PARKE wrote:The P3B-F has a good reputation In regard to caps as far as I know; and both my boards are still fine. But they are 20 years old now so it is maybe something to keep an eye on.
P3B-F is really cool motherboard, but I had experienced capacitor blowing on it and was forced to replace them. Now the board is working perfectly even with 133 MHz CPUs (and with 88 MHz AGP clock), including overclock conditions on 100 MHz CPUs at 133 MHz bus.
PARKE wrote:The P3B-F does in my experience not like pc 133 sticks with chips on only one side so that is another issue to watch out for.
The P3B-F have similar RAM stick compatibility with all other 440BX motherboards. It can use up to 4 256 MB sticks but they're must be filled by chips with no more than 16 MByte density. This means that 256 MB modules should have 16 chips on themself and 128 MB should be 8 or 16 chip. Modules with higher density (and then less amount of chips) will be seen as small size. With the right RAM it will work with top 133 MHz CPUs correctly.
Auron359 wrote:do I need two ISA slots ??
Probably the second ISA slot might be helpful for hardware testing. I.e. to install an old Ethernet or ARCnet card to see if it is still working or to define they jumper settings when no documentation is found in internet (I've used P3B-F and Win98 SE to configure a 8-bit Ethernet card before it was installed to XT PC, as the card was NE1000-compatible but jumpers on it was unknown and Win98's "Add New Hardware wizard" helped me very much).
tegrady wrote:My recommendations:
OS: Windows 98 SE. Windows ME messed with the DOS component, which, as far as I know, can lead to compatibility issues with DOS games.
WinME have disabled real-mode DOS, only MS-DOS Prompt windows are available to run DOS apps. It's still possible to patch the kernel and get the Command Prompt Only Mode (the real mode DOS) back in the startup menu, but the DOS will be not such classic as in Win98SE due to HIMEM.sys integrated into DOS kernel. Also it will be still impossible to exit from Windows to DOS and then relaunch GUI from Start Menu or PIF files. Windows 98SE is better for DOS games and apps. Windows ME is better for multimedia, internet browsing (in past 😀 ) and some stupid home users. But almost all benefits of ME can be installed to 98 too.
2×Soviet ZX-Speccy, 1×MacIIsi, 1×086, 1×286, 2×386DX, 1×386SX, 2×486, 1×P54C, 7×P55C, 6×Slot1, 4×S370, 1×SlotA, 2×S462, ∞×Modern.