I personally prefer VIA over NF chipset boards, even though VIA chipsets of that age had their own particular problems.
I prefer VIA as the NF chipsets often ran much hotter and the chipset often required active cooling while the VIA's run perfectly fine running passively.
Also I'm not sure if NF chipsets were affected by the substrate fiasco.

Both my offline database (VIA s939) and 1 of my main LAN rigs (VIA s754) have run almost perfectly stable, so no reason to switch to another chipset 😀

However, I do want to point out 1 significant problem with the VIA chipsets of that era:
As you may already know, the VIA SATA controllers were plagued by incompatibility problems using SATA2 devises on their VIA VT8237R and prior southbridges, which were fixed with the VIA VT8237R Plus southbridge.

Afaik the VIA VT8237R will not work with any SATA2 devices, they will simply not be recognised!
I try to avoid these if I can, unless I can get a s939/s754 VIA board for like €10 or so. Boards with the VIA VT8237R Plus will work fine with SATA2 devises, even though they run them at SATA1 speeds (both are SATA1 controller chipsets).

So, if you find a VIA chipsetted (lol, is that even proper English? 😜) board, see if it has the VIA VT8237R or the VIA VT8237R Plus.

Having the non-Plus wouldn't be a catastrophe though, for what I use them for any SATA1 harddrive will be perfectly fine (remember that SATA laptop harddrives remained at SATA1 for much longer then desktop harddrives 😉 ).

About the CPU's, I'd suggest you read yourself into the available CPU's as theres several different ones available.
In short, I prefer to use the single cored ones with the Venice core, they are the coolest running.

Hope this helps 😉
If you have any further questions, I'd be more then happy to help you out mate! 😉

OK, thanks a lot. I forgot to mention that I need Athlon 64 CPU support, but definitely single core only, as I want to keep one "foot in the past", with it pointing towards the Windows 98 era. Regarding SATA: I am not going to use SATA drives, of any kind. I have some IDE drives, for my Windows 98 SE projects.

So, with those two "updates" in mind, please can someone recommend some well made S754 mobos that I can hunt about for on ebay? Thanks a lot.

Sorry I can't be any more specific, but there were so many A64 DDR boards made and I don't think anyone here has tried like 5 or more of those...

Lmao, I'm going to recommend you another forum where I think you may find a good answer to your particular question ;D
http://classicplatforms.com/forum/index.php, they are very friendly people with a LOT of knowledge about Socket A and Athlon 64 hardware, I'm pretty sure they will help you out 😉
They are very friendly folks 😉

Thanks a lot for that recommendation. Interesting website! BTW, can you answer this questions please - what came first, socket 754 or socket 939?

Edit: I can answer my own question - here. (Wikipedia says that 939 superseded 754.)

s754 came first, with s939 hot on it's tail 😉

The only significant difference between the 2 is that s939 supports dual channel DDR1 and s754 doesn't.

And of course the 2 Sockets are not pin-compatible 😜

s754 was more for Semprons while s939 was more the high-end solution, but Athlon64's were available for both Sockets and both have Venices available (the s754 A64 Venice is a bit harder to track down then the s939 variant though, but both should be relatively easy to find right now).

retro games 100 wrote:

About 5 days ago, I spotted a Gigabyte GA-K8NS Pro mobo on ebay, with CPU and RAM. It's socket 754, AGP, with a Windows 98 driv […]
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About 5 days ago, I spotted a Gigabyte GA-K8NS Pro mobo on ebay, with CPU and RAM. It's socket 754, AGP, with a Windows 98 driver. Unfortunately, I got outbid on it. I was really hoping to get that thing ASAP, to test a Radeon 9800 XT in it. Nevermind. So, please can someone recommend a mobo that satisfies these requirements:

Socket 754
AGP
Supports 400 DDR memory
Windows 98 driver

Would something like an Asus K8N or K8V be any good? Asus list quite a lot of variations for these two types of mobos. Any ones to look out for?
Also, what about MSI, Asrock, and any other manufacturers? Thanks a lot for any advice.

I have an amazing 754 System that I built around a LANPARTY UT3 Nforce motherboard. It has AGP 8x, takes DDR 400 (max 2 gig) or DDR 333 (max 3 gig), runs flawless in Windows 98se and it looks so cool. Black and yellow.

Currently running it with an Athlon 64 3400+ and an ATI x1950 pro (Gecube).

You should find one easy enough on ebay, I got mine for £24 including postage.

Tetrium wrote:

I prefer VIA as the NF chipsets often ran much hotter and the chipset often required active cooling while the VIA's run perfectly fine running passively.

Yep, I too prefer VIA or intel to nforce chipset. I faced few problems like video hiccups in 3D games, random crashes while using a nforce4 based motherboard once. Maybe it's related to the over heating of the chipset as Tetrium says.

Just be sure to research boards before buying cuz every chipset got used on cheap nasties. 😉 Usual badcap warning.

Also the popular K8T800 lacks AGP PCI lock for overclocking although it is perfectly decent overall.

Iris030380 wrote:

I have an amazing 754 System that I built around a LANPARTY UT3 Nforce motherboard. It has AGP 8x, takes DDR 400 (max 2 gig) or DDR 333 (max 3 gig), runs flawless in Windows 98se and it looks so cool. Black and yellow.

Those DFIs are pretty amazing, back in the day I had an LP UT3 s939 board with AGP... super stable.