Is DOS audio working in a DOS prompt from Windows? Pentium 4 don't support finely tuned slowdown for speed sensitive DOS gaming. Gabriel Knight has game breaking bugs if fan on too fast of a computer, which a P4 is way too fast. But with that extra power, you could just run games from within Windows.

But without knowing your motherboard, it's futile to make recommendations as you might just have a board that won't work.

In your research, I'm sure you've seen a lot of people tell you it's a bad idea to use a PCI sound card for DOS games. That's because DOS doesn't properly utilize PCI. It was built for ISA and a lot of games don't give a flip what, if any, drivers are installed for your sound card. They use their own proprietary sound drivers in the game. Wolfenstien 3D is a great example of this. If you have a compatible ISA card installed, you don't have to load any drivers and it just detects the card and works. This all operated under some assumptions, like the IRQ was always going to be 5 or 7 and the DMA would be set to 1. These were physically set with jumpers on the card.
The SB Live had a driver that emulates a 16bit ISA Sound Blaster that you could load which basically tricked DOS games into thinking there was an ISA sound card. It wasn't fully compatible and some games would work with it and some wouldn't. The Sound Blaster Audigy was the last sound blaster to offer this compatibility layer. All potential DOS support was gone by 2002 with the release of the Audigy 2.
History out of the way to make sure you understand how it's actually working....
Your DOS driver should use either IRQ 5 or 7 and DMA 1. This should be setup in the autoexec.bat file. Don't worry about how the sound card is configured in Windows, it's going to be different. Let Windows handle Windows.

I have a Sound Blaster Live installed in a Windows 98PC but that's a P2 350. So it's a MUCH older motherboard and probably a lot more appropriate for Windows 98. However, this is how I'm configured for DOS sound, I hope it helps.
I have a directory called LIVEDOS which was installed by the creative installer when I told it to install DOS support. In that folder are all the DOS drivers and utilities. The installer added the following to my autoexec.bat file....
"C:\LIVEDOS\LiveInit.bat"

That file contains the following...

SET CTSYN=C:\LIVEDOS
SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T6
C:\LIVEDOS\SBINIT.COM

Note that it's basically creating a variable called BLASTER which contains the settings. THEN it runs sbinit which initializes the DOS driver. I have no clue why the installer didn't just plop these 3 lines into the autoexec directly, but O well.

MGaddict wrote on 2025-02-21, 14:13:

In your research, I'm sure you've seen a lot of people tell you it's a bad idea to use a PCI sound card for DOS games. That's be […]
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In your research, I'm sure you've seen a lot of people tell you it's a bad idea to use a PCI sound card for DOS games. That's because DOS doesn't properly utilize PCI. It was built for ISA and a lot of games don't give a flip what, if any, drivers are installed for your sound card. They use their own proprietary sound drivers in the game. Wolfenstien 3D is a great example of this. If you have a compatible ISA card installed, you don't have to load any drivers and it just detects the card and works. This all operated under some assumptions, like the IRQ was always going to be 5 or 7 and the DMA would be set to 1. These were physically set with jumpers on the card.
The SB Live had a driver that emulates a 16bit ISA Sound Blaster that you could load which basically tricked DOS games into thinking there was an ISA sound card. It wasn't fully compatible and some games would work with it and some wouldn't. The Sound Blaster Audigy was the last sound blaster to offer this compatibility layer. All potential DOS support was gone by 2002 with the release of the Audigy 2.
History out of the way to make sure you understand how it's actually working....
Your DOS driver should use either IRQ 5 or 7 and DMA 1. This should be setup in the autoexec.bat file. Don't worry about how the sound card is configured in Windows, it's going to be different. Let Windows handle Windows.

Once you get to the Pentium 4, Athlon 64 era. Motherboards started coming out they didn't have ISA slots. If you have a board with ISA, of course go with a nice PCI like a SB Live for Windows gaming and EAX, but have an ISA card for DOS gaming.

Different PCI cards used different techniques to work under DOS. However, some motherboard chips lack legacy features, so they just end up not being able to work. NForce boards are one of the big ones that just won't work. But it can vary greatly.

The way game setups automatically detect sounds cards might not work with the PCI workaround. But manually selecting a card and resources allow them to in some cases.

MGaddict wrote on 2025-02-21, 14:13:

In your research, I'm sure you've seen a lot of people tell you it's a bad idea to use a PCI sound card for DOS games. That's because DOS doesn't properly utilize PCI. It was built for ISA

DOS was not "built" for any bus. DOS applications that access hardware don't care what bus it's on, as long as they can read and write to the appropriate I/O ports.

I'm getting this 98se PC to work so I can sell it because I don't use it any more I had an Aureal Vortex 2 in it before but some games like Bioforge would crash so I thought it was just the card, I have a Dos PC that I wont sell it has an ISA PAS16 so I know what is meant and agree about ISA cards can just run games in dos, the P4 motherboard on the other hand is an Asus P4S800-MX SE so I might sell it with just windows 98se and win XP because it has a hard drive caddie at the front of the case. Its a bit of a pity I cant get dos to work with this motherboard or even dos 7.1 I mean crap I was hoping to sell it for a good amount to fix my dirtbike now that I think of it I will put a Pentium 200MHz with ISA and throw in a SoundBlaster or AWE64 that will help the price go up especially with a CRT and a SC55 "plus..." a SB55 but there's a catch the tall case is an ATX, its doable without the ATX case plate but not very original retro oh geez guys I'm sorry as I type this I might as well use another case I forgot I have and just sell the P4 as is with dual boot. thank you for all the help and talking me into making a new dos PC to sell 😉 🤣