For P4 systems spanning XP and 98, GPU choice comes down to a trade-off between performance and backwards compatibility.

It really depends on which specific games or games era you are targeting and how wide a gamut of games you want to run.

Monitor selection and desired screen resolution also plays a role. Using a CRT monitor at 1024x768 requires less performance overhead compared to a 1600x1200 or 16:10 (1650 x 1080 or 1920 x 1200) LCD.

If your P4 2.8Ghz system is primarily for XP, I'd go with the fastest GPU you have (7600GT or 7600GS). Whereas the FX or Geforce4 would be better suited in the slower systems with a primary focus on late 90s and early 2000s gaming.

FWIW, in my own P4 build I use a GeForce 4 4200 Ti. Main reason is because I can run it fanless (and thus silent), and for optimal Win 9x/DOS compatibility while still retaining the ability to run early 2000s games in XP.

The final result might be something like a small lan-center, retrocomputers scattered around the house networked together. Also easy to take somewhere else.
Possible games to play;
- Total Annihilation
- C&C (Tiberian sun and later)
- Q3A
- Unreal Tournament
- Maybe qw/tf (gl)
- Maybe some car games.
These are mostly for my kids. By this time I didn't play that many games (I really suck at games). Mostly tinkering, testing OS's, and procrastinating on IRC.

Doom 3 high works best with 256MB or 512MB ram (DDR3). The 7600GT should be able to run it at 1080p as well. For everything else of that year/earlier, you don't really need that much power.

2003 is the cross-over point for Win2k and WinXP.

If it's a 2003-ish build, I'd go with the Radeon 9500 PRO.

Also, the 2GB ram is way overkill for 2003. It won't hurt having it with WinXP or 2k, but back then it was rare to go above 1GB.

Here is the sort of thing you can encounter : my Soyo Dragon Plus system is running Windows 2000, so out of curiosity I swapped the Ti4600 for a 7600 GS I have. I had to go from Nvidia 45.23 to 91.28. As I suspected, the benchmark scores were similar, though the 7600 GS had the edge by a few hundred points across the board; a newer low mid range card is a little better than an older top of the line one as expected. But when I tried Half-Life Opposing Force, I saw strange artifacts when firing the machine gun and a few other anomalies that weren't present with the Ti4600 and the 45.23 drivers, so I went back to that.

For the P4 machines, I'd go with GF7600 GT/GS and 5900XT, particularly if they are XP-only builds. If you intend to make all of the systems 98-compatible, then surely the Radeon 9500 and GF4 TI4200 would be better choices, followed by the FX5500 and FX5200 (whichever has 128-bit mem bus and not the more crappy 64-bit mem bus) though at the sacrifice of some 3D performance.

As for Windows 2000... while it's a great OS, I'd skip it for gaming. Anything that runs on 2000 will run fine in XP too (likewise, anything that won't run in XP probably also won't work with 2k), and XP is a lot more versatile for software without much overhead.

And +1 on not needing 2 GB of RAM for any of these systems if they are intended for early 2000's games (up to ~2003-2004).
Put 2 GB on the P4 2.8 GHz system only if you're curious to see what it's like to browse online (yeah, I know, almost everyone here will scream lunatic for even suggesting this... but frankly, XP SP3 with some "tweaks", a modern retro browser, and an ad-blocker is about-OK for online use... if you have *enough* patience for pages to load, of course.)

RandomStranger wrote on 2024-04-28, 08:00:

If it's a 2003-ish build, I'd go with the Radeon 9500 PRO.

Also, the 2GB ram is way overkill for 2003. It won't hurt having it with WinXP or 2k, but back then it was rare to go above 1GB.

Overkill for 2003, but OP's talking of running XP SP3, and those SPs seriously bloated the OS. I'd say 2GB is absolute minimum for a decent experience on XP SP3, and even there I'd prefer more. Better alternative: don't install the SPs, particularly not SP2 and 3. The main reason to do so was security, but since XP's way out of support and utterly insecure if accessible unprotected from internet anyway, the difference between vanilla XP and XP with SP3 is not relevant today. And vanilla XP would run decently on 512MB and be very happy with 1GB (which what I was running back then, with and AthlonXP 2500+ OCd to 3200+ spec, and a GeForce4 Ti 4200, so pretty much on par with this build)

The best you could buy in 2003 where AMD Athlon + ATI Radeon. At that time I had a S478 Celeron with GeForce FX and it was a pain after a couple of years.
Also P4 is a bottleneck for anything starting from high-end GeForce FXs.
If you want flexible S478 build with good performance-compatibility balance, I'd recommend using Northwood P4 + GeForce FX (5600+) and XP-98 dualboot.

SP2 is the lowest I would downgrade to - as someone who has used both vanilla and SP1 versions, they tend to crash on certain machines when running games.

IIRC Crazy Taxi specifically would crash at the character selection screen randomly with a frosted mould-like screen for half a minute before showing a "driver time-out" BSOD, and the only fix that worked was updating to SP2.

momaka wrote on 2024-04-29, 13:28:

Put 2 GB on the P4 2.8 GHz system only if you're curious to see what it's like to browse online (yeah, I know, almost everyone here will scream lunatic for even suggesting this... but frankly, XP SP3 with some "tweaks", a modern retro browser, and an ad-blocker is about-OK for online use... if you have *enough* patience for pages to load, of course.)

If one wants to be crazy, why not pull out Windows 10 32-bit and/or a modern Linux distro and try running a web browser on that? I ... might be wrong about this, but I thought that P4s were still fully supported on the 32-bit side of modern Windows...

PcBytes wrote on 2024-04-29, 19:23:

SP2 is the lowest I would downgrade to - as someone who has used both vanilla and SP1 versions, they tend to crash on certain machines when running games.

Agreed. SP1 fixed a number of annoying bugs, including one that I still remember about the taskbar freezing up in certain circumstances.

Honestly, my opinion back in the day as someone who had built a new machine with pre-SP1 XP at Christmas 2001 but had a shipped-in-September-2001 laptop with Win2000 was that Win2000 was the better, more stable OS, at least for productivity. XP caught up with either SP1 or SP2, but before that, 2000 was where it was at...

VivienM wrote on 2024-04-29, 22:06:

PcBytes wrote on 2024-04-29, 19:23:

SP2 is the lowest I would downgrade to - as someone who has used both vanilla and SP1 versions, they tend to crash on certain machines when running games.

Agreed. SP1 fixed a number of annoying bugs, including one that I still remember about the taskbar freezing up in certain circumstances.

Honestly, my opinion back in the day as someone who had built a new machine with pre-SP1 XP at Christmas 2001 but had a shipped-in-September-2001 laptop with Win2000 was that Win2000 was the better, more stable OS, at least for productivity. XP caught up with either SP1 or SP2, but before that, 2000 was where it was at...

In my memory, Windows XP was very buggy up until service pack 2. I wouldn’t even say that it was more stable than fully patched Windows 98, even despite the NT architecture.

PcBytes wrote on 2024-04-29, 19:23:

SP2 is the lowest I would downgrade to

I agree.

While I haven't experienced any crashes with any games on one of my systems with a "super-updated" SP0 (basically all updates prior to just rolling over to SP1), there's a lot of improvements and compatibility issues resolved in SP2, so that's why I also don't suggest to go any lower. And for anyone building a high(er)-end XP machine, I highly recommend going with SP3. In particular, some of the very late XP era (early Windows 7 era) hardware has drivers that may not work properly on anything pre-SP2... and some might have issues with anything pre-SP3.

dionb wrote on 2024-04-29, 14:09:

Overkill for 2003, but OP's talking of running XP SP3, and those SPs seriously bloated the OS. I'd say 2GB is absolute minimum for a decent experience on XP SP3, and even there I'd prefer more. Better alternative: don't install the SPs, particularly not SP2 and 3.

Not really.

I think modern computers have really skewed some people's minds about how much RAM an XP system (be it SP1, SP2, or SP3) needs.
There's actually hardly a difference between SP0, SP1, and SP2 in that regard. Most of my SP2 builds boot at 90 to 150 MB of RAM on the desktop. It really just depends on the hardware I'm using (mainly has to do with drivers, especially the GPU.) Only SP3 needs a bit more RAM... but it will still comfortably run with 512 MB of RAM on most systems, at least for software from that age (i.e. mid 2000's). Of course if you want to game, especially mid 2000's games, 1 GB is highly recommended. And if stretching beyond that to the extent of early Windows 7 era games (i.e. Mirror's Edge, COD MW/MW2, and anything with the updated Source engine like HL2 EP2 / Portal 2 / BMS), only then you'd need to go beyond 1 GB of RAM. But beyond 2 GB, it's usually a waste, unless you're running a high-end XP system with Intel i-series or equivalent CPU and hardware to match. Heck, I'm browsing the internet with an XP machine sometimes, (with a modern retro browser like Mypal), and most of the time I have a hard time going over 1 GB of RAM.

dionb wrote on 2024-04-29, 14:09:

... but since XP's way out of support and utterly insecure if accessible unprotected from internet

Well, *any* OS is quite insecure when connected to the internet unprotected... but then, who does that anyways?? What I'm talking about is running a system directly connected to an outgoing internet connection (e.g. cable modem hooked straight to the computer) without an external firewall of some sort. Most routers have pretty decent firewall and obfuscate the internal network well enough that even outdated OSes like XP will actually be decently protected. That said, I still don't recommend going below SP2. In fact, official SP2 release has some known security holes that can get it compromised online rather quickly. To get around that, there are a few updates needed for SP2. So the minimum is SP2XP2 + a few select updates that patch these security holes.

Kruton 9000 wrote on 2024-04-29, 22:26:

In my memory, Windows XP was very buggy up until service pack 2. I wouldn’t even say that it was more stable than fully patched Windows 98, even despite the NT architecture.

Well, you do also need to consider that there was a lot of shitty hardware back then too (think: cheap POS PSUs, motherboards and GPUs with crap caps, and etc.), which could be the reason why.
All of my vanilla XP and SP0 builds were rock-stable software-wise. I did have lots of problems with one SP0 build in particular... and the issue turned out to be a hardware problem: bad caps in the power supply. It was causing all sorts of "random" software problems. Once I got the PSU replaced, the system became rock-steady like the others. In fact, I still have that system with its original install still running today. I stopped using it as a main computer around 2007-2008, and since then it's been mostly sitting around, used for the occasional old game only.

Kruton 9000 wrote on 2024-04-29, 22:26:

In my memory, Windows XP was very buggy up until service pack 2. I wouldn’t even say that it was more stable than fully patched Windows 98, even despite the NT architecture.

Not sure what your definition of "stable" is, but my last experience running 98SE on a desktop machine I foolishly ordered with 98SE in summer 2000 was that, at best, I would have to reboot every two days or so due to running out of system resources. At best.

Same machine, with some extra RAM, running Win2000 could stay up for 6+ weeks without a reboot.

Now, if you ignore the system resources issue (which you could if your priority was gaming, but if you were doing any kind of multitasking... ouch...) then sure, I suppose 98SE could be stable. But otherwise, any NT that I've ever used (including pre-SP1 XP) was infinitely more stable than 98SE.

(And yes, I know, there's a certain irony that 98SE is now a legend in the retro community, while Win2000 is... not... but that's because Win2000's strengths are irrelevant for a retro machine.)

momaka wrote on 2024-04-29, 22:43:

Well, you do also need to consider that there was a lot of shitty hardware back then too (think: cheap POS PSUs, motherboards and GPUs with crap caps, and etc.), which could be the reason why.
All of my vanilla XP and SP0 builds were rock-stable software-wise. I did have lots of problems with one SP0 build in particular... and the issue turned out to be a hardware problem: bad caps in the power supply. It was causing all sorts of "random" software problems. Once I got the PSU replaced, the system became rock-steady like the others. In fact, I still have that system with its original install still running today. I stopped using it as a main computer around 2007-2008, and since then it's been mostly sitting around, used for the occasional old game only.

That's been my view too. The NT operating systems, at least on good/healthy hardware with good drivers, are rock solid.

Interestingly I don't think I've had any reliability issues caused by bad PSUs, but I've had plenty caused by failing motherboards or, even more frequently, RAM. Or bad BIOSes/drivers. Or storage-related failures - if your boot drive effectively 'falls off the motherboard', you've got a nice blue screen ahead of you.

My sense is that one thing that's helped compared to the 90s is the increasing integration. Instead of everybody and his sister soldering a bunch of random components, maybe even writing their own BIOS, etc, and trying to make an 'IBM compatible', the PC since the early 2000s and especially since third-party chipsets became history in the early 2010s has been dominated by some standardized, well-debugged parts. Much harder to screw up a motherboard design when Intel and a couple of others have done all the heavy lifting for you...

I've read mixed things about different versions of XP. Some people claim that SP3 is bloated and reduces performances, others have said they've experienced no difference.

FWIW, I have XP SP3 running on my P4 build. In using it, it seems snappier and most responsive than Windows 98 even. Benchmarks seem decent with it as well.

I'm not sure if part of that might be due to hyper-threading or SSE3, both of which are lacking on earlier P4 chips.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-04-30, 00:40:

I've read mixed things about different versions of XP. Some people claim that SP3 is bloated and reduces performances, others have said they've experienced no difference.

When did Windows adopt the Linux "unused RAM is wasted RAM" mentality? If it was XP SP3 that must have also ruffled some feathers, even though the whole point is to keep things in RAM to speed them up and clear less used stuff out to make room for new stuff when needed.

That said SP3 does have plenty of things you may or may not need eating RAM, I've made a bat file to disable every service I personally don't need that I can easily run after installing XP and be done with it. It doesn't seem necessary per se, SP3 has always ran just fine without any issues with responsivity on my systems, but hey, if I don't need it then why have it running in the background.

Wow, this sparked a lot of discussion. Mostly on topic, of course.

I finally got around to install Win98 and XP(sp3) on an SSD to that 3GHz P4. It sure pushes out some heat! 😀

i'm ran xp sp2 with a p4 2.8ghz northwood and radeon 9600 xt. i vote the radeon 95oo pro if you can unlock the pixel pipelines on a 256 width card.