To me it sounds perfectly like something Dell would make that I would see come into my shop with XP home around 2002 and he would complain XP sucks so bad and that he just want 9X back so weed put a really low end sound card in there and give it back to him or something.

It's actually not that bad as it sounds a P4 Northwood is a great CPU, If you get a stronger GPU you can actually play a lot of games on that. The 440MX which is very typical kind of thing you would see a lot in prebuilts back then will definatly hold you back, although its probably fine for DX 6 and non demanding DX7 games.

Id probably caution you about IRQs. That motherboard already has serial and paralel so you should ditch that card. You need free IRQs for 98se to run properly especially if you want your sound to work right. ANd you cant be installing a ton on cards to take all the IRQs.

So generally speaking on a board with no cards installed with just a video card and onboard sound or something you probably only have 2-3 Free IRQs best case scenario. That is unless you disable onboard devices in the BIOS.

When you run out of IRQs you get into IRQ sharing hardware doesn't work right and you get blue screens. Irq Steering doesn't always work right.

IRQ Assignment

0 System timer
1 PS/2 port
2 Connects to IRQ 9
3 COM2, COM4 (These are usually serial ports)
4 COM1, COM3 (These are serial ports and modems)
5 Sound (Can also be LPT) But not both
6 Floppy disk
7 LPT1 (Can also Be sound) But not both
8 Real-time clock
9 VGA, 3270 emulation**
10 ** Free
11 ** Free
12 PS/2 port
13 Math coprocessor
14 IDE primary
15 IDE secondary

Thank you, this is really good information! It is gone now. Indeed the motherboard has these ports however I have yet to test them, some of the functions do not seem to be working despite having the official drivers installed (tested integrated Cadenza audio, inoperative). I don't own anything at the moment with parallel, and the only serial device I have is actually the Megasquirt ECU installed in my car. Not a trivial task to connect these! I guess I was just feeling nostalgic by wanting those interfaces working.

My current headache is trying to get online, mainly to interface with my NAS, so I can stop burning CDs to get files onboard. The USB 2 ports on the motherboard are working fine for the keyboard/mouse but when I pop in a flash drive, it goes through the "new hardware wizard" routine and of course can't find anything. Will need to investigate more on this, for now I installed the NUSB driver but that didn't change anything.

So anyway, getting online. A Belkin F5D7000 (revision 5) is installed and it works fine under XP, and the driver/utility claims to be for 98, ME, and XP. The utility is indeed working fine under 98SE, but there is no dice with establishing a connection. It can see the networks in the area but never gets anywhere with connecting. I will be troubleshooting this next. Ideally I would be hardwired via the switch coming from my server's Untangle firewall VM but due to space constraints, I cannot put the tower nearby the server and expect to use it normally. Maybe I should start shopping for a wireless PCI card with known-good Win98 compatibility that will also work in the XP install.

I have that same Intel board, running with the same processor and also with 256MB of RAM, however I use a GeForce 2MX400 and a Soundblaster Live! (disabled onboard audio) on it. It behaves decently under Windows 98SE and 2000 (dual boot). Only hardware issue I've had is USB2.0 driver does not work on either Win98 or ME (the OS hangs on boot),however it does work correctly on 2000 and XP, so I'm limited to USB 1.1 speeds under win 98SE. I have used this computer to play all need for speed games, from 2SE up to 5 (however 5 behaves buggy for me). Also Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake 2 (with all of its expansion packs) and also Quake 3 and No One Lives Forever. It's a nice computer IMO.

Edit: if you happen to have the original drivers CD that came with this motherboard, would you mind uploading an ISO or CUE/BIN image of it to archive.org?

aha2940, the Need for Speed games are actually what I was mainly aiming for! On Windows 98SE I recall NFS High Stakes and Porsche Unleashed being my main squeezes. The latter being a game I played through more times than I can count, and is actually the main game I want to be running. Inspired me to get into Porsche 944s many years later (see username).

On XP I was playing mostly NFS Underground and Hot Pursuit 2. I know for a fact these will work, because this mobo/CPU/GPU are literally the same parts that I used to play these games in the 2003 time period, just in a different case!

For networking if you enter the other computers IP address, in run or the address bar eg \\192.168.0.1 are you able to connect?
Ideally you want all computers to have the same workgroup, username and password which will stop windows asking for a password when you try and connect.
The fact that XP works means it probably something like SMB1 been disabled (typical cause of XP and earlier computers not talking to Win10)

Nothing wrong with Wifi and Win98. Lack of built in Wifi software means you'll be using the adapters software.

Overall though sounds like a good fast machine for Win98 gaming.
The Vibra 128 isn't amazing but will get the job done. Even has dos drivers if you needed them.
You can improve midi by using the 8MB Waveset if not already. You can download it from here
http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=181&menustate=0