This Athlon 64 Windows XP Build Went COMPLETELY Wrong…

🖥️ Building a retro Athlon 64 system should have been easy… but it turned into absolute chaos.

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What started as an optimistic Windows XP build quickly spiralled into blue screens, dead hard drives, incompatible GPUs, and endless troubleshooting. In this episode, I attempt to build a classic Athlon 64 gaming PC — and almost lose my sanity in the process.

🔧 The Build (Eventually)
CPU: AMD Athlon 64
Motherboard: ASUS A8N-E (nForce4)
RAM: 2GB DDR
Sound Card: Sound Blaster X-Fi PCIe (later removed)
GPUs Tested:
Radeon HD 4850 ❌ (no POST)
Radeon HD 5770 ❌ (instability)
Quadro FX 570 ✅ (finally stable)

Storage:
HDD #1 ❌ Failed
HDD #2 ❌ Failed
WD Blue HDD #3 ✅

OS: Windows XP
💥 What Goes Wrong
⚠️ No video output
⚠️ Dead hard drives during XP install
⚠️ Repeated blue screens
⚠️ Driver conflicts
⚠️ PCIe + XP compatibility pain

After removing the X-Fi and switching GPUs again, the system finally stabilises and we can move on to the fun part…

🎮 Benchmarks & Games Tested

✔️ Far Cry
✔️ Need for Speed: Most Wanted
✔️ Unreal Tournament 2004
✔️ Painkiller
✔️ Call of Duty 2

00:00 Intro
00:52 Parts
03:40 Get into case
07:23 First boot
08:00 Troubleshooting
09:43 Try again
10:49 HDD failure
12:21 Next day
14:34 3rd Video card and Ram
15:38 Stable system and Farcry
17:25 NFS Most Wanted
19:05 Painkiller
20:47 UT 2004
22:46 Call of Duty 2
22:43 What a saga

📊 Final Question

Was all this frustration worth it… or should this build have stayed in 2005?

If you enjoy retro PC builds, Windows XP nostalgia, hardware troubleshooting, and real-world benchmarks, consider subscribing for more classic hardware chaos.

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