MSI H61M-P31/W8 motherboard, 32-bit XP and NVMe via PCIe card?

[NT-Five]

Hi there!

I have got several new old stock MSI H61M-P31/W8 motherboards and would like to use them with 32-bit XP for multimedia, internet browsing, video editing and encoding, no gaming.

Full specs: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/H61M-P31W8/Specification

For maximum performance I was thinking about buying a NVMe M.2 SSD drive and a NVMe M.2 SSD to PCIe Card.
There are many cards available like this one; https://sabrent.com/products/EC-PCIE

BIOS mod for NVMe support here:

https://winraid.level1techs.com/t/help-add-nvme-support-on-msi-h61m-p31-g3/35462

Here are some questions:

- Does this upgrade/mod make any sense and is it feasible?

- Does it require special drivers that might not be available for XP?

 

Edited March 18, 2023 by NT-Five

[Mark-XP]

7 hours ago, NT-Five said:

Here are some questions:
- Does this upgrade/mod make any sense and is it feasible?
- Does it require special drivers that might not be available for XP?

Hello @NT-Five (not to confuse with @NT Five ) and welcome to the Forum!

The MSI H61M-P31 should be an ideal platform for any XP multimedia etc system...

- eventually an NVMe seems slightly exagarated, at least for me standard SSD are suffucent in speed in any situation.

- You can find different SATA/AHCI drivers here and find out which one fits best for your situation. the Patch Integrator 3.4.0 is applicable for any personal XP-inst.Iso: you either may rename your iso to "Windows XP Professional SP3 x86 - Integral Edition 2022.9.9 (Vanilla).iso" temoraryly and substitute the one inside  or you manage to extract the drivers and include them to your .iso with nlite.

Best wishes for your project!

[NT-Five]

Hello Mark-XP,

Maybe you are right about NVMe being overkill on this system. There is only 1 PCIE 16x slot on the board anyway.

It's probably better to use it for USB 3 extension board instead. 🤔