Building the Ultimate Windows XP Retro Gaming PC — Detailed Build Guide
**Building a Windows XP Machine**
In this article, we will guide you through the process of building a Windows XP machine from scratch.
**Choosing the Case**
The first step in building our machine was choosing the case. We needed to select a case that could accommodate all the necessary components and have enough room for expansion cards. After considering various options, we decided on a Gigabyte case. The case had sufficient space for our liquid cooling system, fans, and RAM.
**Liquid Cooling System**
We installed a 280mm liquid cooler in one of the back slots. However, with this setup, we were limited to only two 140mm fans due to the available space. In contrast, if we were using 120mm fans, we would have had an extra slot for expansion cards. We decided to install three sets of liquid cooling components for better cooling performance.
**Adding Fans and RAM**
With our case selected, we added four fans to improve airflow and increase the cooling capacity. Two fans were installed on the outside slots to cool down the CPU and GPU. Another fan was installed inside the case to cool down the motherboard. The last fan was used as a top exhaust fan to prevent overheating. We also installed 12GB of RAM, but we only needed four gigs for our Windows XP machine.
**Sound Card Installation**
We chose a Sound Blaster Audigy sound card with two ports on the back and a plug connector for the front panel header. However, this setup was not ideal as it blocked airflow to the GPU. We decided to remove it temporarily to avoid impeding performance during benchmarking.
**GPU Installation**
Our final component was a Gigabyte Aorus RTX 2080 Ti, which is one of the rare cases where we had to use a full-length video card. We installed the power connectors for the sound card and GPU.
**Assembly and Testing**
We assembled our machine by installing the motherboard, CPU, and RAM. We connected all the necessary cables and plugged in the power cord. However, since we were testing Windows XP, we decided not to install the sound card as it was blocking airflow to the GPU.
**Conclusion**
Our build is now complete, and we are excited to test our machine with Windows XP. We hope this guide has been informative and helpful for those who want to build a retro PC.
**Links and Resources**
For those who want to purchase parts or learn more about building a retro PC, there are some links available below:
* [Full Playlist](link)
* [Windows XP Compatibility List](link)
Please note that these links may not be relevant for building a Windows XP machine specifically.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello and welcome to tech deals this is the edited build video of the windows xp ultimate pc this is a 30 minute edit of a three hour live stream that we did way back in december of 2019 while i appreciate all of you who watch the live streams i realize not everybody has the patience to watch a three-hour video and so this is a cut down edited 30-minute version of that showing just the key highlights in just a minute the camera is going to be overhead and you're going to hear the original audio as cut during that live stream with all the fluff and chat interaction take out to make it a more watchable video this pc is way overkill for windows xp to be completely blunt hence the term ultimate if ultimate was ever going to be applied to a configuration and use case i think this pretty much would apply now i'm not going to sit here and explain the whys and the purposes and the pros and cons of this because i did that in the previous video you will find that linked down in the video description below along with a full playlist of all the videos that we've done on this and eventually the upcoming video when we actually installed windows xp on this because i've done all the benchmarks on it but those were all done in windows 10. overall i'm very happy with this computer it was a super premium pc for its day and frankly it's not a bad pc in 2020 all things considered i debated installing windows 7 on this computer rather than windows xp after all given the hardware 6 scores 12 threads 12 gigs of ram windows 7 makes much more sense for pc of this era however why what exactly wants windows 7 but won't run well on windows 10. there's a few programs but that list is exceedingly small thus windows xp ultimate build as opposed to windows 7 because we can build i do plan in the future to make a typical windows 98 retro pc that isn't quite as ridiculous and overkill as this i'm also going to make a windows 98 second edition retro gaming pc and a dos retro gaming pc actually dos might require two because there's such a wide variety of hardware between the early 286 days with cga and ega graphics in the later 486 and pentium days with super vga graphics that might require two completely separate builds let me know in the comments section down below which you'd be interested in actually seeing first the dos the windows 98 or the typical windows xp retro build i'll be interested to see your thoughts now it's time to put the camera overhead and enjoy this awesome 30 minute build edit courtesy of our editor xd enjoy here you can see my original i buy power case really a thermaltake case but provided by ipad power opened up and my original asus p6t motherboard the original intel stock cooler back when they were actually decent and of course the i7 920 is underneath it we've got an upgraded power supply put in at some point don't remember when we are going to be keeping that and i've already taken half of the ram out there was 12 gigs in here we're gonna leave six in otherwise pretty much everything else is going and we're gonna move it over to another case first things first we need to unplug all the cables this we're going to keep just i guess for nostalgia reasons this is a usb 2 header that plugs into the motherboard and provides an extra two ports in the back of the system i'll go ahead and remove the rest of the ram to make it easier to get the power supply cable out very carefully trying to remove the main motherboard power cable there we go all the front panel connectors removed and now with everything removed we're just going to unscrew our motherboard this is a standard atx motherboard so nothing really special here other than nine screws to remove and there we go there is our original asus p16 motherboard probably the most valuable component we have in this system now these x 58 motherboards actually are worth more than the cpus are see what hard drive we have here a barracuda 2 terabyte drive we are probably not going to reuse that slide our ssd out and see what we have this is a oh interesting this is where my original 160 gigabyte ssd was i thought this was in my core 2 quad this is an intel x25 g2 160 gigabyte ssd next we're going to unscrew the power supply because this corsair cx 750 is a perfectly good power supply and there's no reason to not keep it as i said it's not original to this machine i don't remember when i added it yes this is why fully modular power supplies are wonderful look at this mess i don't know we'll see we'll put it in the new case and maybe i'll keep it or maybe i'll switch it to a modular we'll find out in a minute one last look at the armor plus mx thermaltake case before we actually install our motherboard into the case let's go ahead and get the intel stock cooler off and replace the cpu one quarter turn on these locks and the stock cooler should come right off wow that is some dried up thermal paste using our isopropyl running alcohol we are cleaning off the old thermal the safest places to do it is at least in the moment just go anywhere but we'll have to clean it some more once we get it out well there you have it folks three lga 1366 cpus the original i7 920 with four cores eight threads sitting in the middle which was a big leap ahead of its time and then here we have the six score 12 thread xeon 3.06 gigahertz x 5675 and then this would have been very expensive back in the day the i7 980 x unlocked six quart this was a six core chip before six core chips were cool and there's our socket still in good condition hopefully this cpu works nice i've not tested this if we do all this and it doesn't work i'm going to be kind of miffed close that up lower our lever and our i7 980 x is installed cooler master master liquid 120 not light not rgb just straight up power two fans push and pull so we have four screws those are for the fans got it okay individual mounting systems are going to obviously vary between coolers and boards so i'm going to try to explain it but this motherboard is special because it's got two sets of mounting holes i've pushed these all the way in i actually think we're using the 775 mounting we're actually using the inside holes which probably won't matter so let's see if this comes up cleanly through the board check that out one two three four posts we are using the inside so the outside post whatever it is not remotely going to matter that is pretty cool that works really nicely do we need these yes those i need those i need here you can see our new case and this thing is beautiful much more modern design much cleaner design than the old one for sure i was originally going to use a different case a white case but for a variety of reasons i changed it out and so we have switched and we are now using this gigabyte c200 glass tempered glass case having verified that our posts are in the correct position now we're going to insert our i o shield which we pulled out of the other case time to install our motherboard io shield first once you've put all the screws in it's a good idea to go around and just double check that you made them all tight we usually do two passes on this not making them super tight until we ensure that all nine are secure i will be removing these two drive trays back here because i will not be using them and they're in the way so that i can just have a place to stick some cables and do some easier cable management if you're going to put drives here you'd have to spend a little bit more time with cable management routing everything with the power supply but i'm going to take these out because that gives me a place to stuff cables here we have our corsair cx-750 power supply non-modular which i'll admit is a bit of a pain the cables in my hand here are the ones we actually need for the build i've separated them and then the other ones i'm just gonna be stuffing back there and trying to keep them out of the way with the case laid on the side i have done a spider web of cables we've got our molex for our front fans the cables i'm not using are stuffed down here 24 pin atx set aside for later this is our cpu power cable and it's actually the first one we're going to do i'm going to run it up here and the purpose for that is to get it plugged in and then i can zip tie it using these to make sure it doesn't rest against the motherboard with our 8 pin cpu power connector zip tied here that is secure and not bothering anybody here you can see our two six plus two pci express power connectors i'm actually gonna run them through this hole right here because i'm gonna put the ssd right here and run the wiring here so leaving that free to plug into our video card i have given a lot of thought to what to do with storage and i ultimately decided to go with this crucial mx500 one terabyte ssd as my sole storage solution taking one of the drive trays i'm going to just screw it in here and mount it in the top with our drive mounted i will slide it into the top slot here and just screw it in stuff you can see here this black cable well barely but this is the sata data cable plugged into sata port number one of the motherboard and while it's not ideal we'll end up tying it probably here and it'll be out of the way i can tie it to that we now have the 24 pin atx cable plugged into the motherboard and this is where having some aftermarket heavy duty ties comes in handy because these little teeny ones that come with the motherboard or the case may not be sufficient i'm going to do something unorthodox here and i'm going to tie the 24 pin atx cable to the drive cage here but the purpose of tying it off and i've just set the tension just so so it's not pulling on the motherboard it's just sort of resting there is just to keep it here there's no tie-downs over here believe it or not just these here not a convenient spot and i don't want to pull the cable over because i don't want to pull on the socket on the motherboard risking breaking the boredom there's a little little bit of play in here so that'll stay right there time to run the front panel hd audio and the reset switch power switch etc to the bottom of the motherboard this actually needs to get put through here because i will eventually use this okay our front panel audio connector and our front panel uh controls are plugged in here i will save this for later when i get a pci express card that has a port for it so my front panels work now i'm going to take this off so we can install our fans i have a four pack here of cooler master silent fans 1200 rpm very slow 19 decibels these things are basically sound so i will put this up as high with the three fans screwed in in the front i'm going to do my best to turn this up so that you can see it there are the three intake fans plugged in and so now i am going to put the front case back on well that went on nicely putting the case sideways like this you can see well i've got a couple cables in the way here but no big deal move those aside we do have the three connectors here now because i am doing an old motherboard we are presented with a bit of a challenge now thankfully these are three pin connectors and we've got a three pin fan connector right here and we've got a three pin fan connector down here we have a four pin cpu pwm power connector right here and we have nothing else this is old school folks this is before we had oh excuse me we do have one more connector right here the problem is that there aren't enough connectors on the motherboard to connect these plus the top fan i'm gonna install plus the pump plus the two fans on the liquid cooler one two three four five for the pump six and seven for the intake and exhaust fans here we have one two three four so we are short three connectors on this board not to worry i've got a solution the first solution comes with the liquid cooler itself this is a pair of connectors here that we'll use with the two fans on the radiator itself and then this four pin connector will then plug into the cpu fan connector here on the board the second solution is this three pin power splitter to molex i plugged in the molex connector in the back and we've got three front fans and we'll plug those in here the pump will plug into either here or here and then the top fan will plug into this one over here because i don't have another splitter is this long enough to reach under there through there and up to there actually that does that reach his fingers okay put that there you know after tying all this up and organizing it i really hope that we don't have a problem well i'm going to be grumpy most of the wiring in the back is now complete i'll show you the fans on the other side in a second these lovely ketchup and mustard colored cables are those the adapters a little bit of extra cable down here but everything is now plugged in the top fan uh and the top two fans here on the top fan are plugged into this adapter and the bottom fan is plugged into the motherboard every zip tie down time to get the liquid cooler installed with the case flip back over you can see i've got a fan installed up here these two and this fan are plugged into that three-way adapter the bottom fan which you can barely see down here it actually extends a bit into the drive area is plugged into the bottom slot on the board and then we'll be using the top two connectors for the pump and the fans the next thing we have to do is we have to install we put in the right orientation the brackets for the pump there are two of them and we just screwed them in through the holes with those brackets installed we'll just check the fit to make sure yep that will go on very nicely now it's time to put the fans onto the radiator this is officially the way to do it i now have both fans screwed into the liquid cooler and again this is just an awesome i have done a sandwich cooler like this in the past and it was awful trying to get it installed so with the screw heads there we just have to screw this into the case i want those to be variable and cpu controlled so one challenge is going to be cable management for this which i don't want anywhere near any of this okay so we now have yeah well there's a problem we've now got the pair of push-pull fans installed on the radiator and screwed into the case i've got them plugged into the cpu fan mount here for both of these with the splitter wired around back went to a great deal of trouble to make all that nice who playing the home game can see what's wrong here if i take this the pump and i try to place it on the cpu houston we've got a problem yep i am not making this up folks unfortunately here's the reality of it the position of the cpu is different on different motherboards where the clean zone is where it's mounted left right up and down on an atx board is not necessarily the same between all generations of cpus all general you know intel versus amd in this case the radiator and the two fans simply do not fit and given the thickness if i were to take this and turn it here it's not going to fit either so we have two choices at this point number one i can ditch one of the fans either the push of the pull either one and that would make enough room my concern is that a 120 millimeter liquid cooler with a single fan will not be sufficient to get the kind of overclock that we're hoping for on the cpu i can mount it here which would potentially mean i could move this fan over as far as possible mount the liquid cooler here and maybe mount one more exhaust fan here that's i'm gonna try that we'll be back in a minute and see if that works what i could do is switch to a 240 on the roof i might actually be able to just loosen these and slide this because the rails sweet that's going to block the ram yeah cpu coolers are overrated i'm gonna fit over there so if i turn it 90 degrees and go this way that actually fits really nicely okay that fits really perfectly but now these fan cables are on the wrong side that has to plug in man i appreciate new motherboard so much more now we now have the exhaust fan installed here in the front and we have the dual push-pull liquid cooler here directly over the socket it is a tight fit but it does in fact fit now it is time to put the thermal paste on the cpu using a generous amount but not a verge amount because let's not be completely silly here and then we are going to take the pump and very carefully line it up and then hold it down just like so and then we are going to initially finger tighten the mounting screws on just to at least get something going i stuff that under there and stuff that because they're buying a ton of them for cheap we are almost done here you can see some new colored zip ties back here i've actually added another fan and i've rearranged the way they're plugged in now i'm going to flip this over we now have an exhaust fan here in the back an exhaust fan here on the top push pull exhaust fans here on the cooler pumps installed the bottom fan is plugged into the bottom of the board here the center front fan is plugged in through here and only the top fan is connected to that three-way splitter i showed you earlier these top three fans are now on the splitter so i am making it work i just have to make an adjustment there we go one more small change i hate continuing to screw and unscrew these because every time you do it you wear the screws out okay that's nice i have turned the computer 90 degrees around you can see the top liquid coolers here it's actually now closer to the side of the case and the reason for this i'll show you credit to gigabyte for doing this there are two sets of rails here on the top on this side but there are three sets over here if you're installing a 280 millimeter liquid cooler or two 140 millimeter fans you have no choice they will go on the outside slots and they'll just go together there's no extra room but with 120 millimeter fans they give you an extra slot here i had it screwed in here and it was almost blocking the ram slots so you can go one step further over i didn't bother with this top exhaust fan because it's not in the way but with this by just going up one slot this is just giving us so much more room next to those ram slots here on the back of the case you can see the final configuration there's a couple of more zip ties added i ran the pump power connector through here on the back yeah it's a bit of a mess i suppose but actually i think it's pretty well organized considering that none of this stuff is going to move anywhere nothing is going to bother anything when we put the metal backing on this this is actually pretty good all things considered the brave moment of truth are we going to stick all the ram in here i think we are that's 12 gigs we are not going to use on windows xp the most we can use this four gigs and so 12 gigabytes of ram is utterly wasted i could just put three of these modules in for six and we'd still have some wasted ram but whatever it'd be fine so that's 12 gigs of ram we'll put the 12 gigs of ram in first just to do our initial benchmarking and well honestly it's ddr3 what am i going to do with it i'll probably leave it in there because there's no other place to put it this is a usb dual header with a plug that's going to plug into the bottom of the motherboard just giving us an extra two usb 2 ports in the back of the case well i guess we're tearing every one of these off we are going to install a sound blaster audiology audigy sound blaster a thingy number two zs i already i don't know if this works either almost everything in this build is untested this is a usb 3.0 card it's not the card i want to install and i will be replacing this with a card that has two ports on the back and it has a plug connector here for the front panel connector so i can just plug that in here but i don't have it at the moment it'll take i chose the no rush shipping option from amazon to get an extra dollar credit so it'll be here in a week no rush for the moment i'm going to install this right down here this is a gigabyte case so i figure it's appropriate that we put a gigabyte video card in here now this is not going to stay this is a gigabyte auris rtx 2080 ti this is a 1200 video card one of those rare times i'm glad we put a decent power supply in here our setup and install is now complete the two 8-pin pci express power connectors are in this sound card is actually in the way a bit i'm probably going to take this out for the windows 10 testing and i will reinstall this sound card i just want to show it i will reinstall it when i do windows xp stuff but for windows 10 i don't like it's blocking the airflow of the graphics card and so i don't want to impede performance i'll i'll take that back out here in a minute and it will go back in before we do anything with windows xp thank you all so much for sticking around to the end of that and for watching this entire build video two gold stars to all of you for sticking around and a bonus gold star to xd our awesome editor for turning three hours of livestream into a coherent and watchable video i think that is a much more enjoyable experience than meandering through an old live stream on the channel thank you very much for that like this video you know what to do give it a like hit the subscribe button hit the bell notification icon leave a comment down below so the youtube algorithm bots know that you really like this video share it with your friends if you thought this was interesting useful informative helpful funny entertaining or just strange then share it with all of your friends because sharing is caring and it is greatly appreciated there'll be a bunch of links down in the video description below as i mentioned before links to the full playlist on this not really to the parts per se because unless you're building a retro pc it doesn't really make any sense and if you're buying parts this isn't what i would buy for a windows xp machine anyway so it's really irrelevant but there will be some down there anyway thank you all so much for watching i will see all of you next time youhello and welcome to tech deals this is the edited build video of the windows xp ultimate pc this is a 30 minute edit of a three hour live stream that we did way back in december of 2019 while i appreciate all of you who watch the live streams i realize not everybody has the patience to watch a three-hour video and so this is a cut down edited 30-minute version of that showing just the key highlights in just a minute the camera is going to be overhead and you're going to hear the original audio as cut during that live stream with all the fluff and chat interaction take out to make it a more watchable video this pc is way overkill for windows xp to be completely blunt hence the term ultimate if ultimate was ever going to be applied to a configuration and use case i think this pretty much would apply now i'm not going to sit here and explain the whys and the purposes and the pros and cons of this because i did that in the previous video you will find that linked down in the video description below along with a full playlist of all the videos that we've done on this and eventually the upcoming video when we actually installed windows xp on this because i've done all the benchmarks on it but those were all done in windows 10. overall i'm very happy with this computer it was a super premium pc for its day and frankly it's not a bad pc in 2020 all things considered i debated installing windows 7 on this computer rather than windows xp after all given the hardware 6 scores 12 threads 12 gigs of ram windows 7 makes much more sense for pc of this era however why what exactly wants windows 7 but won't run well on windows 10. there's a few programs but that list is exceedingly small thus windows xp ultimate build as opposed to windows 7 because we can build i do plan in the future to make a typical windows 98 retro pc that isn't quite as ridiculous and overkill as this i'm also going to make a windows 98 second edition retro gaming pc and a dos retro gaming pc actually dos might require two because there's such a wide variety of hardware between the early 286 days with cga and ega graphics in the later 486 and pentium days with super vga graphics that might require two completely separate builds let me know in the comments section down below which you'd be interested in actually seeing first the dos the windows 98 or the typical windows xp retro build i'll be interested to see your thoughts now it's time to put the camera overhead and enjoy this awesome 30 minute build edit courtesy of our editor xd enjoy here you can see my original i buy power case really a thermaltake case but provided by ipad power opened up and my original asus p6t motherboard the original intel stock cooler back when they were actually decent and of course the i7 920 is underneath it we've got an upgraded power supply put in at some point don't remember when we are going to be keeping that and i've already taken half of the ram out there was 12 gigs in here we're gonna leave six in otherwise pretty much everything else is going and we're gonna move it over to another case first things first we need to unplug all the cables this we're going to keep just i guess for nostalgia reasons this is a usb 2 header that plugs into the motherboard and provides an extra two ports in the back of the system i'll go ahead and remove the rest of the ram to make it easier to get the power supply cable out very carefully trying to remove the main motherboard power cable there we go all the front panel connectors removed and now with everything removed we're just going to unscrew our motherboard this is a standard atx motherboard so nothing really special here other than nine screws to remove and there we go there is our original asus p16 motherboard probably the most valuable component we have in this system now these x 58 motherboards actually are worth more than the cpus are see what hard drive we have here a barracuda 2 terabyte drive we are probably not going to reuse that slide our ssd out and see what we have this is a oh interesting this is where my original 160 gigabyte ssd was i thought this was in my core 2 quad this is an intel x25 g2 160 gigabyte ssd next we're going to unscrew the power supply because this corsair cx 750 is a perfectly good power supply and there's no reason to not keep it as i said it's not original to this machine i don't remember when i added it yes this is why fully modular power supplies are wonderful look at this mess i don't know we'll see we'll put it in the new case and maybe i'll keep it or maybe i'll switch it to a modular we'll find out in a minute one last look at the armor plus mx thermaltake case before we actually install our motherboard into the case let's go ahead and get the intel stock cooler off and replace the cpu one quarter turn on these locks and the stock cooler should come right off wow that is some dried up thermal paste using our isopropyl running alcohol we are cleaning off the old thermal the safest places to do it is at least in the moment just go anywhere but we'll have to clean it some more once we get it out well there you have it folks three lga 1366 cpus the original i7 920 with four cores eight threads sitting in the middle which was a big leap ahead of its time and then here we have the six score 12 thread xeon 3.06 gigahertz x 5675 and then this would have been very expensive back in the day the i7 980 x unlocked six quart this was a six core chip before six core chips were cool and there's our socket still in good condition hopefully this cpu works nice i've not tested this if we do all this and it doesn't work i'm going to be kind of miffed close that up lower our lever and our i7 980 x is installed cooler master master liquid 120 not light not rgb just straight up power two fans push and pull so we have four screws those are for the fans got it okay individual mounting systems are going to obviously vary between coolers and boards so i'm going to try to explain it but this motherboard is special because it's got two sets of mounting holes i've pushed these all the way in i actually think we're using the 775 mounting we're actually using the inside holes which probably won't matter so let's see if this comes up cleanly through the board check that out one two three four posts we are using the inside so the outside post whatever it is not remotely going to matter that is pretty cool that works really nicely do we need these yes those i need those i need here you can see our new case and this thing is beautiful much more modern design much cleaner design than the old one for sure i was originally going to use a different case a white case but for a variety of reasons i changed it out and so we have switched and we are now using this gigabyte c200 glass tempered glass case having verified that our posts are in the correct position now we're going to insert our i o shield which we pulled out of the other case time to install our motherboard io shield first once you've put all the screws in it's a good idea to go around and just double check that you made them all tight we usually do two passes on this not making them super tight until we ensure that all nine are secure i will be removing these two drive trays back here because i will not be using them and they're in the way so that i can just have a place to stick some cables and do some easier cable management if you're going to put drives here you'd have to spend a little bit more time with cable management routing everything with the power supply but i'm going to take these out because that gives me a place to stuff cables here we have our corsair cx-750 power supply non-modular which i'll admit is a bit of a pain the cables in my hand here are the ones we actually need for the build i've separated them and then the other ones i'm just gonna be stuffing back there and trying to keep them out of the way with the case laid on the side i have done a spider web of cables we've got our molex for our front fans the cables i'm not using are stuffed down here 24 pin atx set aside for later this is our cpu power cable and it's actually the first one we're going to do i'm going to run it up here and the purpose for that is to get it plugged in and then i can zip tie it using these to make sure it doesn't rest against the motherboard with our 8 pin cpu power connector zip tied here that is secure and not bothering anybody here you can see our two six plus two pci express power connectors i'm actually gonna run them through this hole right here because i'm gonna put the ssd right here and run the wiring here so leaving that free to plug into our video card i have given a lot of thought to what to do with storage and i ultimately decided to go with this crucial mx500 one terabyte ssd as my sole storage solution taking one of the drive trays i'm going to just screw it in here and mount it in the top with our drive mounted i will slide it into the top slot here and just screw it in stuff you can see here this black cable well barely but this is the sata data cable plugged into sata port number one of the motherboard and while it's not ideal we'll end up tying it probably here and it'll be out of the way i can tie it to that we now have the 24 pin atx cable plugged into the motherboard and this is where having some aftermarket heavy duty ties comes in handy because these little teeny ones that come with the motherboard or the case may not be sufficient i'm going to do something unorthodox here and i'm going to tie the 24 pin atx cable to the drive cage here but the purpose of tying it off and i've just set the tension just so so it's not pulling on the motherboard it's just sort of resting there is just to keep it here there's no tie-downs over here believe it or not just these here not a convenient spot and i don't want to pull the cable over because i don't want to pull on the socket on the motherboard risking breaking the boredom there's a little little bit of play in here so that'll stay right there time to run the front panel hd audio and the reset switch power switch etc to the bottom of the motherboard this actually needs to get put through here because i will eventually use this okay our front panel audio connector and our front panel uh controls are plugged in here i will save this for later when i get a pci express card that has a port for it so my front panels work now i'm going to take this off so we can install our fans i have a four pack here of cooler master silent fans 1200 rpm very slow 19 decibels these things are basically sound so i will put this up as high with the three fans screwed in in the front i'm going to do my best to turn this up so that you can see it there are the three intake fans plugged in and so now i am going to put the front case back on well that went on nicely putting the case sideways like this you can see well i've got a couple cables in the way here but no big deal move those aside we do have the three connectors here now because i am doing an old motherboard we are presented with a bit of a challenge now thankfully these are three pin connectors and we've got a three pin fan connector right here and we've got a three pin fan connector down here we have a four pin cpu pwm power connector right here and we have nothing else this is old school folks this is before we had oh excuse me we do have one more connector right here the problem is that there aren't enough connectors on the motherboard to connect these plus the top fan i'm gonna install plus the pump plus the two fans on the liquid cooler one two three four five for the pump six and seven for the intake and exhaust fans here we have one two three four so we are short three connectors on this board not to worry i've got a solution the first solution comes with the liquid cooler itself this is a pair of connectors here that we'll use with the two fans on the radiator itself and then this four pin connector will then plug into the cpu fan connector here on the board the second solution is this three pin power splitter to molex i plugged in the molex connector in the back and we've got three front fans and we'll plug those in here the pump will plug into either here or here and then the top fan will plug into this one over here because i don't have another splitter is this long enough to reach under there through there and up to there actually that does that reach his fingers okay put that there you know after tying all this up and organizing it i really hope that we don't have a problem well i'm going to be grumpy most of the wiring in the back is now complete i'll show you the fans on the other side in a second these lovely ketchup and mustard colored cables are those the adapters a little bit of extra cable down here but everything is now plugged in the top fan uh and the top two fans here on the top fan are plugged into this adapter and the bottom fan is plugged into the motherboard every zip tie down time to get the liquid cooler installed with the case flip back over you can see i've got a fan installed up here these two and this fan are plugged into that three-way adapter the bottom fan which you can barely see down here it actually extends a bit into the drive area is plugged into the bottom slot on the board and then we'll be using the top two connectors for the pump and the fans the next thing we have to do is we have to install we put in the right orientation the brackets for the pump there are two of them and we just screwed them in through the holes with those brackets installed we'll just check the fit to make sure yep that will go on very nicely now it's time to put the fans onto the radiator this is officially the way to do it i now have both fans screwed into the liquid cooler and again this is just an awesome i have done a sandwich cooler like this in the past and it was awful trying to get it installed so with the screw heads there we just have to screw this into the case i want those to be variable and cpu controlled so one challenge is going to be cable management for this which i don't want anywhere near any of this okay so we now have yeah well there's a problem we've now got the pair of push-pull fans installed on the radiator and screwed into the case i've got them plugged into the cpu fan mount here for both of these with the splitter wired around back went to a great deal of trouble to make all that nice who playing the home game can see what's wrong here if i take this the pump and i try to place it on the cpu houston we've got a problem yep i am not making this up folks unfortunately here's the reality of it the position of the cpu is different on different motherboards where the clean zone is where it's mounted left right up and down on an atx board is not necessarily the same between all generations of cpus all general you know intel versus amd in this case the radiator and the two fans simply do not fit and given the thickness if i were to take this and turn it here it's not going to fit either so we have two choices at this point number one i can ditch one of the fans either the push of the pull either one and that would make enough room my concern is that a 120 millimeter liquid cooler with a single fan will not be sufficient to get the kind of overclock that we're hoping for on the cpu i can mount it here which would potentially mean i could move this fan over as far as possible mount the liquid cooler here and maybe mount one more exhaust fan here that's i'm gonna try that we'll be back in a minute and see if that works what i could do is switch to a 240 on the roof i might actually be able to just loosen these and slide this because the rails sweet that's going to block the ram yeah cpu coolers are overrated i'm gonna fit over there so if i turn it 90 degrees and go this way that actually fits really nicely okay that fits really perfectly but now these fan cables are on the wrong side that has to plug in man i appreciate new motherboard so much more now we now have the exhaust fan installed here in the front and we have the dual push-pull liquid cooler here directly over the socket it is a tight fit but it does in fact fit now it is time to put the thermal paste on the cpu using a generous amount but not a verge amount because let's not be completely silly here and then we are going to take the pump and very carefully line it up and then hold it down just like so and then we are going to initially finger tighten the mounting screws on just to at least get something going i stuff that under there and stuff that because they're buying a ton of them for cheap we are almost done here you can see some new colored zip ties back here i've actually added another fan and i've rearranged the way they're plugged in now i'm going to flip this over we now have an exhaust fan here in the back an exhaust fan here on the top push pull exhaust fans here on the cooler pumps installed the bottom fan is plugged into the bottom of the board here the center front fan is plugged in through here and only the top fan is connected to that three-way splitter i showed you earlier these top three fans are now on the splitter so i am making it work i just have to make an adjustment there we go one more small change i hate continuing to screw and unscrew these because every time you do it you wear the screws out okay that's nice i have turned the computer 90 degrees around you can see the top liquid coolers here it's actually now closer to the side of the case and the reason for this i'll show you credit to gigabyte for doing this there are two sets of rails here on the top on this side but there are three sets over here if you're installing a 280 millimeter liquid cooler or two 140 millimeter fans you have no choice they will go on the outside slots and they'll just go together there's no extra room but with 120 millimeter fans they give you an extra slot here i had it screwed in here and it was almost blocking the ram slots so you can go one step further over i didn't bother with this top exhaust fan because it's not in the way but with this by just going up one slot this is just giving us so much more room next to those ram slots here on the back of the case you can see the final configuration there's a couple of more zip ties added i ran the pump power connector through here on the back yeah it's a bit of a mess i suppose but actually i think it's pretty well organized considering that none of this stuff is going to move anywhere nothing is going to bother anything when we put the metal backing on this this is actually pretty good all things considered the brave moment of truth are we going to stick all the ram in here i think we are that's 12 gigs we are not going to use on windows xp the most we can use this four gigs and so 12 gigabytes of ram is utterly wasted i could just put three of these modules in for six and we'd still have some wasted ram but whatever it'd be fine so that's 12 gigs of ram we'll put the 12 gigs of ram in first just to do our initial benchmarking and well honestly it's ddr3 what am i going to do with it i'll probably leave it in there because there's no other place to put it this is a usb dual header with a plug that's going to plug into the bottom of the motherboard just giving us an extra two usb 2 ports in the back of the case well i guess we're tearing every one of these off we are going to install a sound blaster audiology audigy sound blaster a thingy number two zs i already i don't know if this works either almost everything in this build is untested this is a usb 3.0 card it's not the card i want to install and i will be replacing this with a card that has two ports on the back and it has a plug connector here for the front panel connector so i can just plug that in here but i don't have it at the moment it'll take i chose the no rush shipping option from amazon to get an extra dollar credit so it'll be here in a week no rush for the moment i'm going to install this right down here this is a gigabyte case so i figure it's appropriate that we put a gigabyte video card in here now this is not going to stay this is a gigabyte auris rtx 2080 ti this is a 1200 video card one of those rare times i'm glad we put a decent power supply in here our setup and install is now complete the two 8-pin pci express power connectors are in this sound card is actually in the way a bit i'm probably going to take this out for the windows 10 testing and i will reinstall this sound card i just want to show it i will reinstall it when i do windows xp stuff but for windows 10 i don't like it's blocking the airflow of the graphics card and so i don't want to impede performance i'll i'll take that back out here in a minute and it will go back in before we do anything with windows xp thank you all so much for sticking around to the end of that and for watching this entire build video two gold stars to all of you for sticking around and a bonus gold star to xd our awesome editor for turning three hours of livestream into a coherent and watchable video i think that is a much more enjoyable experience than meandering through an old live stream on the channel thank you very much for that like this video you know what to do give it a like hit the subscribe button hit the bell notification icon leave a comment down below so the youtube algorithm bots know that you really like this video share it with your friends if you thought this was interesting useful informative helpful funny entertaining or just strange then share it with all of your friends because sharing is caring and it is greatly appreciated there'll be a bunch of links down in the video description below as i mentioned before links to the full playlist on this not really to the parts per se because unless you're building a retro pc it doesn't really make any sense and if you're buying parts this isn't what i would buy for a windows xp machine anyway so it's really irrelevant but there will be some down there anyway thank you all so much for watching i will see all of you next time you\n"