First of all, are you sure about the slots? All the images I can find show that it has at least one PCI slot, depending on the exact model.

Second, I don't know where you get that only Win7 supports PCI Express. The slot was introduced during XP's heyday, it should run fine. I've built plenty of XP systems with PCIe.

Your board is also one of the few that has explicit support for both the P4 Gallatin and 1066 FSB. I'd try to track down the 3.46 model, or failing that a 3.73 or 3.8 Prescott. Combine it with a pair of 79xx or 8800 cards and 2 - 4GBs of DDR2-533 (cheap) and you have a perfectly fine mid-late XP rig. (It'll also take a Smithfield Pentium D, or Presler up to 3.4Ghz. Your call if you want the extra heat from those.)

Yeah, I have an Asrock 4CoreDX90-VSTA running ME quite nicely, with a PCI-E Radeon X700. 98se and ME can both use PCI-E, provided the chipset has drivers.

That said, I think the board you have may be an nForce4 board? Not sure if there's any way to get functional chipset drivers for 98se. It'll definitely be fine under XP though.

You can also get a PCI-e to PCI bridge for pretty cheap. Single and double slot versions are available.

The dual slot ones DO NOT work with Live or Audigy cards though.. at least on the one I have. And if you have a longer card, then you have to make a custom power adapter because they are dumb and don't put right angle connectors on the bridge card.

Dual slot where you mount the PCI slots somewhere else.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/PCI-E-PCI-Express-X1- … e-/192256601105

Single slot. Made to use with low profile PCI cards, but you could always use an extender cable and mount the whole thing somewhere else.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/PCI-Express-PCIE-To-P … t-/322618731288

This board is one of those gems that should be preserved and it was bit of a meme when you could have dumped in 4 7950GX2s just for the lols. A quick google and you will see pictures from the period where people did exactly that even though it didn't work.

Sorry, thunderstorm kept me from replying.

As for why I thought this couldn't do XP.... I probably read that on Wikipedia or somewhere reliable(sarcasm) like that.

If I were gonna use this motherboard tho, I would want to use a video and sound card actually designed for its PCI-e slots, not downgrade it. That just seems like a waste of potential.

If this thing could potentially play either Bioshock or Duke Nukem Forever I might do something with it.... well, unless I find something else that it would definitely play that I'd be happy with. In the meantime its on a shelf--helps that currently I can't afford a new set of video and sound cards anyway (then again I might not NEED a sound card). The main thing is I'm pretty sure the processor, being Pentium 4, is a single-core and I'm not sure how many games actually require a dual- or quad-core game.

BTW it does indeed have one normal PCI slot.