Build a very overpowered Win9x system. That's what I did, and I'm still amazed with how smoothly games perform on a rig like that, even at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 16xAF.

And having a PCIe system is not a problem. Radeon X800 PCIe cards work fine on Win9x using Catalyst 6.2. Chipset drivers are also a non-issue. But if you want to clean up all the exclamation marks from device manager, there are ways to do that too. Here's how mine looks with everything installed.

I'd be looking at industrial Core2-supported (or moddable) motherboards with ISA slots and building a ridiculous retrorocket.

I running an E8600 with win98SE @4,5GHz . Really nice single core CPU speed (i think the best cpu for win98SE looking on single core speed with huge L2 cache) and with 1066MHz DDR Ram.

I'm using Windows 10 on this machine...

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E7500 @ 2.93GHz, 2933 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)

it runs ok for non-gaming things.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-02-21, 20:10:

Build a very overpowered Win9x system. That's what I did, and I'm still amazed with how smoothly games perform on a rig like that, even at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 16xAF.

And having a PCIe system is not a problem. Radeon X800 PCIe cards work fine on Win9x using Catalyst 6.2. Chipset drivers are also a non-issue. But if you want to clean up all the exclamation marks from device manager, there are ways to do that too. Here's how mine looks with everything installed.

That's a nice system! Yes, the X800 series is what I had in mind when it comes to PCIe cards that work in Win9x. I would love to acquire an X800 GTO or similar, like you have, but they're very hard to come by in my area! I actually own a Radeon X850 AGP (I bought it new back in the day) that is paired with a Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2. I expect this system would benchmark slower than your setup but in practical games is probably very close...

I actually had a separate Win9x system using a s754 Athlon 64 + Radeon 9800 Pro AGP which was already running everything I could throw at it at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 16xAF... I found that the more demanding 9x era games could usually be made to run on XP.... in which case they could be run by a far more powerful system (eg i7-3770 with GTX980)

bZbZbZ wrote on 2024-02-21, 22:14:

That's a nice system! Yes, the X800 series is what I had in mind when it comes to PCIe cards that work in Win9x. I would love to acquire an X800 GTO or similar, like you have, but they're very hard to come by in my area! I actually own a Radeon X850 AGP (I bought it new back in the day) that is paired with a Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2. I expect this system would benchmark slower than your setup but in practical games is probably very close...

Cheers! The final build with pics and benchmarks is in this thread. It took some effort to install all of the fixes which make it Win9x compatible, but I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

I found that the more demanding 9x era games could usually be made to run on XP.... in which case they could be run by a far more powerful system (eg i7-3770 with GTX980)

While I generally agree, there are a few edge cases where you may want to run a game on an overpowered Win9x rig. For example, if you wish to play Quake 3 with A3D 2.0, then you're pretty much stuck with Win9x, because later operating systems don't properly support that API on Vortex2 cards.

I completely agree with you. I was a big fan of the C2 series back in the day:
- bought a basically launch day E6600 to finally replace my aging Willamette/RDRAM P4
- bought an E5200 that eventually got replaced with a cheap Q8300 and became my main desktop system until early 2017
- built a server for home with... the Xeon-branded version of the LGA775 E8400
- my aunt had a Dell with a Q... 8300 or 8400
- my mom had a Gateway-nee-Acer AiO with a Q8200 or Q8200S or something like that
- my dad had a Dell with an E8400
- I reused the E5200 in a small form factor box I used as a router for a decade
... and I have a feeling that I may be forgetting a C2 desktop or two in my past.

But fundamentally, I agree with you. I kept my one surviving C2Q system in the closet for 6 years or so, then... well, I started to get into vintage Macs. And I think that led me to vintage PC land, which is conceptually much more complicated and unintuitive than vintage Macland. And I realized that the C2Q in the closet could make a great retro XP system, so I dug it out of the closet, replaced the dead CR2032 battery, put a new elcheapo SSD in, bought a Q9650 on eBay, and replaced the 5770 video card with a 7970 from eBay. And then... having started hanging out here, that got me thinking about ivy bridge. It just so happened that one of my best friends had a 3570k system that he wasn't using very heavily, so I ended up buying that from him, putting the 7970 in there, and... putting his video card into the C2Q. And then the C2Q went back to the closet...

That being said, I think interest in C2 will grow. But... it will be a while. I think there's going to be a huge amount of sandy/ivy bridge being thrown out in response to Windows 11 and Windows 10 EoL. If those are not enough to satisfy demand for retro XP systems, then maybe people will then look at C2.

But otherwise, yes, I think C2 is one of those things that was tremendously significant at the time it came out (the processor that basically... marked the beginning of the end of needing to upgrade your hardware every 3-5 years for productivity applications, not to mention the processor that vindicated Intel fanboys for a decade and the processor that sold Apple on x86 for Macs), but that, long-term-wise, doesn't actually have that much retro appeal.

And as for C2 for Win98, if you want to be adventurous with PCI-E, maybe, but otherwise that's done. The 98SE-friendly AGP C2-capable i865 motherboards have become much, much, much harder to find.

Robbbert wrote on 2024-02-21, 21:15:

I'm using Windows 10 on this machine...

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E7500 @ 2.93GHz, 2933 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)

it runs ok for non-gaming things.

Is it worth making a quick trip to eBay and looking for a Q9x50, if your board supports quad-cores?

VivienM wrote on 2024-02-21, 23:07:

Robbbert wrote on 2024-02-21, 21:15:

I'm using Windows 10 on this machine...

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E7500 @ 2.93GHz, 2933 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)

it runs ok for non-gaming things.

Is it worth making a quick trip to eBay and looking for a Q9x50, if your board supports quad-cores?

I think it's a tough argument to make. Instead of a Q9x50, probably the best LGA775 upgrade would be a Xeon E5450. There are pre-modded (fits LGA775) models on AliExpress for around $20. But even that CPU (4 cores, 12MB cache) when overclocked to 3.6GHz via FSB400 is still going to be pretty slow for the modern web. It might not even be worth the trouble of spending $20, waiting 2 months shipping, and modding the motherboard BIOS. Because if you want a cheap web browsing machine, a $150 mini PC with an N100 will be far better in many ways...

If it's on the edge of Windows XP it's still technically period correct.

I have a Core 2 laptop with a Win XP sticker on it... way overpowered, but has a classic look to it.

Also have a Pentium M laptop with a Win 2k sticker on it.. way overpowered for that, but has it's own older classic look...

If you want more retro you could try a different case/keyboard/mouse... ?

bZbZbZ wrote on 2024-02-21, 20:03:

• Core 2 is borderline not quite period correct for Windows XP. There was definitely overlap, as Vista came out a year or so after Core 2 Duo and was adopted slowly.

It's as period correct as something can get. Vista never had a period. It barely got past 20% market share within Windows and it only took about half a year for W7 to overtake it while it took 2 years to overtake XP.

bZbZbZ wrote on 2024-02-21, 20:03:

• Core 2 LGA775 has excellent XP compatibility, but so do LGA 1156 and even LGA 1155. So a non-period-correct time machine would be more performant (and possibly lower power) on a newer... platform.

But Core2 IS period correct. Also, for XP era a fast Core2 perfectly fine performance-wise. The bottleneck is the GPU in almost all cases. Core i has advantages over Core2, no doubt, but it's more for ultimate and quirk builds.

Nehalem also was delivered with XP.

bZbZbZ wrote on 2024-02-21, 20:03:

[...]

• Core 2 is borderline not quite period correct for Windows XP. There was definitely overlap, as Vista came out a year or so after Core 2 Duo and was adopted slowly. When I built my Q6600 I clean installed Vista (and had very few issues using my then-new hardware) so to me Core 2 doesn't give me WinXP nostalgia. I (and many folks I suspect) spent most of our XP time with earlier systems.

I personally used windows XP up to when windows 7 came out. I did try vista on my Athlon X2 6400+ AM2 rig with 4GB of ram and a Radeon X1950XT, it felt sluggish and cumbersome compared to XP. I also remember driver issues with some of my peripherals, particularly my scanner - so when I upgraded to a Q6600 + MSI P35 Neo2, I installed windows XP 64 bit, and stuck with it all the way up to windows 7. In fact I'd just bought an i7 920 + Asus p6t deluxe a little after Win7 came out, so I never really ran anything other then XP on my Q6600. I also stuck with win98se for longer then most people, mostly because I played a lot of DOS games witch ment WinME and 2K were a no-go for me, and I didn't want to allocate then precious hard-drive space to dual-booting. 98 served me well all the way up to 2002ish when I switched to XP on my main PC and built a dedicated DOS/98 box out of parts leftover from my cousin's old K6-2 500. So for me, XP era started and ended late. I rarely used Vista, and I still have PC's that run windows 7, but that might change when Steam removes win7 support completly and I can't patch/hack steam to run on my win7 boxes (Nehalem LGA1366 and Sandy Bridge LGA 1155/2011 PCs).

bZbZbZ wrote on 2024-02-21, 20:03:

• Core 2 LGA775 has excellent XP compatibility, but so do LGA 1156 and even LGA 1155. So a non-period-correct time machine would be more performant (and possibly lower power) on a newer... platform.

I feel that some earlyer XP games (2001-2005) seem to run a bit smoother on older hardware, like LGA775 Core 2 Duo and AMD Athlon X2 939/AM2 rigs - stuff like Doom 3, Quake 4, Far Cry, GTA San Andreas feel smoother, despite obviously running slower on these PCs. These games will also run on the Socket A and 478 platforms, but not as well as on LGA775 and AM2, especially if you want to crank up the visuals, so for me personally, such machines have use - running 2000 to 2006 games.

Some later games like Fallout 3 and Warhammer 40k Dawn of War seem to be more stable on these older PCs as well... like somehow too much performace messes with the games engines.

RandomStranger wrote on 2024-02-22, 07:44:

It's as period correct as something can get. Vista never had a period. It barely got past 20% market share within Windows and it only took about half a year for W7 to overtake it while it took 2 years to overtake XP.
Also, for XP era a fast Core2 perfectly fine performance-wise. The bottleneck is the GPU in almost all cases. Core i has advantages over Core2, no doubt, but it's more for ultimate and quirk builds.

Socket3 wrote on 2024-02-22, 08:02:

I personally used windows XP up to when windows 7 came out.

I'd like to think that I left room for other peoples' diverse experiences, while explaining my own. I remember trying the x64 version XP and having so many driver issues... For my hardware Vista x64 actually worked better!

I think it's important to distinguish that even though Vista peaked at ~20% market share within Windows, that doesn't mean that only 20% of systems using Core 2 CPUs used Vista. The marketshare breakdown includes (or attempts to include) all systems in service at a given point of time. That's going to include a lot of P4, PIII, AthlonXP, etc systems that were still running XP. I know that on the corporate side a lot of workstations utilized the XP downgrade option, but I recall that the vast majority of consumer grade PCs would've come with Vista (sometimes "Vista Basic" heh...) pre-installed. My expectation is that most folks at home (certainly far more than 20%) who bought a new Core 2 based system from Best Buy, Dell.com, etc would've just kept using Vista as installed on the machine. DIY builders (I was one of them) would've had a choice of XP or Vista of course.

A similar situation occurs today, where Windows 10 still has roughly double the marketshare of Windows 11. But it wouldn't be right to assume that Windows 10 is twice as popular as Windows 11 amongst AM5 + LGA1700 systems.

I certainly appreciate that a lot of folks intentionally skipped Vista, and that's perfectly valid. If you used your Core 2 system with XP back in the day, that's true and meaningful to you. And the point that high end WinXP gaming is almost always GPU limited is a fair one!

bZbZbZ wrote on 2024-02-22, 16:06:

I'd like to think that I left room for other peoples' diverse experiences, while explaining my own. I remember trying the x64 v […]
Show full quote

RandomStranger wrote on 2024-02-22, 07:44:

It's as period correct as something can get. Vista never had a period. It barely got past 20% market share within Windows and it only took about half a year for W7 to overtake it while it took 2 years to overtake XP.
Also, for XP era a fast Core2 perfectly fine performance-wise. The bottleneck is the GPU in almost all cases. Core i has advantages over Core2, no doubt, but it's more for ultimate and quirk builds.

Socket3 wrote on 2024-02-22, 08:02:

I personally used windows XP up to when windows 7 came out.

I'd like to think that I left room for other peoples' diverse experiences, while explaining my own. I remember trying the x64 version XP and having so many driver issues... For my hardware Vista x64 actually worked better!

I think it's important to distinguish that even though Vista peaked at ~20% market share within Windows, that doesn't mean that only 20% of systems using Core 2 CPUs used Vista. The marketshare breakdown includes (or attempts to include) all systems in service at a given point of time. That's going to include a lot of P4, PIII, AthlonXP, etc systems that were still running XP. I know that on the corporate side a lot of workstations utilized the XP downgrade option, but I recall that the vast majority of consumer grade PCs would've come with Vista (sometimes "Vista Basic" heh...) pre-installed. My expectation is that most folks at home (certainly far more than 20%) who bought a new Core 2 based system from Best Buy, Dell.com, etc would've just kept using Vista as installed on the machine. DIY builders (I was one of them) would've had a choice of XP or Vista of course.

A similar situation occurs today, where Windows 10 still has roughly double the marketshare of Windows 11. But it wouldn't be right to assume that Windows 10 is twice as popular as Windows 11 amongst AM5 + LGA1700 systems.

I certainly appreciate that a lot of folks intentionally skipped Vista, and that's perfectly valid. If you used your Core 2 system with XP back in the day, that's true and meaningful to you. And the point that high end WinXP gaming is almost always GPU limited is a fair one!

Vista's market share peaked around fall 2009. That's right around the commercial release of Windows 7 and half a year after MS ended mainstream support for XP. And also a lot of home users "downgraded" to XP, at least in its early life.

So I guess the main question I still have is... how is a Core 2 better than a similar core-count Phenom II? (besides person-specific nostalgia)

bZbZbZ wrote on 2024-02-22, 03:16:

I think it's a tough argument to make. Instead of a Q9x50, probably the best LGA775 upgrade would be a Xeon E5450. There are pre-modded (fits LGA775) models on AliExpress for around $20. But even that CPU (4 cores, 12MB cache) when overclocked to 3.6GHz via FSB400 is still going to be pretty slow for the modern web. It might not even be worth the trouble of spending $20, waiting 2 months shipping, and modding the motherboard BIOS. Because if you want a cheap web browsing machine, a $150 mini PC with an N100 will be far better in many ways...

but then again i5 4460-4590 are $5-10 and work perfectly fine with modern software stack (W10 etc). You can get whole 1150 socket office PCs for ~$20-30 that deliver better performance than those "modern" miniPCs.

bZbZbZ wrote on 2024-02-22, 16:23:

So I guess the main question I still have is... how is a Core 2 better than a similar core-count Phenom II? (besides person-specific nostalgia)

Arent Phenoms slower than core2? Personally I dont like Amd between K8 and Ryzens just like I dont like Intel between P3 and Core.

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-02-22, 17:22:

bZbZbZ wrote on 2024-02-22, 16:23:

So I guess the main question I still have is... how is a Core 2 better than a similar core-count Phenom II? (besides person-specific nostalgia)

Arent Phenoms slower than core2? Personally I dont like Amd between K8 and Ryzens just like I dont like Intel between P3 and Core.

Phenom II roughly matches the performance of late E8000 and Q9000 series Core2 CPUs. The 6 core Phenom IIs can perform around first gen consumer grade i7 CPUs (800 series). They were decent, I daily drove a 1055T until 2019. But they came late. The real mess was between the Phenom II and Ryzen.

bZbZbZ wrote on 2024-02-21, 20:03:

I remember when the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad came out. It was the return of Intel leadership and a reversal of Netburst. I r […]
Show full quote

I remember when the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad came out. It was the return of Intel leadership and a reversal of Netburst. I remember seeing the ridiculous benchmarks showing the Core 2 Duo wiping the floor with the Pentium D (at far less power) and beating the Athlon 64 / FX / X2 handily - especially in games. In 2007 I built myself a Core 2 Quad Q6600 based system which hosted 3 graphics cards (GeForce 8800GT, ATI HD 4870, AMD HD 5850) and 3 operating systems (Vista, 7, 8.1) over a span of 5 years as my primary PC (until Haswell). Oh and I also overclocked that Q6600 by over +40%. The Core 2 / LGA775 platform was exceptional and had incredible longevity... to me, it's sort of a legend.

But what about now? Core 2 systems are available on local used markets for almost (sometimes actually) free. This is a very fine setup for an XP gaming setup (or retro time machine). But... nowadays, with other alternatives available... has Core 2 lost some of its lustre? Is it... maybe even the least good out of a set of very good alternatives?

• Core 2 platforms typically aren't good for Windows 98. There are a few 775 systems with AGP slots, and a few PCIe graphics cards that work with Win98... but in general it is far easier to build an overpowered Win9x system using AMD s754/939 or even a s478 Pentium 4.

• Core 2 is borderline not quite period correct for Windows XP. There was definitely overlap, as Vista came out a year or so after Core 2 Duo and was adopted slowly. When I built my Q6600 I clean installed Vista (and had very few issues using my then-new hardware) so to me Core 2 doesn't give me WinXP nostalgia. I (and many folks I suspect) spent most of our XP time with earlier systems.

• Core 2 LGA775 has excellent XP compatibility, but so do LGA 1156 and even LGA 1155. So a non-period-correct time machine would be more performant (and possibly lower power) on a newer... platform.

• Core 2 is generally slower and less efficient than Phenom II. So even though Phenom II came out later as a budget alternative to LGA 1156 based Core CPUs, as a retro computing hobbyist I think it has some real advantages over Core 2. It's very compatible with XP... it uses the same DDR2 or DDR3 memory... more of the Phenom II lineup came multiplier unlocked... the AM2+/AM3 socket is surprisingly compatible with many modern coolers designed to clip onto AM4... and it's almost as cheap/plentiful in today's used market as Core 2.

I actually am struggling to think of ways a Core 2 duo / quad is better at anything than a Phenom II X2/X3/X4/X6 Black Edition.

What are your thoughts?

i'm sure core 2 can be made to work with win98 easily enough, i just wouln't. win98 is fast enough on any p3 or greater imo and the extra speed is of little practical use, just kinda fun. For games and games newer than 2001 usually run fine on XP anyway.
Core 2 seems, even now, pretty good with some lighter Linux, even Mint. It's fine with Win7 too. XP might be period correct in an overlapping sense but why waste the extra 32 bits 😀 (unless planning to use xp 64 bit..)
Machines of this period, the later 2000's seem abundant too, cheap and sometimes free though i think now they are not being thrown out of offices so much anymore, that happened a few years ago