Do you have the manual and can you verify that the board supports ISA DMA. Some of these boards with a retrofit ISA slot do not.

Yeah, I'm getting that feeling. I feel kind of sad... I wish I would have known that this board didn't support DMA before I dropped 180$ and waited 2 months for it to get here 🙁

I tried to run MSD.EXE and it reports that there is a DMA controller and it does not report conflicts that I can see.

Would a DOS compatible PCI card work in this system?

What is the model number of the ITE chip? What about the southbridge? The pictures I am seeing are crazy blurry and horrid quality.

Edit: not sure you will get ISA DMA as I am pretty sure that the i875/ICH5 chipset is the newest that has that... with the appropriate bridge chip.

Edit 2: The Axiomtek IMB200 motherboard is LGA775... supports up to Pentium D CPUs and has ISA DMA support.... but the price is waaaay too high IMHO. over $300 was the cheapest I saw.

Or how about a DFI ITOX G7S620-N? Cheapest I see for those right now is around $1,500.

I really would like to have an LGA 775 setup with full ISA support at some point but not holding my breath.

Yes anything ICH6 does not support ISA DMA no matter what bridge they use. The ICH4 boards directly support ISA DMA w/o bridge chip but getting one with an ISA slot may be hard....last chipsets supporting 775 and ISA and DMA directly or thru proper bridge chip:
"Certain 865G, 865PE, and 875P boards, 865P, 848P, 865GV: 865G without an AGP slot, 845: ICH2 like Legend QDI PlatiniX 2DI-AL, 845GL, no AGP slot, 845E, 845G: AGP 4×, 845GE, 845PE: AGP 4×." but am sure you already checked into this and is why you figured your 945 based would work. fixed my boo-boo

See here for the ONLY known LGA775 board that supports Core2 chips with ISA slots that can be made to work with ISA DMA... G41/ICH7 - the RUBY-9719VG2AR - special utility was written to make it work.
https://flaterco.com/kb/ISA_chipsets.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20141114122751/ht … =RUBY-9719VG2AR

See here for a thread of a system built with said motherboard:
Retro Xeon Rig - 38-year-span (PC) and 13-year-span (Mac) software supported *without* use of emulation

And you won't be getting AWE cards work on that board, because the LPC to ISA bridge doesn't support enough IO ranges to cover what AWE needs (e.g 22x, 62x, A2x and E2x), so for example you would need to drop FM and MPU401 support to get EMU8000 working.

I cannot thank you all enough for your insightful comments.

This is where my curiosity ends, unfortunately. I've already dumped way too much money into this and cannot afford to continue (which admittedly is my own fault). I'll stick with my athlon, pentium pro, and pentium 2 machines.

Thanks guys.