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Tom’s Hardware
Tom’s Hardware
Technology
Mark Tyson

Enthusiast installs Win 3.1X on bare metal Ryzen 9 9900X and RTX 5060 Ti system using floppy disk drive, OS from 1992 running on 2025 hardware — Asus motherboard’s ‘classic BIOS’ functionality was instrumental to the feat

Windows 3.1X runs bare metal on modern hardware.

A retro computing connoisseur has installed and booted Microsoft Windows 3.1X on a Ryzen 9 9900X and RTX 5060 Ti PC system. That’s a 1992 OS working on a bare-metal 2024 Zen5 CPU and 2025 Blackwell GPU. The full story contains a few nuances, but basically, a system and OS separated by over 30 years of huge advances kind of play nicely together.

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