8800GTS 512MB -- Windows XP or Win 7?

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billabong132

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I'm building a 'retro' gaming PC centered around an 8800GTS 512MB. And I'm having trouble deciding on if I should go with Windows XP or Windows 7 for the OS.

The CPU is a Phenom II x4 @ 3.4GHz.

I'm thinking Win 7 because Win XP won't support the DX10 features of the card. But I'm also worried it will be too slow for Win 7 era games.

What do y'all think?
 
I was using Macs back then so this represents a gap in my PC hardware/game knowledge. I just kind of want to explore the Moby games best of lists for that era. I don't have a specific game/games in mind.
 
8800GTS was more of an XP / Vista card then Windows7.

there was a HUGE issue with the Vista drivers from Nvidia as they were broken and NVidia tried to blame MS for the issue, when they just didn't work on them.
 
Phenom is too new for that card. At least the way I see it, maybe I'm wrong. It is possible.

I would go with 7. I ran 7 with my 8800gtx.
 
What do you mean Windows XP won't support DirectX 10? Crysis had DX10 and that was on Windows XP.

Anyway there's no point in fooling with XP since places like Steam will not even support it at all so just go with Windows 7.
 
Dual boot XP and Windows 7 like we all did in the late 2000s :p. Both OSes will run fine on the Phenom. I ran a Phenom II X4 955BE from 2009 all the way to 2014 on windows 7 + XP with a Radeon HD 5770. If the GPU starts bleeding, there are much better video cards with XP support all the way up to AMD HD 2xx / Nvidia GTX 9xx.

Auntjemima is right though, in the Phenom II's time people would have bought a Radeon HD 4000-5000 series card or GTX 9xxx-2xx, but this is really only if you want to be time period accurate / need more horsepower..
 
jobert said:
What do you mean Windows XP won't support DirectX 10? Crysis had DX10 and that was on Windows XP.

Anyway there's no point in fooling with XP since places like Steam will not even support it at all so just go with Windows 7.
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You did need Vista or 7 to use the DX10 features, Crysis just had both dx9 and dx10 modes.

Besides considerably worse performance, dx10 gave you "3d" vehicle trails on the ground and ermmm, not sure was the other thing? reflection or water stuff maybe, it wasn't that impressive.
 
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jobert said:
Why choose XP? And why disable three cores if he does? Dual cores and quad cores were a thing even on Windows XP.
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For better compadability with retro games. Just because something is a thing doesn't mean it's a good idea. Presumably they have a more powerful PC for games that require more power.
 
kalston said:
You did need Vista or 7 to use the DX10 features, Crysis just had both dx9 and dx10 modes.

Besides considerably worse performance, dx10 gave you "3d" vehicle trails on the ground and ermmm, not sure was the other thing? reflection or water stuff maybe, it wasn't that impressive.
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I must have had Vista at the time then instead of Windows XP as I remember seeing the DX10 option. I played Crysis on the day it was released as I remember picking it up from Circuit City.
 
terpsy said:
8800GTS was more of an XP / Vista card then Windows7.

there was a HUGE issue with the Vista drivers from Nvidia as they were broken and NVidia tried to blame MS for the issue, when they just didn't work on them.
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Interesting. I wonder if they ever fixed the drivers. I do have a sealed copy of Vista Home Premium x64 I could use.
 
If you want to go "retro" go with XP as it has far better support for older games. Don't worry too much about the DX10 capability of the card because at the time DX10 vs DX9 difference was almost nothing, that and the fact that the 8800GT 512MB wasn't particularly good at running DX10 in the first place.
 
Win XP is definitely my vote, that is what most folks would have been running for a gaming system at the time, up until Win7 released in many cases. While a big deal was made of Tesla supporting DX10, IIRC it was more useful for it's DX9 performance which was fantastic and DX9 stayed relevant all the way up until DX11 released. I picked up an 8800GTS near launch and upgraded to Vista to try the fancy new DX10 features in Crysis, Bioshock, and Supreme Commander and came away disappointed. DX9 and WinXP just ran way better.

So yeah. DX10 is kind of pointless IMO. And if one really wants to play in DX10 mode, a GTX 280 or 295 would be a better choice anyhow. Just treat the 8800 like a DX9 card.
 
Decide which OS to use by the games you'll be playing on it. If any of the games might have issues with Win 7 XP will by far be the better choice. Otherwise go with Win 7. Performance in Win 7 will be at least as good as XP in the vast majority of cases.
 
jobert said:
What do you mean Windows XP won't support DirectX 10? Crysis had DX10 and that was on Windows XP.

Anyway there's no point in fooling with XP since places like Steam will not even support it at all so just go with Windows 7.
Click to expand...

Steam's Windows 7 support is on its way out. Now that extended support for Windows 7 has ended, Chrome is dropping support for it early in 2023, which means Steam will too since large parts of it run on Chromium. That is unless Valve makes an active effort to backport security and functional updates to their own branch of Chromium. Valve has no reason to keep Windows 7 compatibility because only a tiny fraction of legitimate Steam users still use Windows 7. 32 bit Windows 7 is only used by 0.11% of Steam users, while the 64 bit version is at 1.88% and falling.

Steam is not a requirement for playing games on Windows. There were plenty of games in the XP era that didn't use Steam, and even some Steam games that had non-Steam releases on places like GOG.

ZodaEX said:
For better compadability with retro games. Just because something is a thing doesn't mean it's a good idea. Presumably they have a more powerful PC for games that require more power.
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Yeah, no. Crippling a quad to a single core isn't going to help with compatibility. If you're having to choke down the CPU to a single core, then your retro machine is targeting the wrong era.

There's absolutely no reason to cripple a quad to 1 core on XP. While the majority of games in the XP era were still single threaded, or at most two threaded, the rest of the system also used CPU time. If you cram everything on a single core, you're going to lose a lot of performance. Almost all games of that time worked fine on multi-core processors, even if they weren't SMP aware. The only game that I ever encountered that had problems was the GOTY edition of Unreal Tournament 1999, but that was fixed in patch 436. That game also predated multicore processors by years, so it has an excuse.
 
billabong132 said:
Interesting. I wonder if they ever fixed the drivers. I do have a sealed copy of Vista Home Premium x64 I could use.
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They eventually did. I was actually banned for 2 weeks on Anandtech for calling out Nvidia and their driver situation and attacked by the NVidia representative as even after the launch they had no working driver for their video card and Vista (although claiming it will be completed and released on Launch Day). It was months until they delivered a working Vista driver with the functionality of the new Vista features.
 
auntjemima said:
Phenom is too new for that card. At least the way I see it, maybe I'm wrong. It is possible.

I would go with 7. I ran 7 with my 8800gtx.
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Phenom is period appropriate here. The 8800GTS released in early 2007 and the first Phenom X4's were released in late 2007. Athlon 64 X2 parts were also still releasing into 2007.
 
"Retro" system huh? I have one of these in my "current" system because I haven't built a PC in over 15 years. LOL. I am running Win 7. Works great. The card has been going strong for almost two decades. It got me through many COD marathons. It is time for an upgrade though. I'll probably sell this none off to someone as a nice paper weight.
 

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Are there even games that work on Windows 7 but won't work on Windows 10 thus requiring a "retro" computer?
 
Good form going w/ WinXP and a 4:3 5:4 monitor for that hardware. Ultimate DX9 gaming box right there (y)
 
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The last driver for the 8800GTS for Windows 7 is 342.01 from 2016-12.
The last driver for Windows XP for the 8800GTS is 340.52 from 2014-7.

I would go with Windows 7. It's compatible with games designed for Windows XP. There's no reason to stay back on XP. You get a 2.5 year newer driver for Win7.. a little more performance is baked in. Will have better drivers for soundcards too. And Windows7 is faster than XP.
 
GoodBoy said:
The last driver for the 8800GTS for Windows 7 is 342.01 from 2016-12.
The last driver for Windows XP for the 8800GTS is 340.52 from 2014-7.

I would go with Windows 7. It's compatible with games designed for Windows XP. There's no reason to stay back on XP. You get a 2.5 year newer driver for Win7.. a little more performance is baked in. Will have better drivers for soundcards too. And Windows7 is faster than XP.
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Newer doesn't mean better. By the time the 2014 driver came along, Nvidia had long stopped optimizing games for the G8x/9x cores.

You'll also need to show some evidence for Windows 7 being faster than XP, because that's complete nonsense. Windows 7 required far more system resources than XP ever did.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
You'll also need to show some evidence for Windows 7 being faster than XP, because that's complete nonsense. Windows 7 required far more system resources than XP ever did.
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This is incorrect. Win7 on XP era hardware ran just as fast if not better (due to better resource management) than XP. I know this because I ran Win7 on several XP era systems. One of these instances was on a friend's single core AMD based laptop (I don't remember what CPU) and I think 256 meg of RAM. With the exact same software installed as he had on XP it was noticeably more responsive in many cases and never once felt slower no matter what.

The inefficient and resource hogging Vista was a completely different story and may be what you were remembering. Also keep in mind that at the end of its life XP needed a lot more in resources to run well than it did closer to release. XP SP2 I think needed a minimum of 256 meg of RAM to run decent and SP3 needed closer to 512. Depending on what software used, Win7 could run just fine on 512 but Vista needed a minimum of 2 gig to have a chance.
 
SmokeRngs said:
This is incorrect. Win7 on XP era hardware ran just as fast if not better (due to better resource management) than XP. I know this because I ran Win7 on several XP era systems. One of these instances was on a friend's single core AMD based laptop (I don't remember what CPU) and I think 256 meg of RAM. With the exact same software installed as he had on XP it was noticeably more responsive in many cases and never once felt slower no matter what.
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Yeah, no. Never happened.

Windows 7 runs like trash on anything less than 2 GB for 32 bit and 4 GB for 64 bit. Windows Update for almost the entire lifespan of Windows 7 had a bug that would consume all available system memory on low memory systems and keep the machine locked up in a fever pitch disk swapping routine for literally days.

https://social.technet.microsoft.co...fd1a5b4/windows-update-scan-high-memory-usage
https://www.sevenforums.com/perform...high-memory-usage-svchost-windows-update.html
https://woshub.com/fix-high-memory-usage-by-svchost-exe-wuauserv/
svchost_exe_high_memory.jpg


Windows 7 also consumes over twenty times the disk space that even an SP3 install of XP does. That grows exponentially larger with Windows Updates being downloaded and stored automatically on the machine, as well as volume shadow copies. Heaven forbid you have a bug that causes Windows to automatically generate crash dumps, which can eat up gigabytes. XP era machines can and did experience complete exhaustion of drive space, resulting in even slower machines. I've had even machines designed for Windows 7 have 100 GB drives completely eaten up with Windows memory dumps.

tl;dr, you're not getting better performance from a bloated OS on 256 MB of RAM. You must have had a fever dream one time years ago. There's a reason that a whole generation of kids grew up hating Asus EeePCs that had shitty Atom processors and 1 GB of RAM trying to run Windows 7. If you forced them to use a single core processor with 256 MB of RAM on Windows 7, you'd have a nationwide mutiny on your hands.

SmokeRngs said:
The inefficient and resource hogging Vista was a completely different story and may be what you were remembering. Also keep in mind that at the end of its life XP needed a lot more in resources to run well than it did closer to release. XP SP2 I think needed a minimum of 256 meg of RAM to run decent and SP3 needed closer to 512. Depending on what software used, Win7 could run just fine on 512 but Vista needed a minimum of 2 gig to have a chance.
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Windows 7 is literally Vista with a spit shine. There is no major difference between the two that would make 7 run better with less memory. I've built literally thousands of machines with both operating systems, they behave exactly the same on low memory, they run like garbage. You aren't doing anymore than notepad.exe and one 90s game on 512 MB of RAM on either. Forget about opening an internet browser. Windows 7 definitely in no way has better resource management than XP did.

Windows XP SP3 had the same minimum memory requirement as RTM, 64 MB. It would also run equally as garbage on 64 MB.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
Yeah, no. Never happened.

Windows 7 runs like trash on anything less than 2 GB for 32 bit and 4 GB for 64 bit. Windows Update for almost the entire lifespan of Windows 7 had a bug that would consume all available system memory on low memory systems and keep the machine locked up in a fever pitch disk swapping routine for literally days.

https://social.technet.microsoft.co...fd1a5b4/windows-update-scan-high-memory-usage
https://www.sevenforums.com/perform...high-memory-usage-svchost-windows-update.html
https://woshub.com/fix-high-memory-usage-by-svchost-exe-wuauserv/
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Windows 7 also consumes over twenty times the disk space that even an SP3 install of XP does. That grows exponentially larger with Windows Updates being downloaded and stored automatically on the machine, as well as volume shadow copies. Heaven forbid you have a bug that causes Windows to automatically generate crash dumps, which can eat up gigabytes. XP era machines can and did experience complete exhaustion of drive space, resulting in even slower machines. I've had even machines designed for Windows 7 have 100 GB drives completely eaten up with Windows memory dumps.

tl;dr, you're not getting better performance from a bloated OS on 256 MB of RAM. You must have had a fever dream one time years ago. There's a reason that a whole generation of kids grew up hating Asus EeePCs that had shitty Atom processors and 1 GB of RAM trying to run Windows 7. If you forced them to use a single core processor with 256 MB of RAM on Windows 7, you'd have a nationwide mutiny on your hands.



Windows 7 is literally Vista with a spit shine. There is no major difference between the two that would make 7 run better with less memory. I've built literally thousands of machines with both operating systems, they behave exactly the same on low memory, they run like garbage. You aren't doing anymore than notepad.exe and one 90s game on 512 MB of RAM on either. Forget about opening an internet browser. Windows 7 definitely in no way has better resource management than XP did.

Windows XP SP3 had the same minimum memory requirement as RTM, 64 MB. It would also run equally as garbage on 64 MB.
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Yes, it did happen. Vista was a bloated piece of shit that had some of the worst resource management that has ever existed. Win7 was not the same and could run just fine with nowhere near the resources that Vista needed and about the same as XP. If you had built thousands of machines you should know this. I didn't need to build thousands of machines to see it.

I also did not say that Win7 on XP era hardware was running all the software from Win7 times perfectly on 256 meg of RAM. I explicitly stated that the software the friend was running ran fine. Considering it was a rather old laptop originally built during XP times it wasn't running brand new games and the highest end of software. But what it was running ran just as well if not better than it did on XP. He even tried Vista on that laptop once against my recommendation. It was an unholy mess and got wiped within an hour because it was literally unusable.

I have no clue why people still seem to think 7 was nothing but a re-named Vista because that's far from the truth. It needed a fraction of the CPU and RAM resources to run well. That's an absolute fact. You obviously needed more than XP era resources to run at the time modern games and some software but that's for Captain Obvious to say. Running XP era games and software on Win7 required little more, if any more resources than the XP era hardware in the vast majority of cases.
 
Regardless of the Win7 / XP performance question, OP said the goal was a "retro" system and WinXP seems appropriate for what's basically a really good DX9c gaming box (the slightly newer CPU notwithstanding)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Win7 would be more "period-appropriate" for a Fermi / Kepler or late Terascale / early GCN GPU IMO, but not Tesla.
 
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billabong132 said:
For those curious: I went with Win XP.

Crysis benchmark running at 1280z1024 on a 4:3 panel:

Min FPS: 45, Avg FPS: 71, Max FPS: 94
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I don't think that I ever saw more than 30 fps at any point back then. Even when I was running 8800 640 GTS in SLI
 
GoodBoy said:
The last driver for the 8800GTS for Windows 7 is 342.01 from 2016-12.
The last driver for Windows XP for the 8800GTS is 340.52 from 2014-7.

I would go with Windows 7. It's compatible with games designed for Windows XP. There's no reason to stay back on XP. You get a 2.5 year newer driver for Win7.. a little more performance is baked in. Will have better drivers for soundcards too. And Windows7 is faster than XP.
Click to expand...
Windows 7 does not run everything that XP can without compromises.
 
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