Of course they want, the prices are already insane and have been for years, maybe what PhilsComputerLab meant was some of the lower end 775 motherboards no one wants. I have two 775 modern DDR3 boards, bought each for 12€ last year as my DDR2 motherboards just died, the prices of those same boards increased a lot since then.
@@JoshVennix I've looked at this exact motherboard p5kpl-am se a couple of years ago, it was already on the 20-25 bucks, it's now with shipping over 50€. 775, AM2, AM3, 939, Socket A... everything is costly now, there are no "hidden gems" anymore. Used Sandy Bridge motherboards cost the same as current modern ones.
LGA775 just refuses to die. Core 2 Quad systems paired with an SSD, 8GB of RAM and a decent video card can still make for a good basic daily driver. One of the best platforms Intel has ever made IMO.
Absolutely. Great for Linux retro gaming and I keep a stack of them in the garage for when the guys come over a few times a year for beer, pizza and a LAN party.
@@emdotrod If it works then good luck to you. I just think AAA games have been complete crap for more than a decade now, the last one I purchased was Fallout 4 in 2015.
Phil, you're a tresure for the community! While everybody gets obssessed with period-correct parts which are super expensive, you're always showing us different ways to play MS-DOS games with all sorts of hardware at very reasonable prices. Thanks for keeping up the website with tools and for all your video content. You are an example to be followed in the retro gaming circles. I have learned a lot about DOS gaming and hardware tips from you. Thank you SO MUCH for your work!
Crazy to think how dependent modern CPUs are on their internal cache, that disabling it cuts a 667 MHz system down to the performance level of a 286/386 from the 1980s.
Great stuff. I built a nice high end 775 Windows XP after watching your previous videos Phil. Only cost me about 40 euros in total - E8400, Abit IP35 Pro, 4GB Corsair Dominator and GTX 285. Runs like a dream.
I had an IP35 Pro with a Q6600, Zalman CNPS 9700 LED, 4GB of G.Skill DDR2, perfect condition...finally threw it out summer of 2022 because I figured it was just slow, old junk that used too much power for too little result compared to modern hardware...just over a year later I'm really kicking myself, that was all good stuff and would make an awesome throwback machine now that I've gotten the retro bug.
@@406Steven Gutted. Hopefully you can pick up similar parts from people who felt the same way as you did last year. My retro pc bug started a few years back with a Pentium 4 system that was given away for free. That one is setup as a Windows 98 machine. It's great having the original hardware 👍
@@duncfunk2998 I have to meter the addiction. I still bid on eBay retro parts but my old Pentium 4 Dell still works and I can run all the old stuff I want. I really should save the retro stuff for those who really want the period-correct hardware.
Great video as always Phil! I remember buying that C-Media card brand new in box in my local computer store back in 2003 for €14.99! Its great to see that these cards are still being made!
Yes, it's just a shame there is all that "messing about" in the BIOS to disable/enable caches, etc. It would be wonderful if you could just run a simple tool to load in the BIOS you want each time without having to do the changes manually.
This is a very good alternative for people who are just getting into the hobby. Retro parts are carrying such a crazy premium now that it's hard to find good deals, glad I bought all my stuff some time back whilst it was still reasonable!
@@marccaselle8108For many, the issues are storage space and the time and cost of maintaining old systems. Emulation is cheap, usually far more flexible and doesn't take up much desk space. The downside is, there is often an emotional disconnect with emulated systems... knowing it isn't the "real thing".
@@another3997 I'm in that boat right now. Storage space isn't a concern for me but I have put together 4 retro PCs between Pentium 4s, an Athlon 64, and a Core 2 Duo (eBay is a drug to me) and, once the build was done, I sat back to think what I should load on there. Everything I used to play is either available on GoG (love the work those guys do!) or can be played via browser. I still get a rush from reliving the older hardware days but it's easier to sit down at my 11700K/RTX 3080 system and fire up In Search of Dr. Riptide within a browser, play Sim Tower in Windows 11 like it doesn't care, or anything from GoG just works.
Hey Phil, there are some really interesting CPUs for 775 available. The Celeron 400 series, codename Conroe-L. They are native single core processors (the last native ones that Intel produced) with up to 2.2GHz and only use up to 35W and are available for pennies.
So true! I have a Celeron 440. This little guy beats a Pentium4 @ 3GHz with less heat and power demands. But still stick to my S478 Rig and the Socket A systems.
Back when i was in highschool we had computers with Celeron 420 and 2GB of RAM. They originally had Vista and then they upgraded them to 8 and to my surprise they were very snappy for a singlecore chip. I never liked Celerons but the 420 was really great for what it was
The core 2 duo or quad fell out of favor a bit more recently for a very simple reason imo, it was still pretty reasonable to use as a daily or even for a lot of modern games. Sure the instructions set or lack thereof became an increasing issue. So naturally what was used for modern stuff till quite recently isn´t really looked at for "dos gaming" purposes as it is probably considered to new. Had a c2q 6600 clocked at 3.2ghz for years, was an amazing pc and held up damn well. In regards to old games, i really stopped worrying so much about using older hardware and building a retro pc for that very purpose. Dosbox came a long way and if you add roland 32 emulators you are probably good to go for the vast majority of games on your overpowered daily machine. Still loved to work with old hardware, and would still do but i would lie if i had the time. And just buying retro hardware to then have it sit in a shelf is a bit of a waste, like hoarding cars.
Up until 2 years ago, I was regularly using my Socket 775 machine for browsing the Web and playing games. Mostly on a 3GHz C2D E8400, but I upgraded it to a fast C2Q just after I was given an "old" LGA1150 machine with a fast 4th gen Core i3. The C2Q got used less and less. The i3 CPU was replaced with a much faster i7, but thanks to clever software developers, all my old games will run just fine, so I don't need to keep and maintain lots of old computers. I kept some anyway. 😁
Oooh another video! ❤ Awesome with a Core2Duo project, I'm planning out my Core2Duo for this weekend as I just received a graphics card of the exact same type I used so many years ago, so now I can build an exact copy of my system I had before for Windows XP. Have a great weekend Phil and sleep well as I'm sure you're heading off to sleep in a short while 😋 (from posting this video that is)
@@philscomputerlab an XFX 8800GTX, I remember when I bought it, it was the most expensive and most powerful graphics card available at around USD $550 and the most expensive I've ever purchased.. these days its almost impossible to get the highest tier graphics cards 😂😋 either too expensive or no stock.. But it was cool back then to have the absolute best. Thanks for the reply! ❤
I had 775 for a really long time, it is still used as a primary computer by ma parents. I replaced the E6550 with Xeon E5450 which is equal to Q9650. You can watch youtube without problems, system is working for it's age very well.
Great video and spot on. There are still lots of good buys to be had for socket 478 and socket 775 boards that do really well for XP and earlier builds. Socket 939 is still probably my favorite from this timeframe, but there is no doubt about the great value to be had with these lesser desirable socket boards for retro gaming. Thanks for the links too!
939 stuff is getting expensive but 754 is kind of the red-headed step-child as it wasn't produced for long (us early adopters paid that price! I remember how annoyed I was with AMD about that). A64 stuff performs better but Socket 478 stuff is CHEAP. I picked up a Northwood 3.06 last week for under $20 shipped, the trick is finding a motherboard with PCIE rather than AGP because it's easy to spend your savings buying an AGP card whereas PCIE cards are cheap--I use a GT 730 in my Core 2 Duo machine and it does exceptionally well with things like Mechwarrior 3 with high-res mods. My main 478 machine runs an FX 5600 Ultra and I've got a second one with a 9800 Pro in it but these days either of those cards will bring $80-150 where I paid more to ship my GT 730 than what I paid for it.
@@406Steven I pretty much agree. I got caught upgrading late in the Socket A/ socket 370 period, and had a similar thing happen with socket 423 right before socket 478. I bought in on the sales of the previous gen and got good short term value, but they aged badly. I never was a big spender on computers, so I was ok with my decisions, and usually invested in upgrades for the video card. Amazing how much AGP cards have risen in pricing.
It's good that in 2023 we can now get motherboards and DOS working properly. Took them long enough right? Those DOS utilities are beyond anything people in the DOS era would have thought of. I detect correct sound here too, I feel like I'm a little kid at my cousin's house. Another note, there is nothing wrong with using DOSbox for certain things, if your retro hardware build doesn't do everything you wanted to.
Wow Core 2 Duo for DOS and a board that uses PCI Express instead of AGP? That's insane! If LGA 775 become more expensive, we can place the blame to Phil. =) Nice video!
Nice video! I once owned several LGA775+E8400/E7500 PCs that be my main working force -- they're powerful but yet very cool on thermal, one of the PC I built as NAS only use tower cooling without FAN. Unfortunately I sold/gave away all my these 8 years ago. Now I regret I should keep one set of it just because they've done very well of my need.
Wing Commander on my buddy's Amiga was the first PC game that blew me away and I have been gaming on PC ever since! Fun video and way to find a use for those parts that would otherwise be e-waste.
I have a Core 2 Duo E6750 lying around. What kind of retro PCs could I build? It was my daily driver from 2015-2018 or so. Kind of crazy considering that’s what I used with a traditional HDD.
Great video, Phil! Very impressive that you were able to adjust the system speed so well on such a new platform. It’s really amazing how cheap LGA775 stuff is right now. Will definitely look into that CMedia chip too - sounds great. Thanks!
For the past few years I have really enjoyed playing my old dos games with dosbox. I have spent some time setting up DBGL and using dosbox ece my experience has been amazing. With the ability to quickly dial in speed and sound settings and being able to easily capture the game play from the same machine makes it handy. I can also zip my entire DBGL directory and copy it across to any of my machines. I still play dos games on my older machines like my pentium2 and pentium3 machines because of the authentic sound quality from my old ISA sound cards like the ess audiodrive es1868f or the awe64 but I really find myself in DBGL more because of the simplicity and features it offers. I also think that using such newer hardware and having to adjust all those settings and running tools like cpuspeed in dos is just very time consuming and then having to change all those settings back to run windows would be a total headache. For me I came into dos games around the tail end of the era, so speed sensitive games I'm not really nostalgic for. My elementary school had an old game called digger installed on most of the computers in the classroom. I went and tracked down that game and found out it was speed sensitive but someone back in the early 2000's made a new version that fixed that issue.
Happy Friday Phil! I still love the socket 775 platform and still build retro machines that triple boot 98/ME, XP, and Win7 in some cases. I’m not too big on DOS gaming because DOSBox works pretty well for DOS games I like to play.
...and here I was on the fence about passing along my Core2Duo parts because I have way too much stuff in general. I guess I'm going to hold on to it for now to avoid kicking myself in 10 years when all the current retro hardware dies and/or is unobtainable. My Auzentech X Meridian uses a CMedia audio chipset and I didn't realize it had such decent DOS compatibility. I've only tried that card in Windows Vista, 7 and 10. (Most feature-complete support was in Vista) I'm going to have to dust those parts off now and tinker. Thanks!
Big fan of cpuspd 🎉 You can set up a batch file to scroll through the various options then record a topbench result for the iteration. This helps profiling your bios config and I found this helped me dial in compatibility on a few picky games
LGA775 is the most underrated platform for the widest range of usability (and with that, the Radeon x600 or x700 is the most underrated graphics card for Windows 98 specifically), and Intel 4th Gen is the most underrated platform for XP or a hybrid XP/7 or XP/10 system.
Hey man! I swear I love your videos. If your creator studio showing you high watch hours, that'd be me! haha! I watch videos over and over. I wanna see you making a gaming pc with gt 210 and pairing it with some dual core to play games like GTA SA and stuff, haha! Maybe on some 4:3 monitor, maybe CRT?
I love socket 775 Pentium 4 (own a Pentium D 541) for late win98/ early XP gaming. Paired with a Radeon 9800XT and a SB live 5.1 it's a powerhouse. I often mess and mix to play older games as well, and love it. Board is an msi neo3-f. Also have a couple voodoo 2 evilking than I sometimes plug in, using SLI for glide games. A lot of fun! The use case in this video was one I envisioned before buying and building, but shifted gears later, as I came into a little surplus in budget I could use. Good times
Great video, Phil. I dual-booted my Core2 Quad with Windows 10 on one SSD and Windows XP on another. I'm hoping I can get my HT Omega Striker 7.1 working in DOS. It uses a CMI8770 chip.
My daily PC still is LGA775 with E8500, GeForce 9800 and 4 Gigs and it is good enought for net surfing. Not fast, but works. Didn't cost anything and older games runs great. I use Linux, so no proplems with overly heavy windows.
The cmi8738 has a very decent sb16 compatibility actually, i have worked on os x ppc drivers for it and it's surprising how clever their implementation is, it's also pretty decent for opl3 music, the major downside is the dac really, since you are stuck with the one built into the dsp and that's not that decent, also for filtering that not that great on lots of cards using that chip, they are quite a bit noisy, but since it also features toshlink/spdif it might also be paired with a better dac and solve those issues, you should also be able to use the digital out with the sb16 emulation or the opl3 if you get the right drivers for it.
I have really fond memories of my Pentium Dual Core E5400. It served me well for almost a decade until it decided to kick the bucket in 2019. I got it running Windows XP and later Windows 7. LGA 775 is an undesirable platform? Nonsense, it gets the job done more than well enough for Win XP and 7 games, DOS compatibility is just the icing on the cake. Have a good one, Phil!
Another hit on the nail Phil, very cool alternative. I put together a similar build (same MB as you) as an "ultimate" Win98 Machine (Core E8600, Nvidia 7950GT, SB Audigy). You just expanded the idea of booting it into DOS 7.1 (with the Super Easy PIF you provide on your site). I will try to use DOS on it like you demonstrated, with a Solo 1 and the 8738. Worth mentioning, there is a similar board from ASUS (P5KPL 1600) that has some extra features (like 3 PCI slots) and offers a little bit more flexibility if desired. I bought both 2 years ago, for same price (each US$ 30) and some Core cpus (E4xxx, E6xxx and E8xxx - US$10-15 each). Worth mentioning folks going this way need to setup SATA as legacy/compatibility mode on BIOS. And last, try that Quadro FX1300 (PCIE) of yours on this motherboard (the one you tried on a video a couple of months ago), I got mine working on this motherboard without hitches. Thanks!
Everytime I see someone run WC1 on "modern" hardware I am taken back to that electronics/record store in '91 where they had WC running on a 386 in demo loop... it attracted quite the audience and ALL of us probably knew that Amiga was dead and PC was the way to go.
It's really cool to see that LGA775 is still very much alive in here, I am a huge fan of the platform - especially on a desktop if you can upgrade to a Core 2 Quad CPU with 8GB RAM. Even if such a machine struggles to run modern Windows, it will run any Linux distro perfectly happily as a daily driver and for retro gaming in WINE and DOSBox.
Even better, it will run older, contemporary versions of Windows very well, without all the hassle of getting running properly, if at all, under WINE. Despite what some zealots seem to think, Linux is not the answer to every problem. Whilst Linux may, in some cases, require fewer resources, and the OS itself feels snappy, the software that people run on it does often does not. There's plenty of empirical evidence showing that many things run slower under Linux, and that hardware drivers are often less well optimised.
@@another3997 See my previous response - I am not repeating the same thing to someone who is clearly a bit lazy and unwilling to learn Linux properly and is just a bit jealous of those of us who have put in time and effort to learn it. Nothing more to see or say here - your unwillingness to learn is not a Linux problem. Discussion closed, I really don't like wasting my time on people who try to blame their own inability to commit time and effort to learning something on something else - you're probably in that millennial generation that appears to have more than its fair share of lazy people in it.
nice video again phil, thanks. i want them parts! and here im sitting and playing around with two 775 mbs going between xp 64 and win 10 64 and even a little gtx 960 in sli.
I bought a few huge boxes of scrap end of 2022 and found in it over a dozen working 775 boards, some just needed a cap replaced or something, others just worked. They have been wandering back and forth through my workshop with me developing and discarding several ideas what to do with them. Cheap Linux machines, sell the parts, nothing really made sense. Just a few weeks ago I decided to build 8 of them up into a set of Windows XP PC's that I can just wheel out of the storage for a nice small LAN-party. Maybe I'll just turn the rest into DOS machines then...
Nice video as always Phil! Related to the sound, we can found the *CMI8738* chip in *Sweex 5.1 PCI* and *Guillemot Muse DVD* soundcards. Maybe someone has them stored there 🙂🙂🙂 Cheers!
I used the P5KPL-CM in my old Core 2 Duo E7300 (upgraded to C2Q Q8400), in 2 years of use, the battery died and the bios was always reseting (even changing the battery), the one ending in VM was also not good
Hi Phil, I'm wondering if an E8500 could also be usable for WingCommander (around 9-10 in benchmark score) as the slower E4400 here. The CPU is running 1333 FSB @stock (333x9,5 multiplier), so should be possible to get this about as low as the E4400 @800 FSB stock (200x10 multiplier). I can get a G31 based board with a E8500 + stock cooler and 4GB DDR2 for less than $10. I have a Pentium 133 based DOS PC, but I can see advantages of using the LGA 775 for DOS, by using the onboard graphics, and the more modern SATA interface with SSD (fast and efficient, compared to older noisy Hard drives). As having the option to use it as an excellent Win XP rig (paired with a PCI-E graphics card). Also the more modern (not valuable) platform is better to actually use, instead of wearing out the old (now valuable collectors item) Socket 7 platform)
Again, Wing Commander had a 16:10 aspect ratio! Like a lot of DOS games of this era. ^ I would buy a Thin Client with SoundBlaster support, I've watched your video and I check once in a while since.
Linking from PC to PC with a MIDI cable is a way to get efficeint usage from a soundcard discovered to be useful like that because it means it can be shared via multiple computers, and even sometimes a breadboard _(even with some glue logic depending upon the other electronics used on it)_ with multiplexers can expand it at low cost whilst learning what makes it tick. So even if one computer has a lack lustre soundcard, as long as it has the MIDI connector, there is potential (or a USB to MIDI conversion cable). Such game ports and MIDI ports can trigger robotics or be for a control surface (open sound control or joysticks, gamepads etc.) or modding a beer-fridge light with RGB so it resembles "christmas tree lights" come "fast and furious" cars underlighting, and activation of a tune selected depending on the party theme _(Halloween, Chrimbo, or maybe the anniversary of the first time you ever snagged your trouser pocket on a door handle whilst stepping in lego and other such fond memories for which we are eternally grateful for being sent as a challenge thereby filling up our otherwise grey lives)._ As for LGA775 motherboards, some are bound to become candidates for LibreBoot (a good project worth noting). My comment has no hate in it and I do no harm. I am not appalled or afraid, boasting or envying or complaining... Just saying. Psalms23: Giving thanks and praise to the Lord and peace and love. Also, I'd say Matthew6.
*Phil, good sir! LGA775 still rules!* I have a wonderful P4 AGP Build for 98SE (ASRock 775i65G), another Q6600 AGP/PCIe build for XP (ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA), and the top end QX9650 for Win7 gaming (ASUS P5Q Pro). All Socket 775. I also have two spare, good as new LGA775 Gigabyte GA-G41M-Combo boards that take DDR2 or DDR3 in storage. The venerable Abit VP6 PIII duallie, the stellar MSI Pro266TD Tualatin duallie, and, pending new caps, an Abit VH6T for single Tualatin overclocking, my fastest PIII machine. My HP150 Touchscreen can also game. Modern gaming is on my Z390, and at the wife's office on a Xeon-based Z97 mini-ITX I adore. There you have it, my full confession as a HW hoarder (aka "enthusiast").
Impressive that something as modern as a C2D can run at 286 speed. I have several 775 motherboards at this point even NOS but I have even more AM2 and AM3 motherboards. I’ve stopped collecting since a year ago because I already have way more than I have cases and power supplies to build them. Apart from a few very specific motherboards and CPUs P4, Athlon 64 and C2D stuff is still very cheap and easy to come by here. Some are even giving them for free. I’ve gifted and been gifted a few old motherboards. It’s nice to save them from being destroyed and I like it if they get put to use.
i am still using a Core2Quad Q9400 on my socket 775 asus P5QC motherboard, slapped 8GB of DDR3 ram in there, a GTX760 from Palit, overclocked the cpu to 3,2 Ghz and i use it as my daily driver for Linux mint and windows 10. works well enough.
Recently upgraded my secondary office-tasks machine from Core2Duo/2Gb RAM/Built-In Intel Graphics to Core2Quad/4Gb RAM/nVidia 8800GT 512 Mb. Now it runs perfectly under Win7 32bit. FullHD UA-cam - no problems anymore (previously there was not enough memory and CPU power to run FHD UA-cam smoothly). I'm sure it is also able to run games from 2000-2010-s pretty well because it's a middle-end config of the age. And even today there are plenty of 2D/light 3D modern indy games perfectly playable on this setup.
This board was everywhere back then. Almost every office/home PCs I know at that time came with this board and a conroe pentium dual core processor like E2160.
When all you have are unwanted parts, call the professional retro nerd... And I thought having a unloved 3.0ghz Pentium 4 HT was crazy lol. Speaking of crazy, somehow the P4's motherboard has no bad caps. (I check the baord every few months in hopes of spotting a problematic cap before it goes poof) It's a Sony Viao VGC RB30 btw. I saved it from becoming e waste, unfortunately somebody walked off with the stock graphics card and the "media card" and I've made some config changes myself so it's no longer stock. I installed a ATI 3600 series graphics card a 3640 and a sound blaster Audigy se,maxed out the ram, I've also unplugged the built in card reader since it's not plug and play and I can find the sony drivers, disconnected the opticals (since you can't get to them the way I have the machine setup. Its facing a wall) and installed a 4 port usb 2.0 card
I have got a Dell Optiplex SX280 with a Pentium 4 HT 3.0 GHz CPU in it (probably the same CPU as your one) and it runs a 64-bit Gentoo Linux build perfectly happily and I don't plan on getting rid of it.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Nice 👍 I've noticed a lot of people seem to save those old Dell omiplex and dimension machines. Wouldn't be surprised if it was the same cpu. Neat mine is my fun retro Windows XP gaming pc, same won't be getting rid of it
@@JohnSmith-xq1pz They're good little machines with good quality components and builds - the only downside is limited expandability with some of the bespoke case formats.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 lol yup that's what I hear all the time, in fact the only one's I've ever really ever heard criticised was the machine in the "clamshell" case's
Good Lord 😮 happy I kept all my CAD PCs since 1987 and added some components from electronicBay over the years. Okay, my focus always has been on professional CAD Workstations and Servers, also PA-RISC and Sparc, but I got sucficiant PC in my stock suitable for retro gaming and retro business applications. 😁 Fun and quite a challenge to refurbish all that stuff without using modern workarounds. 😥 Downgrading more modern components is a possibility, but it is very uncool 😜
I have a dozen 775 board. I had trouble getting sound working on these. I don't recall if I tried the Santa Cruz... but the Solo-1, Yamaha and Vortex were not working well for me. You may have inspire me to try again across the cards I have.
I just can't get the CMI8738 sound card to work on this motherboard. Adlib music works, but any SB emulation just comes out as silence. the initialisation sets IRQ to A
That's a shame... Still, Adlib is pretty good too, especially for the earlier DOS games. Disable the cache and turn it into a 386 and for example all the DOS adventure games will run perfectly fine and sound lovely with that FM chip on the CMI.
If only there was a better DOS driver for the CMI8738... i've found it to be really hit and miss even with motherboard compatibility... and if the chip revisions after 037D could be determined if the FM module has been disabled or removed from silicon chip versions after..
I was reading about the Radeon HD6k series getting a Vulkan driver for Linux earlier today and was wondering how well Core 2 can go with DOS and even Win9x, then that night I see you've uploaded this. In theory with the right hardware (eg. HD6k + older PCI GPU, onboard HD audio + old PCI DOS compatible sound card, etc) and a lot of work it'd be entirely possible to make a PC that can natively boot DOS, Win98SE, WinXP and up-to-date Linux (ie. Proton + DXVK/VKD3D = Compatibility with a lot of even modern titles) to be able to natively run most PC games and programs from a ~45 year timespan on the single PC.
I use a C2D E8400 with 3 GHz and 1Gb DDR 2 800 Dual Channel Ram as Windows 98 SE High End machine. It has a GeForce 7900 GT with 256 MB and 2 voodoo 2 sli cards connected via a pcie to pci bridge with its own power supply. Works flawlessly. However, if I install the two Voodoo 2 cards directly on the board in the PCI slots, the PC freezes. The G31 chipset probably doesn't like SLI in the PCI bus. I use an SB 128 PCI as the sound card, unfortunately many PCI sound cards tend to stutter under Win98 in newer systems. The DOS sound also works, even if it's not the best. With many other PCI cards, the DOS sound no longer works on newer boards (no SB16 link)
LGA775 is IMO the ideal platform for a wide selection of retro gaming. In addition to working well with DOS, you can also have a great WinXP gaming experience with a more powerful GPU and more RAM.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 XP is just the OS. It's up to the applications. But yes, XP supports multi core, so video encoding will be much faster. Far Cry won't. Some games even have issues with more than 1 core.
I'm still using a Core 2 Quad with 8 GB of RAM and an older GPU. I mostly use it for office, web browsing, and emulation. Works fine with Windows 10. It isn't even running at full potential considering I'm pretty sure newer 775 boards at least have PCIe 2 and SATA 3
The Core 2 Duo series are still so versatile being able to do DOS gaming to even running the some of the most modern Linux distros like Manjaro GNOME for basic daily task, as long as you have a good SSD, 8GB RAM, and a 1/2 decent GPU.
If I know the irq and dma mapping for the onboard Realtek audio controller can it work for dos games I have a board with the t2500 core 2 dual that I would like to use as is because it has built in compact flash on the bottom side and the bios allows for turning off the second cpu core?
I have an ASUS P5K-Premium. Can I turn that computer into a dos machine? I’m using my Gigabyte computer for Retro XP gaming. Unfortunately my P5K Premium needs a graphics card. Are there any affordable PCI graphics cards that are natively supported in dos?
How would FreeDOS work for a system like this? I do think Socet 775 is going to be popular in the future because I think it's a good middle ground for Windows XP gaming. I also think Sandy Bridge is going to massively popular to the point that if I had the money and space I'd be snapping up every reasonably priced system I could.
The 775 was always a good platform and I have a ton of that stuff for that in my storage, I have an open test rig which I can play around with when I feel like it, testing different CPUs and overclock or even underclock stuff. amazing what this platform can do with some tweaks
my W98SE PC is a socket 775 GA-P43-ES3G motherboard + core2duo E8600@4ghz + 4x1gb of 800mhz DDR2 in dual channel (limited to 512mb under dos/98se), dual boot on linux mint. ATI X850 XT graphic card and Audigy 2 ZS sound card, 500gb Sandisk SSD (4x120gb in Fat32). hardly what you'd call period correct hardware but thanks to your advices it's arguably the fastest windows 98 computer i've ever seen lol :P i was about to bite the bullet and buy a pair of Voodoo 2, but tbh it emulate every 3DFX games i've tried in 1600x1200 60fps locked Oo that being said, if i was to make a dedicated DOS machine i would defenetly go for older hardware and a much slower CPU, haven't spent much time looking for a solution yet but i'm sure my specs will come back to bite me in the a*s sooner than later on some other games.
LGA775, from DOS to Win 10. Can't beat that compatibility. Should work fine on Win 98 as well with the onboard graphics. The clear advantage of this config, is the onboard graphics. Be sure to get the LGA775 with the Intel Chipset, which has the Intel GMA integrated Graphics running on the FSB bus, which is DOS compatible (sadly QPI or Ringbus is not, so more modern Intel HD graphics is not usable). I'm impressed that is is possible to actually slow down a C2D CPU this much to make it speed sensitive DOS game usable.
Is it possible to dual boot MS DOS and windows XP? I have gigabyte GA-G41MT-S2 that has a core 2 Quad Q9650 @ 3.0 GHz, 8 GB DDR3 RAM, and a GeForce GT 710. It has PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse and an Integrated VGA and It also has one PCI slot.
Even with an original pc with a sound blaster from that time, it's a bit fiddly to get the dos games to run with sound. Sometimes one doesn't work at all and sometimes a game just works with different irq/dma addresses than I set ^_^ nice video!👍
That's why I use dosbox 🙂. It would be cool to have a legit DOS computer but with prices for sound and video cards starting at 50 dollars each it's silly.
Still use a Dell Optiplex 380 with a Core2duo E6750 to run windows 11 and browse the web, watch youtube (even smooth in 4K), etc... Maxed it out with 8gb of ram, a ssd and a low profile Nvidia T600. It actually keeps up with modern systems. Just found a Core2quad Q9550 cheap on Ebay this week and gonna put that in this weekend. will be interesting to see what performance difference this will give.
@@vasileios6301 I must say with that T600 in it (directx 12 support) is gets most "newer' games going well enough in 720p and some even playable in 1080p. The bottleneck is the cpu because in benchmarks the t600 doesn't hit 100% of usage but the cpu does max out. I have a lot of working pc's I still use ranging from an Atari pc3 XT to pc's I use for gaming like an i5 9600k and for desktop stuff (premiere pro etc...) a Lenovo P710 Thinkstation with dual xeon e5-6550 v4 processsors. The Optiflex is just my daily driver since it's small, quiet and still not too power hungry (electricity prices are insane these days!).
Best part of 775 is. You can install brand new CPU cooler with RGB or just pick whatever shape you want (478 is dead end). I had that same Motherboard, but after several times fail to install winXP. The PC just die. The power still run but nothing on screen. Now it just ended on garage.
What's great about the 775 is you are right no one wants it but on the plus side the cpu's are cheap as heck. Cmedia my old favourite goto when I couldn't get a sound blaster. Funny thing is I have a stockpile of 775 board and chips. I must have seen this coming lol. Great video Phil.
I have one of the last boards from Intel that even has uefi and enough PCI slots (that's why I bought it back then). It even has speedstep and the core voltage can be lowered via windows, which many other boards cannot do. Only the energy efficiency is not so nice compared to my I7-gen2. The I7machine needs about 50% less, with 4 cores + hypertreating. But with the new tools from the vogon site, you can actually continue to use the computer for old software. Especially since my motherboard has only been running for 6 months. Thanks for the tip with the soundcard.
I'm wondering how little power a C2D would actually use, when being configured to run at such slow speed for DOS gaming. I mean... 5-10 watts maybe? Making it easily possible to cool totally passive (disconnecting the fan).
I have no idea why people don't want lga 775 parts. The compatibility is immense. being able to run DOS all the way through to Windows 10 is crazy.
they are still great for basic Linux machines as well with enough RAM, an SSD, and a 1/2 decent video card.
Of course they want, the prices are already insane and have been for years, maybe what PhilsComputerLab meant was some of the lower end 775 motherboards no one wants. I have two 775 modern DDR3 boards, bought each for 12€ last year as my DDR2 motherboards just died, the prices of those same boards increased a lot since then.
@@farben_not really. Also there are plenty of OEM systems that have decent on board audio compatible with Windows 98
Exactly, but there is nothing as strange as people :)
@@JoshVennix I've looked at this exact motherboard p5kpl-am se a couple of years ago, it was already on the 20-25 bucks, it's now with shipping over 50€. 775, AM2, AM3, 939, Socket A... everything is costly now, there are no "hidden gems" anymore. Used Sandy Bridge motherboards cost the same as current modern ones.
LGA775 just refuses to die. Core 2 Quad systems paired with an SSD, 8GB of RAM and a decent video card can still make for a good basic daily driver. One of the best platforms Intel has ever made IMO.
Absolutely. Great for Linux retro gaming and I keep a stack of them in the garage for when the guys come over a few times a year for beer, pizza and a LAN party.
I still play AAA games with a Q6600 and decent graphic card in 2014-2015. I just need a bit of overclocking to make it more playable
@@emdotrod If it works then good luck to you. I just think AAA games have been complete crap for more than a decade now, the last one I purchased was Fallout 4 in 2015.
It was an unbelievable rebound after the Pentium 4.
Do Core 2 Quad CPUs run hot?
Phil, you're a tresure for the community! While everybody gets obssessed with period-correct parts which are super expensive, you're always showing us different ways to play MS-DOS games with all sorts of hardware at very reasonable prices. Thanks for keeping up the website with tools and for all your video content. You are an example to be followed in the retro gaming circles. I have learned a lot about DOS gaming and hardware tips from you. Thank you SO MUCH for your work!
Crazy to think how dependent modern CPUs are on their internal cache, that disabling it cuts a 667 MHz system down to the performance level of a 286/386 from the 1980s.
Great stuff. I built a nice high end 775 Windows XP after watching your previous videos Phil. Only cost me about 40 euros in total - E8400, Abit IP35 Pro, 4GB Corsair Dominator and GTX 285. Runs like a dream.
I had an IP35 Pro with a Q6600, Zalman CNPS 9700 LED, 4GB of G.Skill DDR2, perfect condition...finally threw it out summer of 2022 because I figured it was just slow, old junk that used too much power for too little result compared to modern hardware...just over a year later I'm really kicking myself, that was all good stuff and would make an awesome throwback machine now that I've gotten the retro bug.
@@406Steven Gutted. Hopefully you can pick up similar parts from people who felt the same way as you did last year. My retro pc bug started a few years back with a Pentium 4 system that was given away for free. That one is setup as a Windows 98 machine. It's great having the original hardware 👍
@@duncfunk2998 I have to meter the addiction. I still bid on eBay retro parts but my old Pentium 4 Dell still works and I can run all the old stuff I want. I really should save the retro stuff for those who really want the period-correct hardware.
Great video as always Phil! I remember buying that C-Media card brand new in box in my local computer store back in 2003 for €14.99! Its great to see that these cards are still being made!
A socket 775 system running a 386 game properly is a testament to the x86 retrocompatibility.
Yes, it's just a shame there is all that "messing about" in the BIOS to disable/enable caches, etc. It would be wonderful if you could just run a simple tool to load in the BIOS you want each time without having to do the changes manually.
i have 775 quad core system that an run all 2023 in 1080p
DDR 3 max, 9650 !
This is a very good alternative for people who are just getting into the hobby. Retro parts are carrying such a crazy premium now that it's hard to find good deals, glad I bought all my stuff some time back whilst it was still reasonable!
When prices are too high, it's emulation to the rescue.
@@marccaselle8108For many, the issues are storage space and the time and cost of maintaining old systems. Emulation is cheap, usually far more flexible and doesn't take up much desk space. The downside is, there is often an emotional disconnect with emulated systems... knowing it isn't the "real thing".
@@another3997 I agree it isn't the real thing but for me it's perfect or very very close so it doesn't matter to me.
@@another3997 I'm in that boat right now. Storage space isn't a concern for me but I have put together 4 retro PCs between Pentium 4s, an Athlon 64, and a Core 2 Duo (eBay is a drug to me) and, once the build was done, I sat back to think what I should load on there. Everything I used to play is either available on GoG (love the work those guys do!) or can be played via browser. I still get a rush from reliving the older hardware days but it's easier to sit down at my 11700K/RTX 3080 system and fire up In Search of Dr. Riptide within a browser, play Sim Tower in Windows 11 like it doesn't care, or anything from GoG just works.
I love your benchmark pack. Thanks for putting it together for all of us.
Any time!
Hey Phil, there are some really interesting CPUs for 775 available. The Celeron 400 series, codename Conroe-L. They are native single core processors (the last native ones that Intel produced) with up to 2.2GHz and only use up to 35W and are available for pennies.
So true! I have a Celeron 440. This little guy beats a Pentium4 @ 3GHz with less heat and power demands. But still stick to my S478 Rig and the Socket A systems.
Back when i was in highschool we had computers with Celeron 420 and 2GB of RAM. They originally had Vista and then they upgraded them to 8 and to my surprise they were very snappy for a singlecore chip. I never liked Celerons but the 420 was really great for what it was
Thats what i’ve been using for years with my Asrock 775g65i. Makes a perfect miniatx PC.
@@Stratotank3r Pentium 4 are a furnace, even with a fancy-pants Zalman cooler there's no way to keep the temps lower than 50-40ºC even in winter.
I have one with a pentium dual core, may have to try this buikd
The core 2 duo or quad fell out of favor a bit more recently for a very simple reason imo, it was still pretty reasonable to use as a daily or even for a lot of modern games. Sure the instructions set or lack thereof became an increasing issue.
So naturally what was used for modern stuff till quite recently isn´t really looked at for "dos gaming" purposes as it is probably considered to new.
Had a c2q 6600 clocked at 3.2ghz for years, was an amazing pc and held up damn well. In regards to old games, i really stopped worrying so much about using older hardware and building a retro pc for that very purpose. Dosbox came a long way and if you add roland 32 emulators you are probably good to go for the vast majority of games on your overpowered daily machine.
Still loved to work with old hardware, and would still do but i would lie if i had the time. And just buying retro hardware to then have it sit in a shelf is a bit of a waste, like hoarding cars.
Up until 2 years ago, I was regularly using my Socket 775 machine for browsing the Web and playing games. Mostly on a 3GHz C2D E8400, but I upgraded it to a fast C2Q just after I was given an "old" LGA1150 machine with a fast 4th gen Core i3. The C2Q got used less and less. The i3 CPU was replaced with a much faster i7, but thanks to clever software developers, all my old games will run just fine, so I don't need to keep and maintain lots of old computers. I kept some anyway. 😁
Oooh another video! ❤ Awesome with a Core2Duo project, I'm planning out my Core2Duo for this weekend as I just received a graphics card of the exact same type I used so many years ago, so now I can build an exact copy of my system I had before for Windows XP.
Have a great weekend Phil and sleep well as I'm sure you're heading off to sleep in a short while 😋 (from posting this video that is)
ZZZZZzzzz yes need sleep :D What GPU did you receive?
@@philscomputerlab an XFX 8800GTX, I remember when I bought it, it was the most expensive and most powerful graphics card available at around USD $550 and the most expensive I've ever purchased.. these days its almost impossible to get the highest tier graphics cards 😂😋 either too expensive or no stock.. But it was cool back then to have the absolute best.
Thanks for the reply! ❤
I had 775 for a really long time, it is still used as a primary computer by ma parents. I replaced the E6550 with Xeon E5450 which is equal to Q9650. You can watch youtube without problems, system is working for it's age very well.
I am writing through a q9650 8gb and windows 10 pc which is my main, no problems at all other than modern gaming.
s775 best platform over years.
I love this! I like to think after watching your channel there is no excuse not to get into retro gaming with so many interesting hardware options.
Great video and spot on. There are still lots of good buys to be had for socket 478 and socket 775 boards that do really well for XP and earlier builds. Socket 939 is still probably my favorite from this timeframe, but there is no doubt about the great value to be had with these lesser desirable socket boards for retro gaming. Thanks for the links too!
939 stuff is getting expensive but 754 is kind of the red-headed step-child as it wasn't produced for long (us early adopters paid that price! I remember how annoyed I was with AMD about that). A64 stuff performs better but Socket 478 stuff is CHEAP. I picked up a Northwood 3.06 last week for under $20 shipped, the trick is finding a motherboard with PCIE rather than AGP because it's easy to spend your savings buying an AGP card whereas PCIE cards are cheap--I use a GT 730 in my Core 2 Duo machine and it does exceptionally well with things like Mechwarrior 3 with high-res mods. My main 478 machine runs an FX 5600 Ultra and I've got a second one with a 9800 Pro in it but these days either of those cards will bring $80-150 where I paid more to ship my GT 730 than what I paid for it.
@@406Steven I pretty much agree. I got caught upgrading late in the Socket A/ socket 370 period, and had a similar thing happen with socket 423 right before socket 478. I bought in on the sales of the previous gen and got good short term value, but they aged badly. I never was a big spender on computers, so I was ok with my decisions, and usually invested in upgrades for the video card. Amazing how much AGP cards have risen in pricing.
It's good that in 2023 we can now get motherboards and DOS working properly. Took them long enough right? Those DOS utilities are beyond anything people in the DOS era would have thought of. I detect correct sound here too, I feel like I'm a little kid at my cousin's house. Another note, there is nothing wrong with using DOSbox for certain things, if your retro hardware build doesn't do everything you wanted to.
Wow Core 2 Duo for DOS and a board that uses PCI Express instead of AGP? That's insane!
If LGA 775 become more expensive, we can place the blame to Phil. =)
Nice video!
Nice video! I once owned several LGA775+E8400/E7500 PCs that be my main working force -- they're powerful but yet very cool on thermal, one of the PC I built as NAS only use tower cooling without FAN. Unfortunately I sold/gave away all my these 8 years ago. Now I regret I should keep one set of it just because they've done very well of my need.
Wing Commander on my buddy's Amiga was the first PC game that blew me away and I have been gaming on PC ever since! Fun video and way to find a use for those parts that would otherwise be e-waste.
I have a Core 2 Duo E6750 lying around. What kind of retro PCs could I build?
It was my daily driver from 2015-2018 or so.
Kind of crazy considering that’s what I used with a traditional HDD.
Great video, Phil! Very impressive that you were able to adjust the system speed so well on such a new platform. It’s really amazing how cheap LGA775 stuff is right now. Will definitely look into that CMedia chip too - sounds great. Thanks!
LGA 775 is awesome :D
For the past few years I have really enjoyed playing my old dos games with dosbox. I have spent some time setting up DBGL and using dosbox ece my experience has been amazing. With the ability to quickly dial in speed and sound settings and being able to easily capture the game play from the same machine makes it handy. I can also zip my entire DBGL directory and copy it across to any of my machines. I still play dos games on my older machines like my pentium2 and pentium3 machines because of the authentic sound quality from my old ISA sound cards like the ess audiodrive es1868f or the awe64 but I really find myself in DBGL more because of the simplicity and features it offers. I also think that using such newer hardware and having to adjust all those settings and running tools like cpuspeed in dos is just very time consuming and then having to change all those settings back to run windows would be a total headache. For me I came into dos games around the tail end of the era, so speed sensitive games I'm not really nostalgic for. My elementary school had an old game called digger installed on most of the computers in the classroom. I went and tracked down that game and found out it was speed sensitive but someone back in the early 2000's made a new version that fixed that issue.
Someone on that school had very good taste then :-D Greets from a hardcore digger fan!
Happy Friday Phil! I still love the socket 775 platform and still build retro machines that triple boot 98/ME, XP, and Win7 in some cases. I’m not too big on DOS gaming because DOSBox works pretty well for DOS games I like to play.
Very nice! Was it tricky doing the multibooting? I always worry something goes wrong and hoses the entire work... So I just use seperate drivers :)
Great video and great software. Thank you Phil.
...and here I was on the fence about passing along my Core2Duo parts because I have way too much stuff in general. I guess I'm going to hold on to it for now to avoid kicking myself in 10 years when all the current retro hardware dies and/or is unobtainable.
My Auzentech X Meridian uses a CMedia audio chipset and I didn't realize it had such decent DOS compatibility. I've only tried that card in Windows Vista, 7 and 10. (Most feature-complete support was in Vista)
I'm going to have to dust those parts off now and tinker. Thanks!
Very nice! Brings back fond memories from my childhood. Thank you!!
Big fan of cpuspd 🎉
You can set up a batch file to scroll through the various options then record a topbench result for the iteration.
This helps profiling your bios config and I found this helped me dial in compatibility on a few picky games
This is amazing Phil awesome video keep up the great work love it 😁😁😁
LGA775 is the most underrated platform for the widest range of usability (and with that, the Radeon x600 or x700 is the most underrated graphics card for Windows 98 specifically), and Intel 4th Gen is the most underrated platform for XP or a hybrid XP/7 or XP/10 system.
Hey man! I swear I love your videos. If your creator studio showing you high watch hours, that'd be me! haha! I watch videos over and over.
I wanna see you making a gaming pc with gt 210 and pairing it with some dual core to play games like GTA SA and stuff, haha! Maybe on some 4:3 monitor, maybe CRT?
I love socket 775 Pentium 4 (own a Pentium D 541) for late win98/ early XP gaming. Paired with a Radeon 9800XT and a SB live 5.1 it's a powerhouse. I often mess and mix to play older games as well, and love it. Board is an msi neo3-f. Also have a couple voodoo 2 evilking than I sometimes plug in, using SLI for glide games. A lot of fun!
The use case in this video was one I envisioned before buying and building, but shifted gears later, as I came into a little surplus in budget I could use. Good times
Great video, Phil. I dual-booted my Core2 Quad with Windows 10 on one SSD and Windows XP on another. I'm hoping I can get my HT Omega Striker 7.1 working in DOS. It uses a CMI8770 chip.
My daily PC still is LGA775 with E8500, GeForce 9800 and 4 Gigs and it is good enought for net surfing. Not fast, but works. Didn't cost anything and older games runs great. I use Linux, so no proplems with overly heavy windows.
The cmi8738 has a very decent sb16 compatibility actually, i have worked on os x ppc drivers for it and it's surprising how clever their implementation is, it's also pretty decent for opl3 music, the major downside is the dac really, since you are stuck with the one built into the dsp and that's not that decent, also for filtering that not that great on lots of cards using that chip, they are quite a bit noisy, but since it also features toshlink/spdif it might also be paired with a better dac and solve those issues, you should also be able to use the digital out with the sb16 emulation or the opl3 if you get the right drivers for it.
In the place where I live, p4 lga 775 costs 1 USDish / 1 AUDish
Aopen boards are awesome.
I have really fond memories of my Pentium Dual Core E5400. It served me well for almost a decade until it decided to kick the bucket in 2019. I got it running Windows XP and later Windows 7. LGA 775 is an undesirable platform? Nonsense, it gets the job done more than well enough for Win XP and 7 games, DOS compatibility is just the icing on the cake. Have a good one, Phil!
Forgot to say thanks phil, for another great video. Thanks for time and effort and info 👍
Another hit on the nail Phil, very cool alternative. I put together a similar build (same MB as you) as an "ultimate" Win98 Machine (Core E8600, Nvidia 7950GT, SB Audigy). You just expanded the idea of booting it into DOS 7.1 (with the Super Easy PIF you provide on your site). I will try to use DOS on it like you demonstrated, with a Solo 1 and the 8738. Worth mentioning, there is a similar board from ASUS (P5KPL 1600) that has some extra features (like 3 PCI slots) and offers a little bit more flexibility if desired. I bought both 2 years ago, for same price (each US$ 30) and some Core cpus (E4xxx, E6xxx and E8xxx - US$10-15 each). Worth mentioning folks going this way need to setup SATA as legacy/compatibility mode on BIOS. And last, try that Quadro FX1300 (PCIE) of yours on this motherboard (the one you tried on a video a couple of months ago), I got mine working on this motherboard without hitches. Thanks!
Everytime I see someone run WC1 on "modern" hardware I am taken back to that electronics/record store in '91 where they had WC running on a 386 in demo loop... it attracted quite the audience and ALL of us probably knew that Amiga was dead and PC was the way to go.
It's really cool to see that LGA775 is still very much alive in here, I am a huge fan of the platform - especially on a desktop if you can upgrade to a Core 2 Quad CPU with 8GB RAM. Even if such a machine struggles to run modern Windows, it will run any Linux distro perfectly happily as a daily driver and for retro gaming in WINE and DOSBox.
Even better, it will run older, contemporary versions of Windows very well, without all the hassle of getting running properly, if at all, under WINE. Despite what some zealots seem to think, Linux is not the answer to every problem. Whilst Linux may, in some cases, require fewer resources, and the OS itself feels snappy, the software that people run on it does often does not. There's plenty of empirical evidence showing that many things run slower under Linux, and that hardware drivers are often less well optimised.
@@another3997 See my previous response - I am not repeating the same thing to someone who is clearly a bit lazy and unwilling to learn Linux properly and is just a bit jealous of those of us who have put in time and effort to learn it.
Nothing more to see or say here - your unwillingness to learn is not a Linux problem.
Discussion closed, I really don't like wasting my time on people who try to blame their own inability to commit time and effort to learning something on something else - you're probably in that millennial generation that appears to have more than its fair share of lazy people in it.
Phil, Gotta say your content is absolutely on point, Awesome!
Just rambling, I really love your new hair cut.
Sheesh Phil! Keep making videos like this and I'm never going to be able clear out the junk in my parts closet. ;)
We are your support group. Everything is fine ☺️
nice video again phil, thanks. i want them parts! and here im sitting and playing around with two 775 mbs going between xp 64 and win 10 64 and even a little gtx 960 in sli.
and there are so many used 775 out there for so cheap....
I bought a few huge boxes of scrap end of 2022 and found in it over a dozen working 775 boards, some just needed a cap replaced or something, others just worked.
They have been wandering back and forth through my workshop with me developing and discarding several ideas what to do with them. Cheap Linux machines, sell the parts, nothing really made sense.
Just a few weeks ago I decided to build 8 of them up into a set of Windows XP PC's that I can just wheel out of the storage for a nice small LAN-party.
Maybe I'll just turn the rest into DOS machines then...
Nice video as always Phil!
Related to the sound, we can found the *CMI8738* chip in *Sweex 5.1 PCI* and *Guillemot Muse DVD* soundcards. Maybe someone has them stored there 🙂🙂🙂
Cheers!
Thanks for the tip!
@@philscomputerlab Anytime!
This is the exact motherboard that was in my moms pc from 2009 until 2019 when i gave her a newer ivy bridge system with an SSD and 16GB of ram.
Thanks Phil! 🎉 Core Duo just now doubled on ebay! 😉 take care man!
Phil, thank you providing a cost saving alternative to buying vintage, period accurate parts!
I have 3 775 PCs, running win10, win7 and XP. Great bits of kit.
I used the P5KPL-CM in my old Core 2 Duo E7300 (upgraded to C2Q Q8400), in 2 years of use, the battery died and the bios was always reseting (even changing the battery), the one ending in VM was also not good
In the beginning we thought the celeron was slow, then along came the atom
Hi Phil, I'm wondering if an E8500 could also be usable for WingCommander (around 9-10 in benchmark score) as the slower E4400 here. The CPU is running 1333 FSB @stock (333x9,5 multiplier), so should be possible to get this about as low as the E4400 @800 FSB stock (200x10 multiplier).
I can get a G31 based board with a E8500 + stock cooler and 4GB DDR2 for less than $10.
I have a Pentium 133 based DOS PC, but I can see advantages of using the LGA 775 for DOS, by using the onboard graphics, and the more modern SATA interface with SSD (fast and efficient, compared to older noisy Hard drives). As having the option to use it as an excellent Win XP rig (paired with a PCI-E graphics card). Also the more modern (not valuable) platform is better to actually use, instead of wearing out the old (now valuable collectors item) Socket 7 platform)
I think we will discover the DOS potential of all sorts of hardware in the future, not just LGA 775 but also from the AMD side. Exciting times.
Again, Wing Commander had a 16:10 aspect ratio! Like a lot of DOS games of this era. ^ I would buy a Thin Client with SoundBlaster support, I've watched your video and I check once in a while since.
Linking from PC to PC with a MIDI cable is a way to get efficeint usage from a soundcard discovered to be useful like that because it means it can be shared via multiple computers, and even sometimes a breadboard _(even with some glue logic depending upon the other electronics used on it)_ with multiplexers can expand it at low cost whilst learning what makes it tick. So even if one computer has a lack lustre soundcard, as long as it has the MIDI connector, there is potential (or a USB to MIDI conversion cable). Such game ports and MIDI ports can trigger robotics or be for a control surface (open sound control or joysticks, gamepads etc.) or modding a beer-fridge light with RGB so it resembles "christmas tree lights" come "fast and furious" cars underlighting, and activation of a tune selected depending on the party theme _(Halloween, Chrimbo, or maybe the anniversary of the first time you ever snagged your trouser pocket on a door handle whilst stepping in lego and other such fond memories for which we are eternally grateful for being sent as a challenge thereby filling up our otherwise grey lives)._
As for LGA775 motherboards, some are bound to become candidates for LibreBoot (a good project worth noting).
My comment has no hate in it and I do no harm. I am not appalled or afraid, boasting or envying or complaining... Just saying. Psalms23: Giving thanks and praise to the Lord and peace and love. Also, I'd say Matthew6.
*Phil, good sir! LGA775 still rules!* I have a wonderful P4 AGP Build for 98SE (ASRock 775i65G), another Q6600 AGP/PCIe build for XP (ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA), and the top end QX9650 for Win7 gaming (ASUS P5Q Pro). All Socket 775. I also have two spare, good as new LGA775 Gigabyte GA-G41M-Combo boards that take DDR2 or DDR3 in storage. The venerable Abit VP6 PIII duallie, the stellar MSI Pro266TD Tualatin duallie, and, pending new caps, an Abit VH6T for single Tualatin overclocking, my fastest PIII machine. My HP150 Touchscreen can also game.
Modern gaming is on my Z390, and at the wife's office on a Xeon-based Z97 mini-ITX I adore. There you have it, my full confession as a HW hoarder (aka "enthusiast").
Awesome 😎
Impressive that something as modern as a C2D can run at 286 speed. I have several 775 motherboards at this point even NOS but I have even more AM2 and AM3 motherboards. I’ve stopped collecting since a year ago because I already have way more than I have cases and power supplies to build them. Apart from a few very specific motherboards and CPUs P4, Athlon 64 and C2D stuff is still very cheap and easy to come by here. Some are even giving them for free. I’ve gifted and been gifted a few old motherboards. It’s nice to save them from being destroyed and I like it if they get put to use.
is it still possible to find the gotek with the miniusb connector? cant seem to find that, only with normal floppy connector
LGA 775 is a Great Platform.I use them for Modded 771 Xeons Great Performance for the Money Thanks for the Video.
I have SO MANY 775s from the old computer store I used to work at... now I'm gonna start these 😊😅
I LOVE the premise of this video!
The c-media chipsets were found on the auzentech soundcards, and they were mega expensive, beating any creative card
i am still using a Core2Quad Q9400 on my socket 775 asus P5QC motherboard, slapped 8GB of DDR3 ram in there, a GTX760 from Palit, overclocked the cpu to 3,2 Ghz and i use it as my daily driver for Linux mint and windows 10. works well enough.
Recently upgraded my secondary office-tasks machine from Core2Duo/2Gb RAM/Built-In Intel Graphics to Core2Quad/4Gb RAM/nVidia 8800GT 512 Mb. Now it runs perfectly under Win7 32bit. FullHD UA-cam - no problems anymore (previously there was not enough memory and CPU power to run FHD UA-cam smoothly).
I'm sure it is also able to run games from 2000-2010-s pretty well because it's a middle-end config of the age.
And even today there are plenty of 2D/light 3D modern indy games perfectly playable on this setup.
I have a bunch of LGA 775 motherboards. Now, with Phil's video broadcasted, this stock doubled its value. :)
This board was everywhere back then. Almost every office/home PCs I know at that time came with this board and a conroe pentium dual core processor like E2160.
When all you have are unwanted parts, call the professional retro nerd...
And I thought having a unloved 3.0ghz Pentium 4 HT was crazy lol. Speaking of crazy, somehow the P4's motherboard has no bad caps. (I check the baord every few months in hopes of spotting a problematic cap before it goes poof)
It's a Sony Viao VGC RB30 btw. I saved it from becoming e waste, unfortunately somebody walked off with the stock graphics card and the "media card" and I've made some config changes myself so it's no longer stock. I installed a ATI 3600 series graphics card a 3640 and a sound blaster Audigy se,maxed out the ram, I've also unplugged the built in card reader since it's not plug and play and I can find the sony drivers, disconnected the opticals (since you can't get to them the way I have the machine setup. Its facing a wall) and installed a 4 port usb 2.0 card
I have got a Dell Optiplex SX280 with a Pentium 4 HT 3.0 GHz CPU in it (probably the same CPU as your one) and it runs a 64-bit Gentoo Linux build perfectly happily and I don't plan on getting rid of it.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Nice 👍 I've noticed a lot of people seem to save those old Dell omiplex and dimension machines. Wouldn't be surprised if it was the same cpu. Neat mine is my fun retro Windows XP gaming pc, same won't be getting rid of it
@@JohnSmith-xq1pz They're good little machines with good quality components and builds - the only downside is limited expandability with some of the bespoke case formats.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 lol yup that's what I hear all the time, in fact the only one's I've ever really ever heard criticised was the machine in the "clamshell" case's
Good Lord 😮 happy I kept all my CAD PCs since 1987 and added some components from electronicBay over the years.
Okay, my focus always has been on professional CAD Workstations and Servers, also PA-RISC and Sparc, but I got sucficiant PC in my stock suitable for retro gaming and retro business applications. 😁
Fun and quite a challenge to refurbish all that stuff without using modern workarounds. 😥
Downgrading more modern components is a possibility, but it is very uncool 😜
I have a dozen 775 board. I had trouble getting sound working on these. I don't recall if I tried the Santa Cruz... but the Solo-1, Yamaha and Vortex were not working well for me. You may have inspire me to try again across the cards I have.
I just can't get the CMI8738 sound card to work on this motherboard. Adlib music works, but any SB emulation just comes out as silence. the initialisation sets IRQ to A
That's a shame... Still, Adlib is pretty good too, especially for the earlier DOS games. Disable the cache and turn it into a 386 and for example all the DOS adventure games will run perfectly fine and sound lovely with that FM chip on the CMI.
where did ya find the dos drivers for the card? don't see it in the list of resources in the description. do you have it on your website by chance?
www.philscomputerlab.com/c-media-cmi8738.html
If only there was a better DOS driver for the CMI8738... i've found it to be really hit and miss even with motherboard compatibility... and if the chip revisions after 037D could be determined if the FM module has been disabled or removed from silicon chip versions after..
Maybe it'll work with SBEMU. Worth a try.
Very resourceful video, thank you!
I was reading about the Radeon HD6k series getting a Vulkan driver for Linux earlier today and was wondering how well Core 2 can go with DOS and even Win9x, then that night I see you've uploaded this.
In theory with the right hardware (eg. HD6k + older PCI GPU, onboard HD audio + old PCI DOS compatible sound card, etc) and a lot of work it'd be entirely possible to make a PC that can natively boot DOS, Win98SE, WinXP and up-to-date Linux (ie. Proton + DXVK/VKD3D = Compatibility with a lot of even modern titles) to be able to natively run most PC games and programs from a ~45 year timespan on the single PC.
Awesome as usually!
Phil, would you choose a SB live with it's emulation over the soundcard in this video, for DOS?
I use a C2D E8400 with 3 GHz and 1Gb DDR 2 800 Dual Channel Ram as Windows 98 SE High End machine. It has a GeForce 7900 GT with 256 MB and 2 voodoo 2 sli cards connected via a pcie to pci bridge with its own power supply. Works flawlessly. However, if I install the two Voodoo 2 cards directly on the board in the PCI slots, the PC freezes. The G31 chipset probably doesn't like SLI in the PCI bus. I use an SB 128 PCI as the sound card, unfortunately many PCI sound cards tend to stutter under Win98 in newer systems. The DOS sound also works, even if it's not the best. With many other PCI cards, the DOS sound no longer works on newer boards (no SB16 link)
LGA775 is IMO the ideal platform for a wide selection of retro gaming. In addition to working well with DOS, you can also have a great WinXP gaming experience with a more powerful GPU and more RAM.
Heck yes, it even does well with Windows Vista and Windows 7!
One question I have never got an answer to - does Windows XP ever use more than one core of a multi-core CPU?
@@terrydaktyllus1320 XP is just the OS. It's up to the applications. But yes, XP supports multi core, so video encoding will be much faster. Far Cry won't. Some games even have issues with more than 1 core.
@@philscomputerlab Thanks, good to know.
I'm still using a Core 2 Quad with 8 GB of RAM and an older GPU. I mostly use it for office, web browsing, and emulation. Works fine with Windows 10. It isn't even running at full potential considering I'm pretty sure newer 775 boards at least have PCIe 2 and SATA 3
The Core 2 Duo series are still so versatile being able to do DOS gaming to even running the some of the most modern Linux distros like Manjaro GNOME for basic daily task, as long as you have a good SSD, 8GB RAM, and a 1/2 decent GPU.
Well ...
You can run Linux on about anything.
A small CPU is a pain when we need to use Internet.
And I've been using Linux daily since 1998.
Just wondering why you didnt mention SBEMU as an alternative to the soundcard?
It's never worked for me so face up testing until they release a major update.
If I know the irq and dma mapping for the onboard Realtek audio controller can it work for dos games I have a board with the t2500 core 2 dual that I would like to use as is because it has built in compact flash on the bottom side and the bios allows for turning off the second cpu core?
I have an ASUS P5K-Premium. Can I turn that computer into a dos machine? I’m using my Gigabyte computer for Retro XP gaming. Unfortunately my P5K Premium needs a graphics card. Are there any affordable PCI graphics cards that are natively supported in dos?
How would FreeDOS work for a system like this?
I do think Socet 775 is going to be popular in the future because I think it's a good middle ground for Windows XP gaming. I also think Sandy Bridge is going to massively popular to the point that if I had the money and space I'd be snapping up every reasonably priced system I could.
I've done 2 FreeDOS videos actually. FreeDOS will work fine on this machine, but for playing games, MS-DOS is more compatible / no issues.
The 775 was always a good platform and I have a ton of that stuff for that in my storage, I have an open test rig which I can play around with when I feel like it, testing different CPUs and overclock or even underclock stuff. amazing what this platform can do with some tweaks
my W98SE PC is a socket 775 GA-P43-ES3G motherboard + core2duo E8600@4ghz + 4x1gb of 800mhz DDR2 in dual channel (limited to 512mb under dos/98se), dual boot on linux mint.
ATI X850 XT graphic card and Audigy 2 ZS sound card, 500gb Sandisk SSD (4x120gb in Fat32).
hardly what you'd call period correct hardware but thanks to your advices it's arguably the fastest windows 98 computer i've ever seen lol :P
i was about to bite the bullet and buy a pair of Voodoo 2, but tbh it emulate every 3DFX games i've tried in 1600x1200 60fps locked Oo
that being said, if i was to make a dedicated DOS machine i would defenetly go for older hardware and a much slower CPU,
haven't spent much time looking for a solution yet but i'm sure my specs will come back to bite me in the a*s sooner than later on some other games.
Very nice parts! You have the best of a alot of things!
LGA775, from DOS to Win 10. Can't beat that compatibility. Should work fine on Win 98 as well with the onboard graphics. The clear advantage of this config, is the onboard graphics. Be sure to get the LGA775 with the Intel Chipset, which has the Intel GMA integrated Graphics running on the FSB bus, which is DOS compatible (sadly QPI or Ringbus is not, so more modern Intel HD graphics is not usable).
I'm impressed that is is possible to actually slow down a C2D CPU this much to make it speed sensitive DOS game usable.
Is it possible to dual boot MS DOS and windows XP?
I have gigabyte GA-G41MT-S2 that has a core 2 Quad Q9650 @ 3.0 GHz, 8 GB DDR3 RAM, and a GeForce GT 710. It has PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse and an Integrated VGA and It also has one PCI slot.
For Phil & the viewers, is CRT 15-17" a must to enjoy Dos games? or a 5:4 LCD would just suffice
CRT is best, widescreen with 4:3 ratio second best imo.
Even with an original pc with a sound blaster from that time, it's a bit fiddly to get the dos games to run with sound.
Sometimes one doesn't work at all and sometimes a game just works with different irq/dma addresses than I set ^_^
nice video!👍
That's why I use dosbox 🙂. It would be cool to have a legit DOS computer but with prices for sound and video cards starting at 50 dollars each it's silly.
@@marccaselle8108 If only you had known at the time that it was developing that way ^^
@@Bergwacht haha very true
Still use a Dell Optiplex 380 with a Core2duo E6750 to run windows 11 and browse the web, watch youtube (even smooth in 4K), etc... Maxed it out with 8gb of ram, a ssd and a low profile Nvidia T600. It actually keeps up with modern systems. Just found a Core2quad Q9550 cheap on Ebay this week and gonna put that in this weekend. will be interesting to see what performance difference this will give.
My main is q9650,it will keep you up for another 2-3 years if you dont care about gaming, everything else runs fine!
@@vasileios6301 I must say with that T600 in it (directx 12 support) is gets most "newer' games going well enough in 720p and some even playable in 1080p. The bottleneck is the cpu because in benchmarks the t600 doesn't hit 100% of usage but the cpu does max out. I have a lot of working pc's I still use ranging from an Atari pc3 XT to pc's I use for gaming like an i5 9600k and for desktop stuff (premiere pro etc...) a Lenovo P710 Thinkstation with dual xeon e5-6550 v4 processsors. The Optiflex is just my daily driver since it's small, quiet and still not too power hungry (electricity prices are insane these days!).
Also if you're willing to go software emulation for sound (the recent excelent SBEmu) you can also use a Voodoo card on this? :)
Best part of 775 is. You can install brand new CPU cooler with RGB or just pick whatever shape you want (478 is dead end). I had that same Motherboard, but after several times fail to install winXP. The PC just die. The power still run but nothing on screen. Now it just ended on garage.
Yes great point about the cooler.
Try changing MB capacitors. I revived a few motherboards doing that, specially the large capacitors that support power distribution near the CPU
What's great about the 775 is you are right no one wants it but on the plus side the cpu's are cheap as heck. Cmedia my old favourite goto when I couldn't get a sound blaster. Funny thing is I have a stockpile of 775 board and chips. I must have seen this coming lol. Great video Phil.
🎉
I have one of the last boards from Intel that even has uefi and enough PCI slots (that's why I bought it back then). It even has speedstep and the core voltage can be lowered via windows, which many other boards cannot do.
Only the energy efficiency is not so nice compared to my I7-gen2.
The I7machine needs about 50% less, with 4 cores + hypertreating.
But with the new tools from the vogon site, you can actually continue to use the computer for old software. Especially since my motherboard has only been running for 6 months.
Thanks for the tip with the soundcard.
love the old 775 boards i have still got 2 i have lots of old stuff up hear in the Philippines also back in Adelaide to
This platform is supported by sbemu via it's hdaudio codec, been messing with this along with C&C red alert lan play.
i find lots of Socket 775 stuff in thrift shops as a result i own allot stuff from that era, might be fun to setup one with DOS
I'm wondering how little power a C2D would actually use, when being configured to run at such slow speed for DOS gaming. I mean... 5-10 watts maybe? Making it easily possible to cool totally passive (disconnecting the fan).
With some lowering of voltage, maybe. Not sure about totally passive though.