The Ultimate Windows XP PC Build #Helpful Post

Hey guys this is Austin. I had an idea.

In October Windows XP will officially be 15 years old and it has had quite the life. Not

only was it a big step up over the ancient looking Windows 98 and ME but it remains one

of the most popular OSes, running on around 7% of computers today. That got me thinking,

could I build the ultimate Windows XP gaming PC? With minimum requirements of a 233MHz Pentium

it’s not exactly tough to run but the tricky part are, well the parts. While official Microsoft

support for XP ended in 2014 it’s actually still fairly well supported by hardware companies

today and that includes the AMD FX-9590. This obscure CPU is actually still one of the fastest

processors ever made even a few years later, it’s essentially a highly binned FX-8300

eight core CPU that can clock up to a whopping five gigahertz. With eight cores to work with

even the fairly old Piledriver architecture can wipe the floor with a lot of modern chips

but the downside is that it’s power hungry. That’s where the ASRock 990FX Killer motherboard

comes in, not only is it one of the few boards that can handle the kind of power the CPU

needs but importantly it has drivers available. The only key thing missing are Ethernet drivers

for XP but that’s easy enough to get around with a USB Wi-Fi adapter. The hardest part

was actually finding a graphics card. Both AMD and Nvidia stopped supporting XP years

ago but luckily AMD did make a driver for the Radeon R9 270X, one of the newest cards

that will still work on XP. Another limitation is memory, even though they later made a 64-bit

version we’re using the standard 32-bit edition of XP which tops out at four gigs

of memory. One area where we have no problems is with an SSD, a 256 gigabyte Crucial MX100

works just fine. The real question is how does Windows XP run at five gigahertz? In

a word: fast. Really fast. It’s nearly indistinguishable from a modern OS when you add a fast CPU and

SSD, there’s no delay in basic tasks and even web browsing feels just as quick as anything

else. Unfortunately most browsers no longer support XP but Firefox is the exception for

now but even so I wouldn’t really recommend this as your main system. Considering XP hasn’t

seen updates in two years and it wasn’t exactly the most secure OS anyway the internet

is a bit of a minefield when it comes to viruses. Luckily most programs do still support XP

like CPU-Z where you can see the 9590 is fully recognized as well as all eight cores are

showing up inside Task Manager. GPU-Z also shows the R9 270X up and running no problem,

the older drivers really aren’t much of a problem either considering we’re limited

to DirectX 9 games anyway. Speaking of there are a fair few games that will work, older

titles like the original Modern Warfare run no problem on XP, no Infinite Warfare required.

Far Cry 2 blew my mind back in the day and it still looks decent eight years later, it’s

even moderately taxing when you crank everything up. Compared to Mirror’s Edge Catalyst the

original might not be able to hold up but it’s just as fun as ever and again looks

decent. Moving on to a newer game we’ve got the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider which again

looks and works fine on XP, being limited to DX9 hurts a bit graphically but it’s

no big deal. Of course no one is going to do all of this just to play Tomb Raider. You’re

going to do it to play the greatest game of all time. Windows XP pinball pushes the hardware

to the absolute limit with cutting edge 3D graphics, intense sound effects and most importantly

the ultimate way to waste time straight outta 2001.

Another classic is Minesweeper, this might not be quite as demanding but thanks to our

eight core five gigahertz processor we’re able to get it to just barely playable frame

rates. So should you build the most overkill Windows XP gaming rig of all time? Probably

not, XP is best left to a virtual machine or second partition but then again, the siren

song of pinball is hard to resist. Smash that like button if you guys enjoyed this look

back and let me know in the comments below what crazy PC build I should do next. Anyway

guys thank you so much for watching and I will catch you in the next one.