I still have W98 rig with VIA KT400 based board (Abit KD7) which works great with drivers from supplied CD. Unfortunately it is not mATX...

Intel chipsets work best for s478 imo. i865 is nice for win98.

That depends on what do you want. Do you need AGP 1.0 compatible slot? Do you need ISA DMA support?

Err I'd want it to work with PCI soundcards but wouldn't need ISA slots. No need for an AGP 1.0 slot all the cards I use support both AGP slots.

i have an d865gbf (geniune intel) that works great with win98se

Err I'd want it to work with PCI soundcards but wouldn't need ISA slots

Not ISA slots, ISA DMA through PCI.

Both socket A (especially later chipsets) and socket 478 with an Intel 865 chipset work great with Windows 98. Although I prefer socket A for its flexibility, but seems that you are not necessarily interested in that so... in your case socket 478 with a Pentium 4 Northwood could be better, especially because you can use modern power supplies without any worry, even for the most powerful CPUs.

You can use modern PSU on Socket A boards as well. They do have auxiliary 4-pin connector.

Wolfus wrote on 2020-09-14, 12:36:

You can use modern PSU on Socket A boards as well. They do have auxiliary 4-pin connector.

Not all of them, certainly not the earlier ones.

I am trying to build a M-ATX Windows 98 PC but my current SIS chipset board gives me Windows Protection Errors as soon as I boot into Windows 98 after installing the chipset drivers.

What for capacitors does the board have?

Wolfus wrote on 2020-09-14, 12:36:

You can use modern PSU on Socket A boards as well. They do have auxiliary 4-pin connector.

that really depends, if the board uses 12V for CPU power then yes, but a lot of socket A boards rely on 5V and for higher power systems modern PSUs just don't deliver enough on the 5V rail.

Oh, than accept my apologies. I have 4 of them and the all have it 😮

Man, you are lucky! I've played with tens of Socket A boards and I've only seen one with the 12V CPU connector (I believe it was an ECS with nForce 2 Ultra chipset). Anyway, I think less than 1% of socket A boards have it and they are generally very hard to find. 😀
Also true is that I only have VIA socket A boards (for obvious reasons), and I don't think I ever saw a VIA socket A board with this connector.

Anyway, I think less than 1% of socket A boards have it and they are generally very hard to find. grinning face

Almost all nForce2 boards have it.

and I don't think I ever saw a VIA socket A board with this connector.

KT880 boards.

Maybe, but definitely not all KT880 boards... It just so happens that I have one right next to me.

That's ASUS. They were cheap enough to not include 12v on their premium nForce 2 board.

In that case, I am very happy my first board from 2000's has been Abit KD7 😀
PSU killed CPU (Athlon XP 2000) in 2012 but board survived with just few bulged condensators. I should change them 😒

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-09-14, 13:50:

That's ASUS. They were cheap enough to not include 12v on their premium nForce 2 board.

Yeah, I can believe that 😀 Anyway, they are rock solid boards (once you replace the caps) and they usually have tons of BIOS options. I also have two Asus A7V600-X boards (not only my favorite Socket A board, but it's a solid contender for my absolute favorite retro board).

Thanks for your help everyone. The boards I've been looking at all have a 12v CPU power connector so I can use my modern power supply.

I actually got my 478 SIS 651 board to work in W98 by disabling the USB ports and removing the USB folder of drivers from the chipset driver. I also swapped in a 2.4GHz P4 instead of 2.8. I've just copied everything I need directly onto the CF card C: drive.

Regardless I think I'll still buy a socket A board just because I haven't really used them much. Is nForce 2 a good chipset for Windows 98? I've not had much luck with later basic nForce chipsets for Windows XP!

The very few nForce 2 Ultra boards that I tested with Windows 98 were fine - stable and fast (faster than VIA, but usually by ~10%, so nothing ultra-spectacular). However, without question, I would always choose VIA (hehe... never thought I'd ever say this 18 years ago 😀 )
Anyway, no matter which one you will choose, you can expect 200+ FPS in most scenarios even with slower Athlon XP CPUs. And you don't even need a fancy video card or anything: a cheap GeForce 4 MX 440 will be just fine.