I'm pretty happy with my DFI LanParty UT NF4 Ultra-D.

Bought it way back in 2005, still serves me well. Lots of overclocking options, if you're interested in that.

I like DFI LANParty NF4 Ultra-D and also GigaByte GA-K8NF-9.

When it comes to Nforce 4 - anything that's still alive. Other than that you might might want to try ATI XPRESS 200, combined with ULi south bridge, which is presumably less prone to sudden death. For example MSI RD480 Neo2 or ASUS A8R-MVP.

ULi M1697, the last, greatest ALi/ULi chipset. Either on its own for simple good performance and stability (and a lot less power draw than the nF4) or for maximum retro goodness, paired with an M1695 for AGP + PCIe with good performance on both.

Only reason to go nF4 for me would be SLI, but (for me at least) SLI is a kludge that only makes sense if you want more performance than possible in a single card, and there are more than enough single PCIe cards available now that would totally bottleneck any So939 CPU. But if SLI is your thing, go nF4 (or ATi for Xfire).

I would steer well clear of any nforce motherboards, especially nforce4. Not only are they prone to dying, they are plagued by random instability issues, both hardware and software related. Stuff like the board suddenly refusing to boot, causing you to spend hours resetting the bios and toggling various bios settings, only for half a day later the board suddenly deciding that the very same bios settings you started out with, should now work okay again. For the next couple weeks at least, after which the same thing happens all over again. And less said about nforceware (drivers for nforce chipsets), the better. The number of blue screens, corrupted XP installations, disabled/conflicting network or sound adapters and similar issues that that garbage piece of software has caused me is beyond count. At this point I would literally take any other chipset over any iteration of nforce.

I personally use MSI K8N neo2 Platinum. Although it has agp not pcie. Oh and it has ddr400 😀
It works perfect for both win 2k and XP.