The Retro PC Thread

[wclem]

Anyone out there have a motherboard that will accept a 2.6 to 2.8 ghz P4 they would part with. Need it to have an open AGP port and would prefer a few pci slots to go with it.

Or, a link to one that is not a piece of junk. I got out of PC stuff during the P4 era so I am not sure what brand to trust.

[samsonlonghair]

Anyone out there have a motherboard that will accept a 2.6 to 2.8 ghz P4 they would part with. Need it to have an open AGP port and would prefer a few pci slots to go with it.

Or, a link to one that is not a piece of junk. I got out of PC stuff during the P4 era so I am not sure what brand to trust.

I took some time to look through my hoard of old PCs and components. I might be able to help you out with Pentium 4 motherboards, but I can't find any with an AGP card port. I have a bunch with PCI of course. I have a couple that feature both PCI and PCI express. Would it help you if I had a PCI or PCIe card to throw in for no added fee?

[wclem]

I was unaware that a P4 board was made that had PCI-e slots. I thought that came after the original P4 was no longer a thing. That sure would make my life easier and give me many more options. My main goal is to make a really high end Windows XP machine that will run games from that era and before. May also swap drive with a Windows 98 drive if I can get it to cooperate with the hardware. I just assumed any board that would accept an original P4 would not support anything over AGP. Truthfully though, I was out of the loop during the P4 era so I do not know all the ins and outs. Let me know what you have and want for sure. Try to make it worth your time at least.

On a side note I found a Creative DXR2 PCI DVD decoder video card at a garage sale yesterday for a buck along with a PCI to IDE expansion card. If anyone is interested in the DVD decoder card let me know, maybe trade something for it.

[Ziggy]

I was unaware that a P4 board was made that had PCI-e slots.

Don't forget that Intel made P4's for the 775 socket during the Core 2 Duo era. Heck, you can even get newer 478 stuff. I have a Biostar mobo with a 478 socket that has PCIe, SATA, and supports DDR3. The idea was "use your existing CPU with newer hardware."

[wclem]

My main concern with a board like that is support in XP. Does it see the ports correctly?

[samsonlonghair]

I was unaware that a P4 board was made that had PCI-e slots. I thought that came after the original P4 was no longer a thing. That sure would make my life easier and give me many more options. My main goal is to make a really high end Windows XP machine that will run games from that era and before. May also swap drive with a Windows 98 drive if I can get it to cooperate with the hardware. I just assumed any board that would accept an original P4 would not support anything over AGP. Truthfully though, I was out of the loop during the P4 era so I do not know all the ins and outs. Let me know what you have and want for sure. Try to make it worth your time at least.

How would you feel about a mostly pre-built solution? I think I have a computer that meets your needs already. You could still upgrade the RAM and HDD if you want to, but it's otherwise complete. Feel free to PM me; I'll try to remember to check my messages.

[Ziggy]

My main concern with a board like that is support in XP. Does it see the ports correctly?

As long as XP drivers exist for the hardware you're using, there's no problem.

[wclem]

I honestly never researched if XP will recognize SATA or if the PCI-e video cards would even have drivers for XP or even earlier Windows versions. My whole thought process was sticking to things I was fairly certain would play well with older versions of windows. I want to build this for older games mainly. So I can play them as-is rather than trying to hunt down patches or running into tons of problems running it on 7 or 10. Want to boot 98 for 98 compatible games and boot XP for XP compatibles games. Hopefully with little patching or tweaking involved.

Anyway, NBA Jam Extreme refuses to run in windows 10, and damn it I want to play it LOL.

[isiolia]

I honestly never researched if XP will recognize SATA or if the PCI-e video cards would even have drivers for XP or even earlier Windows versions.

Figure, Vista came out in 2007, and then Windows 7 in 2009. The Core line started in 2006-ish, though many of the popular ones we'd think of are more like '07 or '08 (Q6600, E8500 for instance). Still, that puts them in a time period where XP support was still important, since it was still the dominant Windows version.

That being said, you do occasionally run into things that didn't support earlier version of Windows, though I've only really seen it with a few laptops. Usually it's stuff like sound cards with no legacy drivers, since that was a major thing that changed between XP and Vista.

If you plan to use the same hardware for 98 though, then sticking with AGP/etc is probably better. PCIe was not officially supported in that. While there are apparently some cards and things that work, it'd likely take a bit more effort to put together.

[Ziggy]

Oh, if you're gonna dual boot 98 and XP on the same hardware, then yeah.

Here's a list of nVidia cards that have drivers for 98...

http://www.nvidia.com/object/81.98_9x_supported.html