The goal with this one was to put together a dedicated gaming machine using the best parts circa 2007/2008. Mainly because I just think it'd be fun, but also because I have some future projects in mind that require such a beast.

And there's simply something more arbitrarily enjoyable to me to play mid-2000s PC games on a dedicated XP build, especially one as high end as this would've been back then costing $3,588.

On uploading this I already see a couple things that need changing or clarifying so I'll be modifying it a bit over the next couple days. But enjoy the early viewing!

Files

LGR - Building My Dream $3,588 Windows XP PC

Comments

Peter Metzger

YES. YES. YES. YES. YES.

Anonymous

Awesome!

Anonymous

Where's the woodgrain? Kidding, I think. Thanks for this, I love videos of people building computers.

Anonymous

Oh my god. I already love this video already and I haven’t even watched it yet (before posting the comment). I have been waiting for this video to happen ever since you mentioned it on one of the LGR Hauls. I freaking love Windows XP.

Anonymous

The nvidia nforce chipset, now that takes me back!

Anonymous

Seeing UT2004 makes me wonder if you've done a review on it. :P

Tktagmedia

You know, with a few tweaks you can actually run DX10 on XP.

Robert Butler

Of course XP would have an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE (0x7B) stop code trying to boot a RAID controller; those setups weren't exactly common, as RAID wasn't really all that popular back then. Great video!

Anonymous

"Oh man, he is going to get roasted no matter how much or how little thermal paste he uses" *waits to see how much thermal paste is used* "...clever move!"

Anonymous
>>15835317

I had a RAID controller in two of my three XP machines back in the day; it wasn't THAT uncommon to have.

Terry Lee

yeah from the moment you mentioned SLI, I was thinking oh no you are going to experience problems depending on what you play. SLI has always been super finicky and doesn't always scale. Especially back then when it was a new technology. Nvidia is clearly trying to get away from SLI these days. It wasn't easy to code for, just a hassle for developers. Most tech reviewers always say to go with one single powerful card as opposed to SLI. It just comes with too much baggage. and though they were mostly in enterprises back in 2007, SSD's did exist so I suppose you could install one of those on this beastly machine

moosemaimer

Thanks for reminding me I need to unhook this thing, clean it out, and rearrange some of the cables and cards. SLI is really not worth the expense unless you're insistent on having a bleeding-edge rig; the performance increase is almost never close to the 100% bump in price vs. one card, and yeah, the problems it causes are seemingly neverending.

LazyGameReviews
>>15835791

Yep, I've read extensively about the drawbacks ever since SLI was a thing with 3dfx Voodoo cards. Just always wanted to try it for myself though :) And yeah an early SSD is certainly on the agenda for the future. Even at 10K RPM those Raptors still feel kinda slow.

Uncleawesome

The 8800gtx is the most expensive single pc part I ever bought. I had to get it only because of crysis :)

Anonymous

Ahhhh, classic XP gaming. I miss that many ti- *BSOD* -mes. Then I remember why I stopped using XP when 7 came out. On the plus side, nLite brought me back to the days where I was optimizing XP and 2000 installs to be as small as possible to fit on the tiny spare hard drives I had at the time. I still have a screenshot somewhere of a Windows 2000 install fitting in something like 100 MB.

LazyGameReviews
>>15836337

The 8800 series was such an indulegence, I loved it. Easily the single most expensive part in my 2008 build back then as well!

LazyGameReviews
>>15836367

Nice! I remember having like, XP Slim or something? It was some nLite version with the absolute bare minimum, always found enjoyment in those custom builds of Windows

Anonymous

Speaking of games, anyone knows why the are requirements for Vista and above usually higher than XP?

Anonymous

I'm actually working on a PC of a similar era. Friend gave me a PC with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ with 4GB DDR (yes, DDR, not DDR2). It had an Nvidia 9800 GTX+, which I SLI'd with another one I'd found at Goodwill. I had to buy new RAM as one of the sticks was dead, and I'm also planning to upgrade the CPU to an Opteron, because I can. The SLI is actually a long story. The card I got at Goodwill was a GTS 250 (which is actually just a rebranded 9800 GTX+) so SLI wouldn't work because the cards were different. I needed to reflash the BIOS on the GTX+ 9800 to make it think it was a GTS 250 and use two SLI bridges before it would work!

Anonymous

I've also been trying to build out a Windows XP gaming box so this video was a pleasent surprise. My idea is to recreate the same box I had which was a eMachines T2958. Back then I remembered being so impressed that it had both a DVD and a CD drive! I've been having trouble finding one that isn't in horrible shape and will ship to Canada :(

LazyGameReviews
>>15837756

Oh dang, I had an incredibly similar model at one point. Didn't realize they were getting a bit tricky to find in good shape but you're right!

avfusion

Oh god that PhysX card. I remember purchasing one just before Nvidia bought them out and slapped them into the GTX line. Also, XP to me will always be like 3 eras, SP1, SP2, and SP3. It lived for such a long time, a PC from the Pre-to-SP1 days is a world different than something that ran capably on SP3. It was also the age I lived in the most for PC's so that's what I base my retro-timescale on. Also, I have an LG lightscribe SATA drive if you want it. I will never use it again and it's just been collecting dust in my closet.

Ezydenias

7:15 this profile looks like lumber getting into the sawmill!.

Anonymous

Hold on... there's music in the Windows XP installer? I must have installed XP dozens of times at this point, but I've never heard music during the setup. Is this some weird meta joke?

Anonymous

Nice, vid (did you ever play Star Wars Battlefront II *Classic* on it?) I have a Dell Precision M4500 mobile workstation that I can use for most of my Windows gaming needs

BastetFurry

What did that setup cost you now? Would be a cool addition to this video.

Anonymous
>>15839539

That's one way of putting it. Reportedly, most sound drivers don't work under the XP installer, so that might have been one of the few cases of the music actually playing.

Anonymous
>>15836850

Because Vista in general requires more horse power to run, than XP does.

Kris Asick

My Thermaltake case for my current rig also has screwless mounts for hard drives and the drive bays, although I found the drive bay clips to be... weird... so I just screwed my BluRay drive in the normal way. I also definitely like that the case panels just come off through force rather than screws as it makes dusting the thing down every once in awhile way simpler! :)

LazyGameReviews
>>15839885

Well, as mentioned the power supply was the only thing I bought new specifically for this. And that was eighty bucks as shown in the price breakdown section. The rest came from my own parts bins, donations, thrift finds from years ago, etc. I'd guess it was about $160 overall? Hard for me to remember what I paid for a lot of this stuff years back.

LazyGameReviews
>>15840855

Indeed, it was disconcerting at first since it felt like something would break, but it's mighty convenient now that I know it's meant to do that!

Anonymous

Hey Clint, any particular reason you chose 32-bit over 64-bit?

Anonymous

I think I have a Qx9770 lying around, that I could send you would you be interested.

Anonymous
>>15843281

Xp 64bit is something you really don't want for gaming compatibility.

Anonymous

I still think XP is the best looking version of Windows.

Anonymous

Clint! Watching you have so much fun with that PC got me thinking about why and I think that for people in our early-mid 30s this was the generation where a lot of firsts were consolidating: Stable quad-core CPUs, proper 3D engines that didn't look like stacks of polygons, racing games where the cars didn't look like still pictures glued on top of a moving background, and so on. Also, we were at an age where we understood a little better how the hardware worked and why... Sorry for the long comment, but your video hits me on the nostalgia trigger.

Anonymous

Finally a xp build, still remember my pentium 4 with the 7500gt card playing NFS underground 2🤣

Anonymous

My first XP computer was my first computer. I don't know the specs (I know what a keyboard is, a mouse and that's about it) but apparently it was decent. I bought mine for about $150 from a internet cafe that were upgrading their PC's. I think this was 2007? :D

Anonymous

Just to put this out there but in this era I always had maxed out systems with up to 4x SLI/Crossfire and whatever was the latest and greatest. So I looked through my Newegg history to see what audio card I had, and in this 2007 timeframe I could have had a Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty - that's the one with the black front plate and everything. I thought the X-Fi series came later, but I confirmed the date of my order, which was July 20, 2006. Also I ran two Raptors in a raid 0, then went to three and finally four raptors in a raid 0 by 2008, well in Dec 2008 I ordered two Intel X25-M 80GB SSD's, at $499.99 each, and wow, I became an SSD evangelist - it absolutely blew those raptors out of the water, at least as a boot drive. I made back some of the money for the SSD's by selling off the Raptors, which even used sold for a good amount, but wow, what an incredible difference SSD's made. Also in that Dec 2008 order I bought an Intel i7-920, 6GB of ram (back when the motherboards had 6 memory slots), two GTX 260 and a EVGA E759-A1 X58 motherboard, the entire setup was $2556 as a reference point.

Carey Brown

Ahhh the memories!!! This is making me a bit jealous!

Anonymous

haha I would have rioted if you went with anything but RAID 0. Great video!

Anonymous

Ahh, that CPU fan makes my mouth salivate!

Anonymous

This is fun because my PC is this budget 2009 PC build with an i7-870 and a Radeon HD 5770, all parts put in back in 2009 but running Win10 now lol and also dang do I miss WinXP, it's such a fountain of nostalgia

Brian Condron

My current desktop PC is from 2007 and runs a QX6700, bought it new 11 and a half years ago and have been upgrading it ever since. Funny that I think of it as being modern when the motherboard is closer in years to my retro PC, 1999 technology so 8 years, than it is to today.

Anonymous

My first xp machine was a 500mhz Celeron with 256mb of ram. This thing is a beast by comparison!

Mighty Jabba's Collection

I built my first and only gaming PC around this time, so this was a bit of a trip down memory lane. By the way, you're probably aware of this, but a number of the transitions between clips (like where you're showing the various components) seem to have audio that is oddly cut off or overlapping.

Anonymous

Awesome video, the first PC I ever used ran Windows XP so I have a lot of memories using it. Unfortunately while setting up an XP virtual machine earlier, I found out that Microsoft shut down the activation servers. I was able to activate it over the phone, but who knows how long that will last

Anonymous
>>15881388

They really should come up with a way to bypass the activation without the need to call. It's not like they should be making money on 15 year old unsupported versions of Windows anyways, am I right?!?

Anonymous

This was nice to watch after the disaster that was The Verge "How to build a $2000 PC", just so many mistakes. Back in this time period I was on an x1900xt 256mb and a core 2 due E6400. I think later that year I went for a Radeon HD2900 Pro which ran Oblivion great (comparatively) with its 1GB of VRAM and silly amounts of VRAM bandwidth letting me crank the AA (still wasn't great though, the AA was free but the performance was still not good). I believe I tried a 8800GTX 320 at one point before that and the 320mb was just way too limiting at the time, I'm pretty sure that's why you're getting stuttering in crysis, I believe minimum for a good time was 512mb like with the updated 8800 GT.

LazyGameReviews
>>15888690

Ha, I saw that video before they deleted it. Good grief was it bad. And yeah I need to try my 8800 Ultra in this rig! I'm sure its 768 megs will help.

SuperBunnyBun

I really like rosewill equipment. one of the best 3rd party developers of just about everything

Anonymous

Wow, the memories here. I would have died for this PC back in my more spry days. A friend of mine had parents who were pretty well off, and I was always jealous of his XP gaming rig. This makes me want to grab some parts and try my hand at my own XP beast machine.

Anonymous

man this video took me back <3

LazyGameReviews
>>15891394

Indeed, I've been quite pleased with the few items of theirs I've had so far, considering the budget pricing. No issues yet!

LazyGameReviews
>>15891945

Go for it! Take it from me, making up for "lost time" from PC gaming past can be quite a worthwhile journey :)

Anonymous

Great video! Because of the classic PC gaming talk on your channel I went to my dad who kept a lot of laptops that his job at the time was throwing out. These laptops range from Windows 95 all the way up to XP. But the ones I've been getting the most joy out of are the IBM ThinkPad T40 laptops running Windows XP. These have been excellent for a chunk of games ranging from the 90s to early-to-mid 2000s. Plus because they are laptops they're very easy to store away. It seems like a lot of games for Windows started to fall apart after XP which is a real shame.

Mac84

Great video!! It takes me back to 2008 with my first post-Windows XP machine I built which included a Core 2 Quad CPU and an ATI HD 4670 Crossfire setup. I recall the graphics drivers being unstable under XP, which forced me to install Vista. *shudder*. However, Vista quirkiness aside, it ran games like a beast, I remember being so excited to play games at a decent framerate again. My previous PC was a Pentium 4 setup with a budget ATI card, and my main computer at the time was the rev A. Intel iMac from 2006 with a Core Duo CPU and a 256mb ATI X1600. The iMac was decent for most games and Steam titles, but the PC I built in 2008 was a lot of fun. I'm curious, your original XP era gaming machine that you had, what were the (rough) specs on that?

LazyGameReviews
>>15911793

I had quite a few of them, it really depends on which era of XP we're talking about since tech evolved a bunch over that span of 7 or 8 years. But the one I was using to try and play things like Far Cry was an HP Pavilion of some kind, very much like this one: <a href="https://www.cnet.com/products/hp-pavilion-751n-p4-1-8-ghz-monitor-none-series/specs/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.cnet.com/products/hp-pavilion-751n-p4-1-8-ghz-monitor-none-series/specs/</a> I got it up to 512MB RAM and a GeForce 6200 128MB GPU Next one in 2006 was a custom build with an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ and a 256MB 7600 GT. Upgraded again in 2007 with an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ and a 320MB 8800 GTS, which I had for the next few years.

Anonymous

The second I saw the title of this video, I thought Dual WD Raptor in RAID 0. I left satisfied!

Bryan McIntosh

I just put my Ryzen 5 2600X-based build into the Cooler Master Centurion case that I bought back in 2008. It's definitely showing its age; the power supply is still at the top, and I am pretty sure that its airflow is competing with the CPU cooler I am using. I tried putting in a triple-fan GPU last year for testing, and it smacked into the hard drive cage. One thing that I often forget is how unsophisticated the GPU cooling solutions of the time period were; those tiny little blower fans had to spin like crazy to cool the Tesla-era GPUs!

Anonymous

Man I loved XP. Played the games I wanted to and never gave me much of an issue. Sucks I never got into building then, but now I want to build one cause fuck it.

Anonymous

I'm in love with that tool-less HDD drawer. Awesome vid.

Anonymous

You should give Fallout 3 a try on it! Its a pain in the ass to run on win10

Anonymous

I have installed Windows XP more times in my life than I can count and I had no idea that there was an install sound track. That blows my mind.

Anonymous

Hi Clint, I just wanted to know if you would like me to send you some DDR2 sticks. I have two identical sticks to the ones you have and some "SLI" rated memory.

Anonymous

Getaway computer is best l