- Joined
- Sep 20, 2001
- Location
- Bakersfield, CA
As part of my misadventures in retro rig building, I decided to attempt getting Win7 running on my old primary rig board, a Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Master with an 8350K I grabbed off of ebay and re-lidded with Conductonaut, a new Nextorage 1TB NVMe and Kingston Fury 3600C16 memory. I got a nearly fully updated custom Win7 ISO, and wham bam, what do you know, it installed fine. The only things that Snappy Driver and some internet digging could not install were the Wifi/Bluetooth drivers and the Nvidia USB-C driver. It took a little digging but no issues getting the Realtek ALC1220 running either (driver from an GB X370 board did the trick). Also, the Kingston ram booted XMP with no issues and passed Memtest86+ with flying colors, when this same board absolutely hated my Gskill 3200C14 kit. Go figure.
I still have to OC this thing and benchmark it, but this should be an absolute killer Windows 7 machine for Dirt 2 and Crysis. It'll be fun comparing GPU and CPU performance with Crysis on this versus my Haswell Refresh and Broadwell 5775C CPUs.
I basically have come full circle on all these hardware swaps. First I got into Z97 with an Asus Maximus Impact and an Asrock Z97 Anniversary (running in my super mean WinXP build). I originally wanted to get a max Win7 build on an eVGA Z97 Classified (went to Win10 and failed to dual boot it with Win7 because of BIOS issues. Reverted to older BIOS versions fixed the Win10 issues). Bought an Asus Z97 Hero because I wanted NVMe. And now I got Win7 running on my original main rig parts that were retired when I built my new Raptor Lake machine. Lol.....
I still have to OC this thing and benchmark it, but this should be an absolute killer Windows 7 machine for Dirt 2 and Crysis. It'll be fun comparing GPU and CPU performance with Crysis on this versus my Haswell Refresh and Broadwell 5775C CPUs.
I basically have come full circle on all these hardware swaps. First I got into Z97 with an Asus Maximus Impact and an Asrock Z97 Anniversary (running in my super mean WinXP build). I originally wanted to get a max Win7 build on an eVGA Z97 Classified (went to Win10 and failed to dual boot it with Win7 because of BIOS issues. Reverted to older BIOS versions fixed the Win10 issues). Bought an Asus Z97 Hero because I wanted NVMe. And now I got Win7 running on my original main rig parts that were retired when I built my new Raptor Lake machine. Lol.....
