I currently keep an old school PC with I believe a Geforce 7000 GPU with windows XP installed on it to play old school games that don't play well with win 7 or 8. Its unfortunately full ATX and takes up a lot of space. I was thinking of getting one of the mini-ITX boards with and AMD APU. Would I be able to install XP on one of these newer boards and APU's? Would I run into driver issues? Or should I go about figuring out how to set up a virtual machine on my main desktop (Win 8.1)?
Thanks!
Yes you are more than likely going to run in to problems with a APU on xp and older games useualy only run on a single or dual core you are probably going to be better of geting one of intels new pentiums and a cheap video card.
A virtual machine should work.
What virtual machine would work best within windows 8.1 then? Also if I go the Pentium route, would any modern video card be able to support these older games? I have a spare 560gtx and 760gtx so that would be convenient..
Shure droping one of those old cards in will work fine
I'm not well versed with modern VMs but I think part of it has to do with the processor. And yes any gpu should work.
i wouldn't recommend to play virtualized games unless maybe on the newest APUs but virtualization os not designed for gaming (the new APUs try to fix this with something in the memory controllers but i´m not sure how it performs)
OK so playing games in a virtual computer doesn't work well then? Is that what your saying? That's why I always kept a separate computer with win xp on it. But I was hoping to either get rid of it and use a virtual machine or getting a smaller rig to save space. Sounds like a virtual machine may not be the best route then..
Or what about setting up dual boot?
So I looked into the 1150 pentiums that I can find and they are all haswell on newegg. I cant find a board for them that offers win xp driver. I tried gigabyte, asus, asrock, msi, and nothing. However I was able to find FM2+ boards that offer windwos XP drivers. So maybe and A series APU may work after all, but with a discrete graphics card??
So I looked into the 1150 pentiums that I can find and they are all haswell on newegg. I cant find a board for them that offers win xp driver. I tried gigabyte, asus, asrock, msi, and nothing. However I was able to find FM2+ boards that offer windwos XP drivers. So maybe and A series APU may work after all, but with a discrete graphics card??
the IGPU should be enough for that kind of games but again I dont know if it performs well virtualized I guess the better option is to install xp in dual boot and try the w7 drivers
Ya I wasnt concerned that the APU would be strong enough to handle the old games, just if there would be driver issues or compatability issues. Wasn't sure if the older versions of directx or opengl are supported or not.