If you want to take your Longhorn Experience to the next level, you probably want to run it on real hardware and not just in a virtual machine or emulator. Getting the best hardware for Longhorn is a tricky process, so we’ll take you through our recommendations.
We’ll give you options focused on an “authentic” pre-reset experience focusing on contemporary hardware that would have been used with the builds at the time, some faster hardware that doesn’t involve too much effort to use, and the absolute limits of what you can use with Longhorn.
CPUs
Authentic Experience
For 32-bit Longhorn, a “Northwood” Pentium 4 using Socket 478 is the most suitable consumer platform to use, from an authenticity point of view. Within this range, an 800MHz FSB Hyper-threaded version will give a good balance between authenticity and performance, the Pentium 4 HT having been officially released in April 2003.
For 64-bit machines, you should use an AMD Athlon 64 on a Socket 754 motherboard. For authenticity, later Socket 754 boards should be avoided, as AMD repurposed the platform as a budget option after they released Socket 939. Particularly, avoid a motherboard with PCI Express, as these were only introduced relatively late in the development cycle, and are not representative of hardware used during the Longhorn development cycle. 64-bit Intel CPUs will not work on the earliest Longhorn 64-bit builds without a debugger as Intel’s implementation didn’t arrive for another year.
Faster Experience
Probably the best trade-off between ease-of-use and performance is a Core 2 Duo CPU on the Socket 775 platform. A Core 2 Quad will show some further benefit, though the scheduler in this era of NT is poorly suited for many-core systems and certainly anything beyond four threads (i.e., 4 cores without hyperthreading, 2 cores with hyperthreading) will show rapidly diminishing returns in typical workloads.
On the limit
Generally, you’re looking at similar limits as to what’s achievable for Windows XP. I’ve found an Ivy Bridge Intel i7 works acceptably well, though you may need to add a USB 2.0 PCI Express card, since USB 3.0 will not work with Longhorn unless your UEFI / BIOS supports a compatibility mode. A Sandy Bridge era motherboard may come with USB 2.0 ports included, and is capable of using an Ivy Bridge CPU. I’ve also found a Haswell-E is doable with Longhorn, though at this point, the limitations are clearly visible and you’ll struggle to find suitable drivers. You will also need to use a PAE modification (see the RAM section below), since the 32-bit address space gets very crowded by device-reserved address ranges.
RAM
Generally, more RAM is better, although with most builds, you are limited by default to a 4GB address space since they’re 32-bit. Typical machines of the era may have come with as little as 256MB RAM, though for authenticity, there’s no harm in using 512MB or even 1GB to represent a more high-end machine of the era. Certainly, using a smaller amount of RAM will be unpleasant thanks to the memory leaks that exist in many Longhorn builds.
For a faster experience, it’s worth upgrading to 2GB as a minimum. Going much higher is likely to be pointless for most builds, as 32-bit builds are limited to 4GB by default, and will subtract device-reserved memory ranges from this 4GB.
For the ultimate experience, you should use a PAE-enabling patch to make all of your memory usable. I recommend PatchPAE3, which explicitly supports 4093, and works well across different Longhorn builds.
GPUs
Authentic Experience
Probably the best cards for an authentic experience are Radeon 9xxx AGP cards. For nVidia, FX 5xxx cards (or their Quadro FX equivalents) are probably the best suited to authentic experience, but they lack the DirectX 9 performance of the ATi cards.
Faster Experience and On the limit
ATi drivers broke compatibility relatively quickly, however nVidia drivers work in pre-reset builds right up to 18x.xx era drivers. This enables you to use cards as late as GeForce 9xxx and even GTX 2xx cards, which represent the pinnacle of performance available for pre-reset Longhorn.
Storage
HDDs for the authenticity, SSD for the sanity
Audio
Getting HD Audio to work, AC'97 easiest.