I recently resurrected my old core 2 duo system and installed winxp in it. It has E8500 cpu and 8Gb ram (even though windows xp can't see all of the ram)
Now I have been wondering what graphics card I am going to put there permanently because I have several pci express cards.

Radeon 1900XTX
Geforce 8800GT
Geforce gtx 280
Radeon HD5870
Geforce GTX 780ti

You could always say that I should use the fastest, but there is always a limit where faster graphics card doesn't improve the experience when playing games or cpu becomes the bottleneck.
That is when you could also consider the power consumption like which graphics card is fast enough with least effect on your electricity bill and that is why I am bit hesitant to just sticking 780ti in it and be done with it.

HD 5870 gets my vote.
Unless you need specific things (like PhysX).

It's all personal preference of course, but if it was me building what I presume is to be an "ultimate" XP system, then I'd go with either the GTX280 or the HD5870 depending what mood I was in. I've been using the 200 series cards for a long time so the GTX280 would be the easy answer, but HD5870 if I was feeling adventurous.
If using dual monitors then HD5870 (see below).

The 780 feels too new for XP to me, unless it will run something that benefits from it. Seems like a card that would be used with games that require Win7+.

The 8800GT is iconic of an era IMO, and it certainly fits an XP build. For many it would probably represent the end of the XP heyday. Since I've continued to use XP for so much longer with the GTX2xx cards, the 8800GT doesn't feel "ultimate" to me personally.

If by chance you will be running dual monitors, then NVidia does have some quirks there.
The GTX280 (and maybe the 8800GT, but not certain) will be locked into their max performance state when running dual monitors. This jacks up their idle desktop power consumption. There's a 3rd party workaround but it's a little clunky.
Monitor rotation doesn't work properly either. The rotated monitor will perform like it's 2D acceleration is crippled somehow. People complained but I haven't seen a solution.
I certainly hope these problems were fixed by the time of the 780. I don't think ATI has these problems.

Baoran wrote:

Radeon 1900XTX Geforce 8800GT Geforce gtx 280 Radeon HD5870 Geforce GTX 780ti […]
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Radeon 1900XTX
Geforce 8800GT
Geforce gtx 280
Radeon HD5870
Geforce GTX 780ti

Nice to see the cards already ordered by performance.
Considering that you'll go with an E8500 I'd say:

• 1900 XTX: The weakest of them, most likely be the limiting factor. Would put it in something slightly slower. Athlon 64 or Pentium D build maybe.
• 8800 GT: Surely a legendary card of it's age, but unless you really want to make a period correct build, there are faster options.
• GTX 280: A good match for a Core 2, but not the fastest card. Well rounded in terms of performance against the E8500.
• HD 5870: Similar to the GTX 280, but faster. A good match for a fast core 2. Probably my preference for that build.
• GTX 780 ti: Simple: The fastest card possible for XP. Will be held back by the CPU. Yes even beyond 4 GHz. A faster SandyBridge quad would fit better to get "Absolute XP Overkill"

Also consider dual booting. With 8 GB of RAM and a Core 2 Quad the platform is far from obsolete even today. Got something similar in my "medium" rig.

Random thoughts.. a friend of mine and I were looking through nvidia documentation and can't find a clear answer.. Does anyone actually know 100% for sure, if we can SLI two GTX 700 series cards (any of them, 770, 780, 780 Ti, etc) under windows XP 32-bit or Windows XP 64-bit? I know there's nvidia drivers for Windows XP for these cards but we're thinking that the drivers don't support SLI for these "last era of WinXP nvidia cards". Possibly we seem to think that the last SLI capable video from nvidia for XP was the 600 series, GTX 650/660/660Ti/670/680. And even that information is sort of sketchy.

kithylin wrote:

Random thoughts.. a friend of mine and I were looking through nvidia documentation and can't find a clear answer.. Does anyone actually know 100% for sure, if we can SLI two GTX 700 series cards (any of them, 770, 780, 780 Ti, etc) under windows XP 32-bit or Windows XP 64-bit? I know there's nvidia drivers for Windows XP for these cards but we're thinking that the drivers don't support SLI for these "last era of WinXP nvidia cards". Possibly we seem to think that the last SLI capable video from nvidia for XP was the 600 series, GTX 650/660/660Ti/670/680. And even that information is sort of sketchy.

According to Nvidia you can. See here.. on pages 15 and 16:
http://www.nvidia.com/content/geforce-gtx/GTX … _User_Guide.pdf

cyclone3d wrote:

kithylin wrote:

Random thoughts.. a friend of mine and I were looking through nvidia documentation and can't find a clear answer.. Does anyone actually know 100% for sure, if we can SLI two GTX 700 series cards (any of them, 770, 780, 780 Ti, etc) under windows XP 32-bit or Windows XP 64-bit? I know there's nvidia drivers for Windows XP for these cards but we're thinking that the drivers don't support SLI for these "last era of WinXP nvidia cards". Possibly we seem to think that the last SLI capable video from nvidia for XP was the 600 series, GTX 650/660/660Ti/670/680. And even that information is sort of sketchy.

According to Nvidia you can. See here.. on pages 15 and 16:
http://www.nvidia.com/content/geforce-gtx/GTX … _User_Guide.pdf

Thank you for finding this! 😲 Awesome! Looks like Dual 780 Ti's will be my choice for an ultimate XP system later then.

I'm planning to use my high end gigabyte Z77X-UD7 board and some sort of sandy/ivy bridge chip and 5+ Ghz for an exotic XP system later. Probably stick to a quad core i5 chip, DirectX-9 / XP era games can't make much use of an i7 anyway.

Why no love for GTX 295? Is it the memory or internal sli?

Anyone know how well a fx8350 would play over a 960t paired with a gtx285 and Windows xp 64 bit?

I wonder if this system would play the gta 4 episodes well. Last I tried them on Windows 8 they weren't playable at all with a GTX 570 or 970, can't remember which card now

SLI is flawed and old SLI like GeForce 7950GX2 is very flawed.

My point of view on this thread:

From the launch of Windows XP until its end of support in 2014, there's an ultra wide variety of video cards that were designed for this OS. A majority of graphic cards from 2002 (beginning with ATi Radeon 9700 Pro) until 2014/2015 (which are the Radeon R9 270 (and 270X) and NVIDIA GeForce 950/960) have support for Windows XP. The final four graphic cards are considered (and to be clear) to be the latest and powerful graphic cards that can support Windows XP. Those cards can run all DirectX 9 titles (including Crysis, one of the heavily demanding PC games to bottleneck a single DirectX 9 graphics card and the processor).

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

Why no love for GTX 295? Is it the memory or internal sli?

SLI is a bad idea, when you can buy a single card that is faster than SLI configuration you aiming for.
Oh, and one GTX 295 will work on XP in SLI mode (regardless of board used), However - you can't do Quad SLI [2x GTX 295] on Windows XP even on SLI capable MB (software limitation).

IAmJefferson wrote:

My point of view on this thread:

From the launch of Windows XP until its end of support in 2014, there's an ultra wide variety of video cards that were designed for this OS. A majority of graphic cards from 2002 (beginning with ATi Radeon 9700 Pro) until 2014/2015 (which are the Radeon R9 270 (and 270X) and NVIDIA GeForce 950/960) have support for Windows XP. The final four graphic cards are considered (and to be clear) to be the latest and powerful graphic cards that can support Windows XP. Those cards can run all DirectX 9 titles (including Crysis, one of the heavily demanding PC games to bottleneck a single DirectX 9 graphics card and the processor).

Just to be clear on that, if one really wanted "The most powerful" for XP and with full XP support (apparently including SLI but I haven't tried it yet) would be the 780 Ti and it's a much, much faster option than either the 270X, GTX 950 or the GTX 960.

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-G … 0-Ti/3165vs2165

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-R9-2 … 0-Ti/2188vs2165

Not sure why the community is so stubborn about this given that XP compatibility covers such a wide range of hardware and it is not like 9x or earlier where one has to get picky if they want to be able to run certain games or not. Unlike with earlier eras there is a lot more freedom to build whatever you want and not be limited to what others so you can or can't do because it is outside of their box. Personally I love SLI and Crossfire as it Was the shit back in the day almost every gamer wanted to build such a system as it was cool.

kithylin wrote:

Just to be clear on that, if one really wanted "The most powerful" for XP and with full XP support (apparently including SLI but […]
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IAmJefferson wrote:

My point of view on this thread:

From the launch of Windows XP until its end of support in 2014, there's an ultra wide variety of video cards that were designed for this OS. A majority of graphic cards from 2002 (beginning with ATi Radeon 9700 Pro) until 2014/2015 (which are the Radeon R9 270 (and 270X) and NVIDIA GeForce 950/960) have support for Windows XP. The final four graphic cards are considered (and to be clear) to be the latest and powerful graphic cards that can support Windows XP. Those cards can run all DirectX 9 titles (including Crysis, one of the heavily demanding PC games to bottleneck a single DirectX 9 graphics card and the processor).

Just to be clear on that, if one really wanted "The most powerful" for XP and with full XP support (apparently including SLI but I haven't tried it yet) would be the 780 Ti and it's a much, much faster option than either the 270X, GTX 950 or the GTX 960.

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-G … 0-Ti/3165vs2165

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-R9-2 … 0-Ti/2188vs2165

There are lots of comments around the web of people running a GTX 970 on Windows XP with modded drivers. That will trade blows with a 780 Ti in most situations, plus its far more efficient.

The 980 and 980 Ti will also work with modded drivers, so the 980 Ti would be the most powerful card you could get working in XP.

EDIT: Woa, this thread was resurrected. I thought this was a different thread about almost the same topic... I see I commented on this two years ago in this thread. 😵

Best card that works out of the Box is a GTX 960. If you modify the last official Geforce drivers for a 960 you can install a GTX 970 and or a 980. These are the best GPUs you can get for XP. Op makes the case about you shouldn't pick the fastest card becasue of CPU bottle neck. But that is cherry picking and using alternative facts to say something. I am told the fastest chipset you can run on XP is a X79 if you running a X79 with a I7 you wouldn't have a CPU bottle neck with a 980.

Warlord wrote:

Best card that works out of the Box is a GTX 960. If you modify the last official Geforce drivers for a 960 you can install a GTX 970 and or a 980. These are the best GPUs you can get for XP. Op makes the case about you shouldn't pick the fastest card becasue of CPU bottle neck. But that is cherry picking and using alternative facts to say something. I am told the fastest chipset you can run on XP is a X79 if you running a X79 with a I7 you wouldn't have a CPU bottle neck with a 980.

I would actually like to see someone put together a monstrous X79 + 980 Ti system that maintained XP compatibility and then try to see if they could make it run slow by using insane resolutions and graphics settings in Pre-DirectX10 games. I don't mean running newer games that have a DX9 mode, I mean games that actually looked their best on XP with DX9.0C and didn't utilize anything newer.

Did XP drivers support nvidia DSR? You could force games to run at 8K resolution downscaled to 1080P or something... 🤣

Ask and you shall receive (4960X OC'ed + GTX 780 Ti [Reference with Skyn3t mod vBIOS]) 😀

Crysis @ 2560x1600 + 16xQ AA (that's native 16x MSAA) :

1) I can't use DSR or Downsampling with WinXP (I didn't install GeForce Experience, just FYI - it didn't do anything).
2) I tested Crysis stock with 4k Downsampling*, and 3GB VRAM is good enough for 4k @ MSAA 8x (without "Q").
*On Windows 7 (since XP doesn't do DSR/Downsampling).

agent_x007 wrote:

Ask and you shall receive (4960X OC'ed + GTX 780 Ti [Reference with Skyn3t mod vBIOS]) :) […]
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Ask and you shall receive (4960X OC'ed + GTX 780 Ti [Reference with Skyn3t mod vBIOS]) 😀

Crysis @ 2560x1600 + 16xQ AA (that's native 16x MSAA) :

Crysis 2560x1600 16xQ mini.PNG

1) I can't use DSR or Downsampling with WinXP (I didn't install GeForce Experience, just FYI - it didn't do anything).
2) I tested Crysis stock with 4k Downsampling, and 3GB VRAM is good enough for 4k @ MSAA 8x (without "Q").

Awesome! If Crysis can run at 67fps minimum and 100fps average, then presumably any less intensive games that are natively DX9 should run at least as fast.

You should run something really old, like the earliest 3D accelerated Windows games that work in XP. 🤣

I did run 3DMark 99 Max and few more 😉

🤣 83,000 in 3DMark 2001... I remember tweaking my system and playing with settings to get 13,000-14,000 on a Geforce 4 Ti 4400 + Athlon XP back in the day...