Timtheloon's Retro High-End AGP (HD3850) PC (Dual Boot WinXP & Win7)

[Timtheloon]

Howdy Retro Users

I decided to embark on a little side project away from the Amiga

So I wanted to making a high-end 32bit Retro AGP Windows XP machine and ended up with a dual boot Window XP and Windows 7 Machine

I decided to do some research on AGP cards and I found two contenders both being ATI, the ATI Sapphire HD3850 (@MMaximus) & HIS HD4670 (@zzyzzyxx) which I purchase from Amibay.

Now I've only tested the HD3850 so far and so far so good.

Now for the Motherboard I went for the ASRock 775Dual-VSTA which surprisingly supports both AGP & PCI express (This is obviously limited to older PCIe cards) and added an Intel Core Duo E7600 processor to it which was the second best I could find and within my budget now I did find after purchasing this motherboard that it has a bigger brother which supports quad core CPU's but they are in the big bucks and blew my budget out of the water.

Link to more info on the Motherboard (Click Me)

I'm not a motherboard expert (I've been a laptop User since 1999 due to my Navy days and restricted living space) so there are probably other motherboards I could have gone for but I'm happy so who cares

Now this motherboard has a bios hack to see more than 2GB so I have added to OCZ Gold Series 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 OCZ2G8004GK PC2 6400 I don't get the full 4GB but it way better than 2GB so again I'm happy.

I have two SATA drives fitted 1x1GB and 1x 2GB the 1GB I have made 2 partitions for windows XP & Win 7 for a nice dual boot machine to allow for retro gamming across both OS's supposedly this Motherboard will also work with windows 98 but I haven't attempted that yet but so far it is playing all the games I wanted it to play

I have put it all into an old Pentium II case which it fit very nicely into and it adds to the Retro look it has a few knocks and paint chips but it adds to the look IMO.

I will find a White DVD drive to give it a better look but the black one will do for now.

The twin floppy drive sadly needs attention the 5.25" 1.2mb drive seems to work ok but the 3.5" 1.44mb is a no go it looks like capacitor damage is the reason why this on is not functioning.

PSU is overkill lol a 600W Bequiet ATX PSU but it was one i had lying around that was easy to get to.

I'm a fan of the old Alienware themes if you are wondering why they are there.

If you want benchmarks let me know what programs you would like me to test with

Hope you enjoy the Pictures and Screenshots:

Still to test:



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Other projects of mine you maybe interested in:

A500+:

Timtheloon's A500+ with A570 CD-ROM and TF536 Build​

A600:

Timtheloon's A600HD PiStorm Build​

A2000:

Timtheloon's A2000 Triple Processor Project​

A1200:

Timtheloon's Checkmate A1500 Plus (A1200 Build)​

CD32:

Timtheloon's CD32 SX32 Pro Setup with Cosmos Kickstart Mod​

Timtheloon's CD32 TF360 Plus ProModule Build​

A4KD & A4KT

Timtheloon’s A4000cr Alice project​

Timtheloon's A4000T Project​

Acorn RiscPC:

Timtheloon's RiscPC 600 build​

RetroPC

Timtheloon's Retro High-End AGP (HD3850) PC (Dual Boot WinXP & Win7)​

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[deladrevoc]

Have you got WinUAE on it yet?

 

[Timtheloon]

I will have very soon lol

oh forgot to add it can run Crysis on High Settings @ 1680 x 1050 with ease I think I need direct X 10 for the very high settings

 

[MMaximus]

Nice! Glad to see you're putting this HD3850 to good use

 

[qz3fwd]

I miss both XP & 7. They were both great OS’s. I remember waiting in line to buy XP in a retail store the day it was released. Only time I have ever done that, other than the Star Wars original DVD release.

 

[Timtheloon]

I'm defo enjoying the XP revival

The old games are working great so far, only "Jeff Wayne's War of the World" is the first game I've come across which fails on game start. loads all the intros just fine.

 

[trixster]

Very interesting build!

I have a similar one using an Asrock 939Dual-VSTA and the AM2CPU upgrade board to allow for a dual core s940 3.2ghz Athlon 64 X2. I’ve got an HD3850 with this and dual booting XP / Win7.

It’s a very usual system given its PCI, AGP and 16x PCIe

 

[Timtheloon]

Wow, that's cool, just looked your motherboard up.

The ASRock 939Dual-Vista has a better layout because of the separation of the PCIe and AGP slots unlike the one in this machine with them right next to each other and this one has x16 PCIe unlike the one I have with only x4 PCIe

@trixster take it yours is a newer model, as I said not got much experience with Motherboards due to always getting laptops after 1999

 

[trixster]

I wanted to get the ‘best’ s939 board I could with pci agp and pcie and came across this with its crazy cpu daughter board. So now socket 940 rather than 939, but moreorless the same. The good thing is a bios flash enabled it to make use of a 3.2ghz A64 X2 cpu! It’s a fun system, and as you say allows for full speed agp and / or PCIe. V useful for testing old gpus

 

[trixster]

 

[Timtheloon]

Looks like it needs a case

Wow very interesting especially that daughterboard

 

[trixster]

If I could be arsed to get round to it id put it in a pc test bench so as to keep it accessible, but my heart’s not into retro right now so it sits where it is on top of my old 90s tower case.

 

[StrongARM]

Due to the crap m$ politics an intel core 2 is nowadays really an obsolete thing remaining for retro and vintage.

 

[zzyzzyxx]

Hi, I just saw this post.
How does the HD4670 perform?