Show and Tell: XP Rigs for Retro Computing

I've been on a retro PC building kick recently, and decided to build five desktops from my childhood (my first PC's from ~2001) through about 2012, which is an era comfortably retro and cheap enough to build for peanuts, and practical & nostalgic enough to be able to actually use as 'HQ PC's' for every era of my retro gadgets I have- like PDA's, MP3 players, digital cameras, etc.

One of the rigs being set up for testing with a few of my PDA's and all their accompanying management SW.

Virtual machines just don't get you everything you want when trying to run, update, mod, and install stuff on old gadgets. From hardware passthroughs, to driver compatibility, to simple accessibility for day-to-day use (I always find I'll build a VM, configure it for one old cellphone I've got or something, and promptly forget about booting it up ever again for months at a time until I forget what I built it for and just build a new VM anyway). So, why not build some awesome physical machines dedicated to this kind of stuff?

Some of the coolest practicalities in having genuine era-correct PC's are things like having physical Serial ports, physical 5.25" and floppy bays/drives, and just fun old interfaces like IDE and AGP and weird old media drives (like LS120 disks, CompactFlash and Memorystick slots, stuff like that).

A skeleton-build of one of the 9 motherboards I was troubleshooting and testing through my process (lots were DOA, lots had faulty components, some had gremlins that couldn't handle inter-generational gear like AGP gen2 GPU's.

And between old PC's I always wanted as a kid cause they looked so cool like iMac G3's, and my personal favorite desktop aesthetic of all time- the Compaq 5000 series from that translucent color era from the 2000's, and being nostalgic for old flagship technologies and configurations like SLI, Crossfire, Intel Extreme Edition and AMD FX series CPU's, I just really, really loved the idea of building rigs that I could finally connect all my other old tech to natively while also being mind-blowingly fast and theoretically expensive if I had them back in the day (like PC's that would've run $5000+, that you can source from ebay and goodwill for a couple hundred bucks at most).

Using old CRT's, running quad-SLI setups, even the cool case stickers you could show off to wrap up the look and brag about the insane specs with- it's all just too cool to NOT bother with. And that's where it went from "let's build one!" to "damn, let's build em all! Every old config I always wanted". That journey, though, was nowhere near as straightforward as I naively expected though.

Tons of random XP-era gear during my experimental build process

Issues from finding really rare parts that almost no one even heard of back in the day, let alone have to sell on ebay now, to going through dozens of old parts that arrived DOA to me with dead capacitors- and the DRIVERS... phew. Finding compatible drivers, especially for OEM machines like my aforementioned Compaqs, sometimes took weeks of burned CD's and downloads from sources across the internet to finally find the right ones to.

But when it all comes together, and you're booting XP or Vista in 5 seconds on a 20+ year old machine, playing your favorite old PC games and instantly plug-and-playing your archaic Nomad Jukeboxes and Palm Pilots and Compaq iPaqs and Cybikos to, it is just a chef's kiss of perfection.

So I'm showing off my two XP-era rigs in this post. The other three kind of evolved their configurations along the journey, and ended up being one Vista, one Win7, and one I just recently decided to scrap the retro innards plan on (since 4 rigs are more than enough, and frankly kind of redundant once the awesomeness of "woahhh look at all these GPU's blowing away those old 3D mark benchmark scores" wore off)- and is now going to be a sleeper rig filled with bleeding edge modern parts in a 25yo mATX frame. But those 3 are for other posts.

Both my builds as I was finalizing them. Pentium 4 Extreme Edition on the left, Athlon XP flagship on the right.

So on to the topic at hand, the XP rigs are the two flagship counterparts from Intel and AMD from ~2004. The specs for my AMD Athlon XP 3200+ build actually needed the insanely rare RAM I had as a kid in middle school- and that RAM had load-monitoring LED's, which meant you kinda had to have a transparent side panel... so I had to go with a more modern case to show them off, but that reminded me of all the other cool 'gamer' lighting from that era too like CCFL tubes and holographic LED fans... so the modern case still looks pretty era correct. This is it:

See the RAM load LED's in there? Those are insanely rare Corsair XMS Pro DIMMs. It's the reason I had to use a modern case- for the side panel window. Retro lighting included the CPU fan that was just a jerry-rigged 40mm fan to add some old fashioned RGB lighting, the green LED case lighting was to emulate CCFL lights, and the rear (ceiling, and front not pictured) fans are 80mm with POV LED's that make orange and green patterns that do a pretty good job of giving the 2006-era POV customizable fans I had in highschool/college (my OG's displayed custom text messages but these just do trippy flower/square/sine patterns).

Flagship Athlon XP Rig Specs

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3200+ w/400MHz FSB Socket A (fastest Athlon XP ever)

The coveted XMS Pro RAM (I wish they still made these load-monitoring DIMMs for modern PC's but they stopped at DDR)

RAM: 1GB dual-channel DDR400 Corsair XMS Pro with load-monitoring LED's (that are truly SUPER useful when troubleshooting issues)

Storage: Silicon Power A55 256GB SATA III SSD retro-fitted with IDE adapter over ATA-133 (A55 is the standard I use in all the rigs)

GPU: Nvidia 7900GS 512MB AGP GPU (last and fastest Nvidia AGP GPU Nvidia ever made, absurdly rare- took me ~6 months to source)

Motherboard:

Motherboard: mATX FIC K7MNF-64 Nvidia nForce 2 Socket A for 400mhz FSB and DDR400 RAM. This was what I built the entire rig around- an nForce-in-its-hey-day motherboard. In this era, nForce was AMAZING. It was an Nvidia chipset built for Nvidia parts, and its management software worked AMAZINGLY for overclocking and tweaking. From the northbridge to the FSB to RAM to CPU to GPU overclocking, you could do it all seamlessly from the "Nvidia nTune" management software. Since nForce 2 though, Nvidia really stopped bothering with it so nothing after this era was really a great buy with the "nForce" name.

PSU: Thermaltake 600W 80+ White, cheap and gets the job done

Media Drives: None built-in (used a modern mATX Thermaltake case), but use an external LG Blu-Ray drive for all optical needs.

The final touch, brand and spec stickers for that OEM look.

Display: Dell 2007FPb UXGA (1600x1200 4:3 LCD), truly the BEST monitor for testing 2000's PC's and consoles- they have every input you want at hi res and the right aspect ratio

Keyboard/Mouse: Black Microsoft Explorer keyboard and black 3-button Microsoft optical Intellimouse

OS: Windows XP Pro SP3 (w/unofficial SP4+ updates and MCE 2005 "royale" theme)

Special I/O: USB IrDA transceiver for IR gadgets, Serial (standard port, but super useful for connecting pre-USB era gadgets)

Practical Purpose: This is my primary headquarters rig for ALL my 2000/XP era gadget syncing/configuring/modding/flashing/managing needs.

And my other rig is a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.2GHz, which focuses much more on that beloved Compaq 5000 case and everything else that came from those cheap OEM brand bundles of the 2000's (so matching speakers, monitor, trim and keyboard).

This is it:

Funny enough, my original intent was to build my dream childhood AMD rig (above) in my dream chassis- the Compaq 5000... but when I needed something with a side window to show off that XMS Pro RAM, I decided to re-purpose the Compaq case for the counterpart flagship of the time- a Pentium 4 build (which I despised, Netburst architecture was a joke, but I couldn't just make TWO Athlon rigs- it'd be 100% redundant). So this is kitted out with OEM Compaq monitor, keyboard, and case with blue "MyStyle Accent" transparent case trim. I have another Compaq 5000 case with Grey trim I'm actually going to use as a 'sleeper' rig with all 2025-era mATX parts.

Flagship Pentium 4 EE Rig Specs

That legendary "Extreme Edition" insignia on the side of the P4 badge

CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz Extreme Edition w/2MB L3 cache Socket 478 (~fastest Intel socket 478 P4 ever- a 3.4GHz variant existed but the 3.2GHz is just the underclocked counterpart with exact same specs... you can overclock a 3.2 to a 3.4 if you really want lol).

RAM: 2GB dual-channel DDR400 generic RAM

Storage: Silicon Power A55 256GB SATA III SSD connected to a SATA I port- aka 150MB/s.

The fastest AGP GPU of all time, the HD3850, in all its glory

GPU: ATI Radeon HD3850 512MB AGP GPU (fastest AGP GPU of ALL TIME, including the Nvidia 7900GS- by about a 25% margin... but overclocking the 7900GS does get quite close to the HD3850). Originally in the build I was running an Nvidia FX 5800 for compatibility/troubleshooting reasons, but the 5000 series SUCKED in its day and I decided, since the new motherboard isn't an nForce or married to anything Nvidia, why not use a team red GPU and hell, why not use THEIR best against team green's counterpart 7900GS in my AMD rig. Makes sense, right?

Motherboard: mATX ECS FX661-M socket 478 for 800mhz FSB and DDR400 RAM

PSU: Thermaltake 600W 80+ White, cheap and gets the job done

Media Drives: 1) Panasonic LKM-F933-1 LS120 Superdisk 3.5" drive- one of my favorite retro tech components, I have these outfitted as external drives for my iMac G3's (I featured them in an article on the site a few years ago). The technology was from Imation (same company that made the ZIP drive), and by any on-paper standard, this SHOULD have been the official replacement/evolution of the legacy 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive standard... but LS drives died in the water within years, while their proprietary ZIP counterparts somehow thrived for a while.

LS120/240 disks are some of my favorite retro PC tech of all time.

This should really be its own article so I'll keep it short- LS drives used 'magneto-optical' 3.5" disks that were the exact same format as floppy disks AND were intercompatible and could read & boot from floppies just like a standard floppy drive. But if you used an LS120 disk, you could benefit from significantly improved write and read speeds and 120MB of capacity... over 80x the capacity of a floppy! Anyway, they were amazing and that's why I have this drive equipped in this rig.

2) LG "Supermulti" 5.25" DVD burner w/Lightscribe (I got this specifically as the flagship era-correct drive that could read everything you need for mid-2000's software, and LOVED lightscribe during the 'DVD ripping era' of the mid 2000's for making really cool, professional looking CD/DVD labels).

Display: Compaq FS740 17" 1024x768 flat-screen CRT. This is one of the best basic CRT monitors out there for this era (large 17", flat screen, great geometry, and a nice 0.25" fine-pitch tube), and of course I got this to stay with that OEM Compaq aesthetic these towers came with. Even has the speaker slots for the monitor-mounted JBL speakers the systems came with.

Just like the AMD Athlon rig, I outfitted the case in all the 'brag badges' necessary to keep the OEM look. Originally I had an Nvidia Geforce 5800FX GPU as I had to find compatible legacy GPU's for the original mobo this Compaq came with, but I just love those Nvidia badges too much to replace them with the now-correct ATI stickers the rig's got now.

Keyboard/Mouse: Compaq KU-9978 Multimedia keyboard with aforementioned "MyStyle Accent" translucent trim, and white Microsoft 3-button optical Intellimouse (my favorite retro mouse of all time)

OS: Windows XP Pro SP3 (w/unofficial SP4+ updates and MCE 2005 "royale" theme). I might run 2000 or ME on it though, just because two XP machines are redundant- but I really wanted to benchmark them with the same OS environment as the CPU's are perfect competitors to each other- both '3.2GHz' models from their generation.

Special I/O: CNR port (Communications and Networking Riser), Serial (standard port, but super useful for connecting pre-USB era gadgets)

Practical Purpose: This rig really doesn't have a unique practical purpose compared to my AMD rig, I just really thought building the flagship PC's from both Intel and AMD, coupled with respective flagship GPU's from ATI and Nvidia, would be super cool for benchmarking/messing around with and getting to work with each vendor's driver and software quirks. But because this P4 rig has the superior GPU, the LS120 floppy drive, and the majestic Compaq 5000 trim, this will probably be my actual daily driver "HQ retro gadget XP machine" even though I hate Pentium 4's and the AMD Athlon+Nvidia build is my true favorite. Oh well.

BENCHMARKING AND FINAL REMARKS

So far I've benchmarked both of these rigs and their CPU's/chipsets with PCmark 02, and as you can see from the results, the difference it genuinely negligible... which says a LOT about the pointlessness of grabbing that $1000+ Intel Extreme Edition CPU when AMD's was the perfect competitor at a fraction of the price. This was truly AMD's golden era, and the catalyst of my yearning to build a "dream rig from highschool days".

I'm no fan of AMD in 2025 and haven't been since the Bulldozer architecture released in around 2011 (aka AMD's "Netburst Architecture" failure of a line)... but man oh man, back in the Thunderbird days (the CPU line I used in my very first PC build in 7th grade) and on, all the way through to the Athlon 64 days, they were the cream of the crop- WAY more affordable than Intel yet also trounced them in performance... an absolute win-win era of total dominance.

Side tangent: AMD also had the superior 64-bit architecture (a key feature being that it was backward-compatible with 32-bit software so we could transition seamlessly over the years) and instruction set foundation the entire world adopted and we all use even now, vs Intel's almost worthless Itanium 64-bit only architecture.

So anyway, on to the benchmarks I've taken so far. This is really just relegated to CPU performance with PCmark 2002- but I plan on running an entire gamut of 3Dmark, legacy and Geekbench standards to see how the CPU and GPU coupling performs in each.

In the real world, I've been absolutely loving the near-instant (less than 5 second) boot times from splashscreen to Windows login these things can do with the help of modern parts like SSD's paired with these blazing-fast era correct specs, and how buttery smooth and beautiful demanding games like Doom 3, Farcry, and Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour (my favorite RTS of all time) look and run on those original XGA monitors. It really brings you right back to childhood.

The results I've gotten are below, and they're hilariously predictable:

AMD Athlon XP 3200+ w/dual channel DDR400

Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz w/dual channel DDR400

I just love those results. The ~$250 (at the time) Athlon CPU is marginally (but negligibly to be honest) FASTER than the ~$1000 Intel CPU. Lives up to exactly what its model name was, the "Athlon XP 3200+" aka 3200MHz equivalent to Intel's 3200MHz offering. The HDD score is kind of unusual, but still makes sense- the Intel rig has native SATA I ports, and the AMD rig only had IDE so needed a SATA-to-IDE converter card. That may have added some overhead to bottleneck the connection. But on paper, the the AMD rig's IDE bandwidth was 133MB/s against the Intel's SATA I 150MB/s connection which isn't a huge difference by the standard... on paper.

I do intend to do GPU benchmarks and some overclocking on all the components, but for now I'm happy that these guys are up and running reliably. I think they go really well as a balance to my iMac G3 rigs I built a few years ago:

Both my G3's I rebuilt, restored and upgraded around 2021. The aqua on the left is just my favorite G3 color (2nd gen with pretty standard 400MHz CPU), the gray on the right is the fastest G3 of all time the 'summer 03' model.

Side view to get a better idea of what I meant by "going really well next to the Compaq 5000's"

The tower on the right is the one covered in this post, and the one on the right is the original tower I got that started this whole journey. I decided against making two XP-era rigs with these beauties, so my new plan with the gray one is my next project. It's going to be a 'sleeper' rig, fully kitted out with 2025 era mATX components, an RTX 5060Ti (best GPU you can get in a compact mATX form factor), and all the components are going to be WHITE. So looks like a relic on the outside, pop the side cover and get to check out a bunch of new, white, cutting edge gear. I'm planning to make it my actual daily driver PC.

That's it for this post, thanks for stopping by! If you're building any cool retro rigs, send a comment on this post- I'd love to chat about PC building plans or help you if you're looking for insights or directions on where/how to find this stuff.