Building a 1.6GHz Windows XP gaming PC in 2021

Overview

Join me as I build a complete Windows XP retro gaming PC from scratch using an Intel Atom N270-based ITX motherboard in a compact RaidMax case. This passively-cooled system with an SSD makes for a surprisingly capable retro gaming machine. I test it with Command & Conquer, SimCity 4, Unreal, Quake 2, Warcraft III, and more!

Key Moments

• 0:00 Introduction and parts overview
• 3:15 Jetway N94 motherboard specifications and features
• 6:30 Installing motherboard, wiring front panel connectors
• 12:45 Mounting the SATA SSD and optical drive
• 15:20 Cable management and final assembly
• 18:00 First boot into Windows XP Professional
• 19:30 Gaming performance tests: Command & Conquer, SimCity 4
• 24:00 Testing Unreal and Quake 2 with OpenGL
• 27:15 Warcraft III multiplayer game and Atari Arcade Pong

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hey YouTube, today I’m going to be assembling a Windows XP computer using a very interesting little motherboard here. It’s going to be an ITX motherboard with an ITX case. It’s going to have a 120 gig SSD and a Serial ATA DVD CD burner.

As far as the motherboard goes, this is a motherboard that has an Atom N270 CPU running at 1.6 gigahertz. It’s a single core, dual-threaded CPU. It’s got an IDE connector here, two-channel IDE. It’s got two Serial ATA ports, a PCI expansion slot. It’s got a ton of USB headers on the motherboard—one, two, three, four, five. It’s even got an LVDS connector here that you could use to connect this directly to a flat panel display.

As you can see, it’s fully passive cooling for all the major chips on the board. In the back here we have a PS/2 port that can be used for either a mouse or keyboard. It’s got two USB 2.0, a VGA output for the onboard Intel GMA 950 graphics adapter, and it’s got a DVI output here. So technically you could have a dual monitor setup, I believe, if you wanted to do something like that. It’s got a parallel port, two serial ports, and two more USB ports here. Onboard Realtek HD audio and an ethernet port.

As far as the case is concerned, this is a case that I had—I bought many years ago. It’s an In-Win mini ITX case. It supports an optical drive, so I can put the burner in here. It’s got a power button, hard drive LED light, power light. Up here it has two USB ports and the audio connections.

For the storage, I decided to go with an SSD. It’s a 120 gig SSD. I got this from Amazon. It’s not a high-end brand, but for this build it should work really well. This is a Serial ATA cable, short one. As far as the burner is concerned, this is an old burner that I had from a working system. It’s a DVD burner, so it’ll be utilized to install software like games and run them. So definitely something you want in an older computer. But you could also use USB flash drives and transfer data from a more modern laptop to this.

The case came with a power supply, and I’ve been noticing that lately a lot of the newer ITX cases or cases in general, they don’t give you things like optical drive bays and they don’t include power supplies. They expect you to purchase those things separately. So this case is kind of special given the current state of things in the market.

The motherboard is a Jetway motherboard. It uses a first-generation Intel Atom N270, and it’s meant for embedded computing. The specs are as follows: it has an Intel 945GSE chipset with an ICH7M companion. It’s got one DDR2 SODIMM slot up to two gigs, which is what we’re using. So yeah, I forgot to mention that on the board there’s this SODIMM slot, and in it I’ve installed my only two gig DDR2 memory stick. But I was surprised that it worked because I have other motherboards—sorry, I have some laptops—that use the same chipset, same CPU, and it didn’t really like taking this 2 gigabyte stick. So this is a better build unit than those laptops.

As far as audio, there is a Realtek ALC662, and it’s got a gigabit ethernet adapter, which with Windows XP I don’t recommend using the internet on a Windows XP machine. But for multiplayer games and a LAN-based environment that is not connected to the internet, that might work.

It’s got two SATA 3 gigabit per second ports and a Parallel ATA port with UDMA 33, 66, and 100 megahertz. There’s this cute little diagram here with all the I/O ports. It’s got a lot for this motherboard. They really went all out. And it’s designed for digital security and surveillance, digital signage, gaming—so maybe as part of an embedded system in one of those arcade machines, that’s possible. We’ll see how well the games perform on this machine. Industrial automation control, medical, retail, thin client, HTPC—interesting. Well, this is back when mini ITX was being heavily used for the HTPC market.

All right, so let’s take a moment here to switch things up. I’m going to open the case and we can get started with building this out.

[Assembly process]

All right, let’s get started. Okay, so I went ahead and removed the cover from the case. It just had three screws, and I use some foam here to keep them in place so that I don’t lose them. Inside the case, nothing much there. There’s just the cables for the front panel, there’s the power supply cables. This power supply amazingly has a 6-pin connector for a PCI Express video card, and it does have one SATA power connector here that I can use for the hard drive. So that’s nice—I don’t have to use any adapters. And a bunch of other Molex connectors that I’m not going to use, and the P4 connector, which this motherboard doesn’t require.

Amazing, this is a really good power supply for something this small. It’s only—let’s see on the other side here—oh, 300 watts! Micro ATX power supply. That’s a lot more than I expected this thing to provide. So 22 amps at the 5-volt rail, 9 amps at the 12-volt rail. 300 watts in such a little package. That’s kind of cool. I hope it’s not too loud.

All right, so let me put this back down. What I’m going to start with is I’ve already gone ahead and used the standoffs and installed the standoffs for the motherboard down there. So I’m going to go ahead and install the motherboard. I don’t have an I/O shield, otherwise I would put one in there. This—like I said, I only bought this motherboard without the I/O shield.

Okay, so I put that in there and I’m going to go ahead and install some of these screws, and then we’ll continue with the hard drive.

[Continues with assembly, wiring, and testing]

Okay, here’s the final product. It’s fully assembled and I plugged in a DVI monitor, the Dell UltraSharp with a 4:3 aspect ratio, and a USB keyboard and mouse. That’s it. Let’s power it up and see how it performs.

Also, I’ve already previously imaged this SSD with Windows XP Professional and installed some games. And I also connected a couple of Logitech speakers here. So let’s power it up.

[Powers on and boots to Windows XP]

That’s Windows XP up and running, and that was very fast! So I have installed here Command and Conquer, SimCity 4, Sim Coaster, WinAmp, Atari Arcade, Unreal, Quake 2, Warcraft 3, X-Wing Alliance (which I can’t use because I don’t have a joystick), and Doom 2. Doom 2 is running under DOS, and the media music works, but the sound effects under DOS games are hit or miss because of the fact that this is Sound Blaster emulation.

So let’s start with Command and Conquer. [Gameplay demonstration] You can see this loaded up—it’s very fast, so it’s fun. Let me lower the volume. It’s very fast. It’s quite playable!

All right, so that was Command and Conquer. Next one I’m going to show you is SimCity 4. [Shows gameplay] This is at 800x768, so I want to zoom in really quick. Works really well!

All right, I’m going to skip Sim Coaster right now because I don’t know how to play that, and I’m going to go to Unreal. [Loads game] The SSD is really helping here a lot. This is at, I believe, 1024x768. I don’t know what I’m doing, but as you can see, the OpenGL performance is very good, especially for a game of this vintage.

And now I’m going to show Quake 2. Keep in mind this is all passively cooled as well, which again, this is low-end hardware. [Shows demo] I can just let it show the demo because it’s probably better than what I can do. Keep in mind this is like a 1.6 gigahertz Atom CPU.

All right, so I’m going to quit this and I’m going to now load Warcraft III. I’m going to do a multiplayer game, create a game, and I’m going to choose an insanely hard computer which is probably going to kill me really fast. But that’s fine because I’m just showing the performance. [Gameplay] Game is loaded. It’s very fast!

All right, this would have been a very nice computer back in the day. And Doom 2 just for completion. [Plays Doom 2] Let’s use the mouse a little bit. Music sounds amazing. The sound effects, like I said, don’t work well. So this is Doom 2 under DOS.

And to show that this is a real retro machine, I’m going to load the arcade, which is going to be Pong. Now this is real retro! I remember having a TV that had this built into it, and it was—oh, and I’m awful!

And that was it. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you like this kind of content, be sure to subscribe because I upload a video once or twice a month and showcase a different piece of hardware usually every single time I create one. So hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for watching!