Recently finished a Windows 98se retro PC project and found some more hardware that works. Many in the community have helped make this project a success, so I figured I would share my findings to give back to the community.

Motherboards:
- Fujitsu Siemens D2030-Axx (Esprimo 5600 replacement motherboard) - Socket 939, SIS 761GX / 965L chipsets with Win98 Drivers, PCIe working, SATA working. * CAVEAT: Says it supports 400MHz DDR RAM but all memory kits I have show only working at 333. Odd f

ront panel pinout.
- ASUS P5KPL-EPU - Socket 775, Intel G31 Chipset, Unofficial inf worked, Tested with e8500 CPU, PCIe working, Did not test SATA but IDE working fine with SATA adapter. * CAVEAT: 2-3 motherboard resources too new to be recognized by Windows 98. But seems stable otherwisde.
- ASRock ALiveSATA2-GLAN - Socket AM2, VIA K8T890 CF chipset, VIA HyperionPro 524A drivers worked, PCIe working, Did not test SATA but IDE working fine with SATA adapter. * CAVEAT: 2-3 motherboard resources too new to be recognized by Windows 98. But seems stable otherwisde.
- ASRock 890GX Pro3 - Socket AM3, AMD 890GX / SB850 chipsets work with standard WIn98 PCI device drivers, PCIe working, SATA working with R. Leow AHCI 6 port patch. * CAVEAT: 2-3 motherboard resources too new to be recognized by Windows 98. But VERY stable. Overclocked a Phenom II 555 with 1 core disabled to 4.1GHz and 4GB DDR3 1600 8-9-9-24 1T RAM. Scored 39645 in 3D Mark 2001 on my x800 XT GPU. That was better than the socket 775 e8500 setup.
- Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 R4.0, Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3P, ASRock A770-DE+ and FOXXCONN A7DA-S 790GX motherboards would NOT boot off SATA in any mode. Some failed outright, others were inconsistent, booting 1-2x then throwing errors. Some have IDE controllers and I may test those to see if they work any better. Will post updates if they do.

Hard Drives:
- Seagate Momentus XT 7200 RPM 500gb hybrid SSHD. 4GB SLC NAND cache managed on-device. No need for TRIM. Full 500GB usable with LBA and R. Leow HDD patches.
- Samsung SpinPoint F3 7200 RPM 1TB HDD. Full 1TB usable with LBA and R. Leow HDD patches.
- Seagate Baracuda 7200 RPM 250GB HDD. Full 250GB usable with LBA and R. Leow HDD patches. Model ST 3250310AS has jumper for SATA 1.5/3.0 compatability.
- Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 80GB HDD. Found some NEW old stock. Model ST380815AS has jumper for SATA 1.5/3.0 compatability.
- Had to patch Windows 98 with the Windows ME ScanDisk and Defrag tools to maintain the larger capacity drives. But once patched everything seems to work fine in Windows. I even filled the 1TB HDD up to 750MB+ and defragmented it overnight to confirm no issues. Plugged it back into my Windows 10 system and checked the drive for errors after and no issues reported.

SATA Observations:
- Getting SATA to work seems VERY finicky when using SSDs. However I have found even fairly modern SATA HDDs, some of which are still available NEW, are MUCH easier to get working with on-board SATA controllers. The SAME motherboards that would not work/boot with a SATA SSD would work fine with a SATA HDD. Some would work with the 1.5/3.0 jumper in either position as well. So compatibility seems much better when using a SATA HDD rather than SSD. If I had to guess, I would say this is likely related to AHCI and the on-device SSD controllers.
- The Seagate Momentus hybrid SSHD seems to be the best of both. It was as compatible as an HDD, but after 3-4 cycles the frequently used data was in the 4GB cache and I was getting SATA read speeds near 800-1000MB/sec in ATTO on the SiS chipset. Not sure if this is 100% accurate reading, but the system was very fast to boot and snappy in windows. Standard SATA HDD was getting around 200MB/sec reads/writes.
- Motherboard BIOS settings for SATA on some of these motherboards could be switched between IDE, RAID, Native, AHCI. I found on a few that IDE/Native were actually LESS compatible than selecting RAID and just not configuring an array. Leaving the drives as JBOD/single devices on the RAID controller worked fine, even when AHCI or IDE modes did not. If I had to guess, I think this is because the RAID controller/firmware assisted with compatibility where the native controller was failing.

Sound Card observations:
- nVidia 250 chipset did not get along with my Aureal Vortex 1 or 2 sound cards and would not work with other sound cards in DOS mode.
- VIA, Intel and SiS chipsets seemed to work better, and I had especially good success getting the Yamaha 724/744 model sound cards to work properly. These Yamaha cards were VERY consistent and had ZERO issues while testing across all the motherboards I tried. They may not have 3D audio, but they are rock solid.

I have not seen the motherboards I listed above on any 'Works with Wiondows 98' lists, so I hope this will be useful to some of you out there looking for options.