PARUS wrote:

canthearu, yes, of course! It's because they are rare and on huckster's hands. They know that these boards are best solutions for retro gaming in case if you want sublimate max eras in one machine. If you don't want it you must be mad to buy such board for such price. I understand that those boards should be more expensive than "usual" "regular" boards but nowadays prices I don't understand too - $200+ and some of them even $1000+ 😳

A few years ago I was lucky and got two DFI G7S620-N boards about $180 for each. And now I have i865+C2D+AGP+PCI+ISA system. It's covers for me 1983-2006 close to 100%, and ~2006~2010 more or less.

Those boards have nothing to do with "retro gaming", they were a niche product for industrial use. They're rare because ISA was a non-thing for consumers in the P4 era, and the sellers are understandably marketing them as spare parts to industrial customers who have no problem plonking down $300 to fix a $10 000+ piece of lab gear. Nobody's targeting "us" specifically, or seeing a few old nerds building Win98 machines as a gold mine.

xjas wrote:

Those boards have nothing to do with "retro gaming"

This is your opinion and it's wrong.

xjas wrote:

they were a niche product for industrial use. They're rare because ISA was a non-thing for consumers in the P4 era, and the sellers are understandably marketing them as spare parts to industrial customers who have no problem plonking down $300 to fix a $10 000+ piece of lab gear.

Yes! But it doesn't mean that these boards "have nothing" for retro gaming as you said. They not Intel? Not PCI? Not ISA? Not DOS/WIN98/WINXP compatible? Don't say foolishness please 😀

xjas wrote:

Nobody's targeting "us" specifically, or seeing a few old nerds building Win98 machines as a gold mine.

Probably. But you have a mistake: not a few. I do not say "a lot" of course but some. And: we are all old nerds here. And you're too!

I didn't say you couldn't use them for "retro gaming", but that's not what they were made for & that's not why the prices are high. Nobody's out there cackling & rubbing their hands together trying to rip us off over a few P4-ISA boards.

Hey all, I already bought the Mobo, and performance on the PCI bus is surprisingly fine, doom 3 does in fact work on high settings with good framerate, and I downloaded the demo of Bioshock as a test, and it is playable. This is enough for me, to be completely honest. I have an Xbox 360 somewhere that can do the rest of that era just fine. Main goals for the upper limit were to get UT2004 running at high framerates, and I'm using a 17" Dell Trinitron CRT, so not running games at high resolutions.

All in all, extremely happy with the PC, and the motherboard I have (the P4SCA) is excellent. I might do another build someday with AGP, but of all my Pentium computers none of them support AGP, so getting a few extra PCI cards isn't a bad thing.

I will say though, PARUS, that first mobo you linked hits all the requirements I had for a board, and was roughly what I paid for mine (if i'm correct in seeing the 2 SATA connectors on there).

xjas, 😀 sorry. I thought that I may don't care what they were made for. The main thing is they are fit.
dumpsterac1d, well different users are more or less strict. OK, if you are satisfied I'm glad 😉 I can say that even Pentium D wasn't good enough for me because I just knew that it is possible to try get working Core2 on my board. And I did it via big help my friends which know asm very well and are able to disassemble BIOSes. We spent 2 years for Wolfdale (unsuccessfully) and have sorted Conroe. Now it's Conroe with L2=4MB and I can start it on FSB400-800 as I wish. But I wasn't satisfied and by my request the MSR Editor for DOS was made. I've reached x1 multiplier! If it is starting on FSB400, setting mul=1 and disabling cache it's similar to XT 9,54 MHz. Throttle FSB only 1/2 and it's similar to XT 4,77 MHz. And it's possible to reboot at full speed 3 GHz. It's able to become about 286, 386, Pentium 2 or any other speeds freely. Only by rebooting with another parameters, sometimes even without reboot. Second thing that I made is reassignment ACPI system from IRQ9 to IRQ10. It makes it possible to use IRQ9 by ISA sound cards without disabling ACPI in BIOS. In this way I use SoftMPU at IRQ9. Third thing is using 5 slots ISA riser and super tower case.
Yes, different users are more or less strict.