What an interesting old thread! I have semi-usable retros based on three old setups, two of which are very similar. I had great hopes for the Asus P5A, and never ran across this preference it is supposed to have for K6-3s. I have several K6-2s, and a couple of Intel Pentium/MMX chips, but they seem too slow.
Of course, at this point, I haven't tried any pre-Windows stuff, so for all I know, the PI/MMX 200 that worked great in Win98 (but hardly at all in Win2K) is "too fast" for those.
The P5A proved incompatible with a TNT2, a Geforce256, and a GF2 Ultra, before I tried ATI cards. The Rage128s worked to a moderate extent, but seemed primitive. Neither the Radeon SDR nor Radeon DDR seemed to work at all well. Of the old ATI cards, a 7500 seemed about as good as any of them.
My biggest problem has been to keep Windows (any version) connected to the Asus MB's USB ports. I had trouble with audio card drivers for a variety of cards I tried, and with the nVIDIA video drivers. I'm just about to give up, but perhaps if I can locate a K6-III inexpensively enough, I'll see if that will reduce the frequent instances of erratic behavior.
The similar PC I put togther has a SOYO MB, with an MVP3 Via chipset. That's the very same chipset I was using back then ,when Win95 was brand new, in a "VIP" motherboard, and it hasn't shown any incompatibilities except with slightly newer Creative cards / drivers. It has an SB128 in it that works fine, and a Geforce GF2 GTS video card.
I would have abandoned the other (ALi Aladdin Asus) long ago, had the SOYO's BIOS known what a "Quick Boot" was. It's so damn slow getting from power-on to loading an OS, that I can lose my urge to play something while waiting on it!
My old PI/MMX 233 PC was never so slow back in the period when it was first line equipment.
So, folks, does this litany of P5A complaints sound familar? How much is related to the CPUs I'm using? (K6-2s from 350 to 575 MHz, mostly down- clocked somewhat.) And, of course, is there any trick to convince the SOYO that it really can perform a Quick Boot?
P. S. No matter what DIMMs I've tried in the several ALi boards, 128 MBs is the largest I could get to work, although the manual claimed the MB could handle 3 x 256s. The SOYO, on the other hand, is running happily on the first pair of 256 MB DIMMs that I stuck into it.