early 2000s I was going for mid to higher end boards (mostly for overclocking) at some point I lost my interest for that and started going for budget boards, I mostly had a decent time with the cheap boards,
coming from the 90s where cheap boards here were stuff of nightmares, really lacking in performance and stability ( thinking of you pc chips 598) it was sort of a revelation, it lacked features but performance and stability was there finally.
I realized that I mostly didn't use all the features anyway, and some of those higher end boards were also fairly unreliable;
I think I had the "popular" average enthusiast forum stuff, Abit NF7-s, DFI nf4 ultra, and then for a couple of years I went with some cheap ECS SiS boards and was impressed by them actually, after a couple of Asrocks with nforce 6100 (mixed, more to negative experience with those) I got this Gigabyte G31m-s2l which I was pretty solid, I used it for a few years and it still being used now 13 years later by my brother on his work PC (every single day this past year thanks to covid), I even had fun overclocking with that board, my early e5200 to almost 4GHz, even got a 65nm quad core Xeon (x3210) which would run fine at 2.8GHz stock volts but would shutdown due to overheating/overloaded VRMs at 3GHz overvolted I suppose (on prime95, on games it was OK),
I go back to what these boards are, very basic, this was like sub $50 new, and still works just fine, with performance (CPU, MEM, gaming..) right there with p35 at the same clocks at least, and super stable.
also on my office I still have even a PC with a gigabyte with 945GCM, some Intel with G41 and so on... these are daily use things for over a decade and have proven to be reliable.
it's up to your needs, I don't really need more than 2 front USBs, or 2 ram sticks for the most part (OK at this point it would be nice to take some of those over 4GB, but the 945 can only use 3.2 anyway!), or more than 2 PCIs and 1 PCIE on this sort of PC, the main thing that attracted me to better boards was always OC
for a retro gaming PC g31-g41 or whatever are completely fine choices, specially if you are lucky or select one of the better boards based on it.