My "Windows XP Gaming" Setup - Installing OS

I was on a little trip to my basement and i found my old project - Windows XP (DirectX 8 / 8.1) Gaming Setup. Some time ago i bought some parts that were in reasonable price and were fitting to the motherboard i used to have. It's time to make it came to life again!


My "Windows XP Gaming" Setup has been built based on mATX board, using AGP 8X GPU slot, DDR1 RAM slots and 533 / 800 MHz LGA775 CPU Socket. Motherboard also have SATA ports, which is good information. All of this has been built using MidiTower case, which looks just fine. On the fly i saw that my setup is missing HDD. There are also some missing cables - SATA cable for HDD and ATA tape to connect CD / DVD Drive.

I searched through my stuff and found old SATA HDD which i could use with this setup. SATA cable and ATA tape also weren't a problem - i always have a dozen of them in a drawer. Right away i put all parts together and powered it on. PC turned on the first try, so i calmed down (i'm always a bit stressed when powering old PC) and started to check on specs, which are:

Motherboard: MSI PM8M3-V mATX
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 630 3.00 GHz
GPU: nVidia GeForce FX 5600 XT 256MB AGP 8X
RAM: 1 GB DDR1 (1 module)
HDD: Seagate Barracuda ST350041 500GB SATA
CD / DVD: DVD Writer TSSTcorp
FDD: Samsung 3,5'' FDD
PSU: Fortron / Source 350W
Case: MidiTower

After a long time in the basement the BIOS has lost it's settings, so i guess the CMOS battery is dead. I replaced old battery to a new one, got into BIOS and set everything to default except Boot Sequence, which i changed to booting in order - FDD - CD / DVD - HDD.

Next step was to make HDD ready to install OS. With that case i always use Linux-based G-PARTED  software, that works like a small Live-OS that is booting from CD and let you to do anything you want with all HDD's mounted in PC. I set HDD to have 3 partitions (i know it's not helping whole system to work better, but i like to have things in order) - 50 GB for C:\ - Windows, 50 GB for D:\ - Software and around 365 GB for E:\ - games, files like videos, music or photos and of course any kind of downloads.

When the HDD was ready to work i swiched CD in drive from G-PARTED to Windows XP Professional SP3 x86 installation disc. On first try i failed to install Windows, because Installation Wizard failed to detect any drives - it turned out that i forgot one thing - SATA drives on this motherboard is seen as an SCSI device and Windows Installer needs additional driver... from FLOPPY DISC! The only FDD i have is in this particular setup, but it has no OS and i can't use it to put files on Floppy Disc. I had no other way than order USB 3,5'' FDD to put every needed drivers onto diskette. Price of 30,00 PLN (8,99 $) was acceptable for me.

Just couple hours after ordering USB FDD i thought about it again and concluded, that's i'm not a smart man... Windows XP Live! So i downloaded the famous Hiren's BootCD which is Windows XP with a tons of important software built in (amazing software to use when used OS breaks and we need to recover important data from HDD), then burned ISO on CD and run my Windows XP Gaming Setup with this Live distribution. This tool was enough to put all needen drivers onto floppy and with that my road to install Windows was open.

Rest of installation process gone the standard way (with SCSI RAID driver exception), and my setup was finally ready to run. I put on all drivers on and installed all important software.

Of course i couldn't resist to benchmark this setup in 3DMark05 and 3DMark06. The outcome was terrible with 273 points in 3DMark05 and only 89 points in 3DMark06:

Some other day i'll try to test my PC with favourite games. Looks like this setup is the best for Windows XP and DX8 or early DX9 games. I will definitely write about it so stay tuned!