I’m planning on building a WinXP retro gaming machine around an AMD Radeon HD 7970 card that I already have.
What would be the fastest mobo to fully support WinXP? Z77 appears to be the fastest officially supported ones, but apparently Haswell Z87 (and maybe beyond) works too? I have a leftover Haswell Xeon 1231v1 CPU, but no mobo to test it with. Does Z97 support WinXP? Am I right that Skylake and beyond should be avoided, or do they work with unofficial drivers? There appears to be semi-official support for some high-end EVGA Dark overclocking mobos, but I’m not so sure if getting one would be any sense at all.
What would be the easiest way to install WinXP with the newest updates? While I do have a legit copy of XP, it seems like creating your custom ISO file with nlite is a big hassle that I don’t want to bother with, if I can. Is the Windows XP “Integral Edition” any good? I am not planning to connect the PC to internet, so security is not really a concern. I plan on transferring games to the PC via USB or (W)LAN.