Got Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS (SB0350) for my P4 retro rig (DOS 7.1+WinME+WinXpSp3). Around 10$ but w/o the box/manual/software CDs and w/o the Game/MIDI bracket.
The question is - have this card the official DOS support or not?
Well, after I fix the WinME partition - I will find the answer. If the answer is "no" - the target will be lowered to the Audigy 2 family. 😀

There is a p3 Compaq Deskpro EN sitting under the stairs at my work with 2 inches of dust on it I just discovered! Now if only there was someone to talk to about acquiring it 😢

HighTreason wrote:

I was not angry, I was just attempting to better understand his motivation. Not much point being a community if you don't talk t […]
Show full quote

I was not angry, I was just attempting to better understand his motivation. Not much point being a community if you don't talk to one another or try to understand each other as people... Heh, maybe I'm wrong.

Unfortunately, here in the UK or in Hull¹ at least , flea markets are devoid of anything like that, junk yards are "no entry", removal from the city dump is considered theft (and they come down hard if they catch you) and nobody has yard sales. eBay is the only option and if you can even find it in the UK it will still be cheaper to import from the States or Eastern Europe, the latter being most reasonable provided you are careful and look closely at what you are buying.

¹ The city is a notorious shithole near the East Coast, where I happen to live... As a reference to how tech-oriented the city is, we are unique to the country in that we really only have a single ISP. This page explains it well for an outsider I think; http://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/ask-our-exp … n-i-get-in-hull and naturally the ISP abuses this monopoly, bills people up the ass, does not offer unlimited packages (they keep changing them and raising the prices) and fuck over the poor areas the worst by far, upgrading the fibre to the rich asshole who just got it (with free installation, paid for by doubled bandwidth charges to old DSL customers) but telling us our failing network is fine and does not need work... Yeah, because the fact my landline phone doesn't work, my internet is intermittent and only connects at 2.5-3Mbps (when it used to manage 12Mbps) is no problem at all, it works fine. Oh, guess I'll have to pay more, because they have to "maintain obsolete hardware to keep you connected" as if it's my fault.

Basically, they are public enemy Number One around here.

Actually thinking of doing a video on it at some stage, which I might mention in passing here if it ever happens as I actually find it quite interesting and out telecoms network is technically "retro hardware" given large portions of it predate the Athlon XP... There are rumors - and they are rumors, though photos surfaced but were never verified - that some of the equipment is still in wooden "drawer" type frames with sliding ladders and has been there since the 1930s, which wouldn't surprise me.

What we have is what makes us who we are. There will always be enough old junk for everyone 😀

I'm having a hard time following what you are trying to attain here. Maybe there will, but I doubt it, several items are in short supply already... For example, I have never seen an AdLib in the UK and have only encountered them up for International shipping in recent years - not soon to be a problem (not that I want an AdLib, but still relevant for other items) as I am looking into agents in the USA and other countries so I can cut shipping costs or buy things that do not ship to the UK. Already have one set up in China that I rarely use.

Anyway, I just bought an AMD Athlon XP - a big deal as I said I would never buy another post K6 product made by AMD. I have obtained an Athlon XP 2800+ Barton, it runs on a 133MHz BUS which is unusual and it has the same clock as the 133MHz 2600+ so the only real difference is a later core revision and double the cache. I do wonder if I can coax some older motherboards into running it, such as my KT133 based Chaintech - 7AJA I believe, don't know, it is in a case being used and I have not seen it in around two years - this board has an ISA slot and despite most CT boards having a CMI8738 which is fine for later DOS games (Though hooking the MU90R up is recommended!) I do prefer having the option of my AWE64 Gold and I think it would make a mean platform for things like Shadow Warrior... P3-1.4-S might still be faster? Not sure. I seem to think the Pentium's were generally faster at this clock-for-clock but as the Athlon here is exceeding 2GHz clock it might be able to outrun it by some margin. Look up AXDA2800DKV4C if you are curious of this model. Also, for reference, the 7VJL is running a AXDA2600DKV3C and the 7AJA presently runs a AMP1500DMS3C - don't ask why or how, that's just what it came out of the dumpster with and it seemed happy enough so I just cleaned it up and left it alone.

If it does not work in the 7AJA I think I will try it in place of the 2600+ in my 7VJL. The 2600+ wasn't really meant to run in that so far as I know, so I have no idea what the 2800+ would do if anything. If it did work and I just put up with the CMI audio it would probably make an even worse (read; better) DOS machine and wouldbe more fun to test against a P3 because of the DDR memory (The 7AJA is SDR) but whatever, should be fun to prat around with.

I really need to knock the buying off. Ugh.

AMD were playing Silly Buggers with us during the end of the Athlon XP era, marketing barely changed products as though they were on the same footing as a 3.2ghz P4, which they weren't.
That was why in 2003 I purchased a P4 2.6c instead of a Barton based AMD rig, the Athlon 64's were ridiculously expensive here in Australia at the time, and along with insanely high Ram prices,
pushed an A64 rig out of my budget.

I thought Car boot sales were the way to find old junk cheap in the UK?

If Your Athlon XP mobo's have an Award Bios, it can be updated with new cpu microcodes that allow proper recognition of newer cpu's than what existed when new. For instance I can
put a 2400+ in my KT7-RAID and it is properly recognised. As long as it's an unlocked multiplier model You can run it ok. That's necessary with my mobo as it only supports a 100fsb, so I
got over 2200mhz at 100 x 22.
I'm looking for a cheap Mobile Barton with 512k cache to try whenever one comes up on ebay. The mobile Bartons are unlocked as far as I know.

Car boot sales are a mixed bag, and a lot of places either don't have any, or don't have any that hold interesting stuff.

Car boot pretty much never happens around here, or if it does, I don't know about it. The closest thing is the Sunday market and there is never anything there. Once there was a guy with some stuff, he asked far too much money (£50 for a Game Gear? Pfft!) and when I tried to haggle him down he got aggressive immediately and began throwing profanities at me. I merely walked away from his tables and reminded anyone who went near it that eBay was cheaper and he was ripping them off... I don't think he liked me.

AMD were playing Silly Buggers with us during the end of the Athlon XP era, marketing barely changed products as though they were on the same footing as a 3.2ghz P4, which they weren't.
That was why in 2003 I purchased a P4 2.6c instead of a Barton based AMD rig, the Athlon 64's were ridiculously expensive here in Australia at the time, and along with insanely high Ram prices,
pushed an A64 rig out of my budget.

I was losing faith in AMD back then because of that BS and the Athlon 64 (Don't even get me STARTED on the Athlon 64!) was the final straw - it was slower than an Athlon XP in 32-Bit clock-for-clock. If I could go back in time I would never have touched AMD and would have run a P4 back then, mostly due to the short lifespan of AMD systems by comparison. By now though the unreliable parts have generally been filtered out (though there are a worrying level of K7S5A/M830LR boards around still) so it is somewhat safer. If I were willing to buy all new stuff, I would have been putting a P4 together though.

Funny thing is, I suggested P4's for years, even up to a few months back, every time I did people got arsey and jumped down my throat. But, hey, one of the cool kids has done it now so I guess it's a good idea, huh? 😜

Ram prices got bad here too around that time and that was another factor against AMD. SDRAM was TEN TIMES more expensive than DDR (Literally!) and once DDR2 was approaching and when it first came out, DDR more than doubled in price. Athlon 64 boards did not support DDR2 and many older Athlon boards didn't support DDR - if they did, they often didn't do it well - note the model mentioned above - which was infuriating. Especially given how most Athlon 64 boards I have owned seem to kill RAM. In fact, the reason I had to give up on my Athlon 64 system was simply that the RAM kept dying and I could not afford it. I've told the story before, but to shorten it, it sucked, because the SDRAM in my P3 died too, leaving me with a 33MHz 486 as my sole machine for nearly a year as I struggled to author DVDs for the video editing course I was on... Though times and probably the reason I love the 486 so much.

As for Mobile Barton processors, yeah, I seem to remember people plugging those into desktop boards all the time because of their unlocked multipliers. There were two camps, the "Overclock it until it runs hotter than the sun!" camp and the "Underclocked, it makes a super-low power ITX box" crowd... I was in the latter half in my own application of one and had a nice ITX system with an underclocked chip. I liked that machine and I liked the software i had - wish I could remember the name - as it would automatically ramp up the CPU when it was under load... Or it tried, but it wasn't entirely reliable.

From what I experienced, I got a reasonable life out of my Athlon XP machine, which I think was a 2200+, and I know my dad's 3000+ (or something like that) was still going perfectly strong when I gave it to a friend. I wouldn't necessarily blame AMD for the reliability and compatibility issues with platforms of the time; as far as I'm aware, nobody was really using AMD chipsets (unlike they did with Intel), and most of the chipsets were third-party. Some of the most popular ones were nForce-based, or other NVidia chipsets, and I believe most of these had shorter lives than almost anything that wasn't killed by crappy caps (certainly, my MCP61-based Dell Inspiron 531 with an Athlon64 X2+ CPU always ran hot on the chipset side and never performed properly, particularly in terms of SATA speeds, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that my mum's Vista Acer AMD Turion laptop suffered some kind of NVidia failure as well). Those boards that weren't built with NVidia chipsets often used VIA's chipsets, and many of those were cheap junk (with the obvious exception of things like the KT133A.) Pentium 4 systems built with VIA (or, even worse, SIS) chipsets have been just as flaky, as far as I'm aware.

I don't know much about Mobile Barton cores, but I can testify that the 1.1 GHz Camaro Duron in my Vaio laptop runs significantly cooler than any PIII or Celeron I've seen, whilst being generally quicker. Shame the USB performance is so strangely slow (easily fixed with a PCMCIA card that is needed for USB 2.0 anyway) though.

HighTreason wrote:

¹ The city is a notorious shithole near the East Coast, where I happen to live... As a reference to how tech-oriented the city is, we are unique to the country in that we really only have a single ISP. This page explains it well for an outsider I think; http://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/ask-our-exp … n-i-get-in-hull and naturally the ISP abuses this monopoly, bills people up the ass, does not offer unlimited packages (they keep changing them and raising the prices) and fuck over the poor areas the worst by far, upgrading the fibre to the rich asshole who just got it (with free installation, paid for by doubled bandwidth charges to old DSL customers) but telling us our failing network is fine and does not need work... Yeah, because the fact my landline phone doesn't work, my internet is intermittent and only connects at 2.5-3Mbps (when it used to manage 12Mbps) is no problem at all, it works fine. Oh, guess I'll have to pay more, because they have to "maintain obsolete hardware to keep you connected" as if it's my fault.

Holy.... I couldn't live with that at all! My last months internet traffic was well over 800Gb!

I'm not sure how, but this was in one of my my kitchen cabinets. I don't know how it got there and I don't even know where I got it from. 😕

@Lukeno94; The Athlon 2500+ in my Presario 2100US ran hotter than hell... But that was probably because I forced it to run full clock the whole time. It still works anyway.

No, you're right, it was the mobos that were the problem and I have observed very few direct CPU failures, in fact, the only ones I have which do not work are either through components on the motherboard killing them (VRM popped and took CPU with it) or through fan failure - never happened to me personally as I have mega paranoid cooling requirements - my systems must be cool if only half the fans are running or I deem them unfit for use.

nForce 2 boards are my most hated of the bunch, they never worked and they had very strange problems if you used Windows 98SE... The one I remember is how you could never use an SB Compatible card, regardless of how it achieved the compatibility. The board could see it, windows could use it and the software could detect it, talk to it and whatever but no sound came out in games that used it. Never understood why. DMA related I guess. The SATA never worked on them either though I was told nVidia never made that bit so I can only assume all board makers implemented the worst SATA Adapter available... Not that I used SATA back then, I was pretty much solely PATA until around 2008-2009.

One SiS AMD board I had I actually liked (that was the ITX one) but it was slow, some ASRock board. Fine for an internet faring Sempron in the last days of dial-up - which was around 2004-2007 here though it sadly died before the Athlon 64 and was so worthless I never bothered to repair it. I still have the CPU but I hate the Sempron with a passion, my Duron 1800 could outrun the thing pretty well until it failed a short time later - both were mobo failures but the other hardware (HDDs, PSU and otehr mechanical gear) was very tired by then.

So far as I know, my Athlon 64 will actually boot right back up if I glue the pieces back together. One of the 250GB PATA drives in my Pentium D (soon to be removed and replaced with the dead Core 2's 1TB SATA drives) which I use for storage is actually using the original partition from the Athlon 64 and would probably still boot my modified Windows 2003 installation if I plugged it in... Now..,. That could be interesting. Corvidae Precision...

The main problem with the Athlon 64 is that it and the motherboard seem to be ES parts. The motherboard looks closest to an ECS KV2 with minor differences and the CPU would probably be the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ but the print says it is a 3200+ (At least, the string printed on the lid would imply this) and the board simply reads it as "Hammer" even with the latest BIOS (Any X2 chip read as Hammer on this board with outdated BIOSes). The second core is not always available and generally causes the system to crash, I am unsure of the real intended CPU model though as the specs do not match the 3800+ exactly. It actually seems like an FX-51 with two cores and regular 939 chips do not fit in the socket. I may part with it shortly anyway, perhaps see if anyone wants it on eBay, I have no use for it and it serves only to annoy me.

You could say I soured my experience based on a prototype, but I actually found it more reliable and stable than the production models I had which were worse, such as the 64 FX-53 which I owned for a grand total of less than 24 hours before the guy I got it from actually came to take it back when I was trying to call him about it. He had gotten one too and he was disgusted by it, as I was trying to call he came around and said he could not leave me with such a horrible rig... I agreed. I didn't mind the 754 platform though.

The worst mobos I have run across are;
> DFI LANParty NF2 Ultra - Sucks, because I love DFI! (Owned one)
> MSI KT6 Delta FISR - Never even tried to set that up as it was so clearly a waste of time and did not come with the advertised features thanks to PC World Component Centre - another site now deleted by archive.org (DICKHEADS! Obviously, owned one)
> LeadTek K7NCR18D - The CMOS battery exploded after a week of use! Hottest running board I have ever seen. The only WinFast product I ever owned until the T230 which I still need to repair. (Owned briefly)
> ECS K7S5A - Sold by Amptron and PCChips too under different names. Designed by PCChips. Says it all. May be OK for a Duron if you don't use AGP video, but cannot supply power to faster Athlons and AGP Video cards. My first 462 board.
> MSI MS-6340M - By far the most unreliably Socket A board, and it was everywhere. Advent, Time, Tiny, Packard Bell, HP(?) and more all used this fucking thing! Including machines in my workplace. (Owned several, still have one as a reminder for future generations)
> MSI KT4-Something - Saw a few... As I took them to the dumpster, none worked. (never owned personally)
> Anything by Soltek - They were common around here. Some even had AGP Pro slots that never worked properly. (Owned some long enough to throw them in fires, they burn well SolTek's)
> Gigabyte 7NNXP - An unknown company back then, Gigabyte did NOT make a good first impression on me. I never owned this one but had to repair several, one of those components that you could smell and immediately identify. (Never owned one, never would)
> Abit AN7 - Another great maker lets the world down in the K7 era. (Never owned, saw enough in the store when we played with one there).
> ASUS Anything - More expensive models might be above average, but they still sucked and were usually badly made to the point you may as well just buy a DFI which would serve you much better... Except the NF2 of course.
> Anything with nForce 3 - These were notoriously unreliable. Seemingly paired with faulty drive controllers a lot too, I remember and can probably dig up many cases of corrupted drives under Windows 98SE and 2K with these - OK, I know this was for the 64, but it was so horrible I thought it was worth a mention.

Probably many more if I could remember them or had used them at all. Good boards I know of were;
> Chaintech 7VJL Apogee - Both models, this board rocks!
> Chaintech 7AJA - It works. Nothing special but it doesn't quit.
> MSI KT3 Ultra 2 - Holy shit! An MSI actually got here? It isn't a great board, but mine took a lot of misuse before it gave up. I was using a Duron though so I don't know if it stood up so well with Athlons installed.
> ABIT KT7-RAID - ONLY if you have the patience as it can throw a fit sometimes. Mine died by Chinese PSU unfortunately.
> ASRock 7S41GX - Slow, but it keeps going. This was the ITX I was referring to - it was actually a Micro ATX I guess.
> ASUS I cannot remember the model of - And that is a testament to it, because it means I haven't seen it in years, it is still droning away with it's Sempron 2400+ doing... Actually, what is it doing? I can't remember. "Claire" FTP mirror in case "Dave" dies I think... Or I'm wasting electricity. I should probably check that. Oops.

Hoo! That was a rant and a half. Still pretty mad about it all these years later though, I could have built something good in those years instead of mowing lawns and cleaning cars only to watch it fail and have to mow more lawns, clean more cars and paint more fences. Then I got community service and had to paint even more damn fences and wash even more cars without being paid, which sucked because I hadn't even done anything, apparently pushing someone out of your way because they try to smash a chair on your head is assault.

@sf78; Yeah, it is a king-size pain in the ass. I am stuck on an old bundle deal which costs £70 a month for 30GB usage... Not much fun.

Nice looking board there. I think anyway, not much experience with Epox stuff but I've heard of that one at least. Wonder what I'll find in my cupboards when I move, probably a bunch of dead drives I suspect.

My old Athlon XP system (custom built by my dad several years before) was probably killed by a knackered PSU, unless every single component in it was flaky. When it was on the way out, the RAM amount was fluctuating, the CD-RW drive hadn't worked for years (although I actually fixed that when I took it apart), it ran super hot (once shut off having hit the 100C limit that was detected by the board), and the last time I used it, I had to reinstall Windows twice in one DAY, and it never booted successfully after that (couldn't even install Windows again). I couldn't tell you what chipset it had - it was too long ago. I do know that it had some kind of GeForce FX card in it, but that's about it. It ran fine on 98 and XP when it was healthy. It did have one of those crappy PCI SATA cards with a 160GB Samsung hard drive on it, that could be fun at times. That Samsung drive outlasted both the Athlon XP it was fitted to, and the Inspiron 531 that replaced it...

The Dell Inspiron 531 was a poorly-specced heap of shit from day 1, and I've never seen anything as finicky with RAM as it was towards the end. So many things died in that system, even the bloody DVD drive failed completely... the only things that lasted were the hard drive and the card reader, which I still have in this system. What was particularly galling is, when it died for good, I'd put the effort in putting it into a new case with a few extra bits and given it to a friend - only for it to completely conk when I was setting it up in her room. The motherboard had been retired from my use for at least a year at that point though. The fact Dell refused to make an AM2+ compatible BIOS meant that it was stuck with the hopelessly outdated (by the time I was looking to upgrade in around 2009 or so) Athlon64 X2 platform, when a Phenom X4 upgrade would've given it a nice performance boost...

Can't say I've had any really bad boards other than the Inspiron 531 one though. My current Gigabyte Z68 board is pretty good, although has issues with the USB ports that may stem from using a very cheap PSU for the first year of its life or so. The SIS chipset in the Advent 7094 laptop is so slow that it allows a 1.5 GHz Celeron M to be outdragged by old PIIIs of much lower speeds (1 GHz and less)... and a 1.5 GHz Northwood Celeron in a SIS-equipped Packard Bell Versa laptop, for that matter.

Never had problems with my athlon xp 1700+ have to check, but i think it will still bootup after all these years. Have to check the motherboard brand since i cannot remember it.

I've only got 3 Socket A boards, all have the VIA KT600 chipset (FSB 200 compatible). In terms of performance they aren't too far off a P4 (comparing a XP 3200+ with a Pentium 4 3.2 GHz). While the P4 is in front, it's nothing you really notice apart from benchmark figures.

Where the P4, and Athlon 64 is stronger, are other aspects. Firstly the VIA SATA controllers are bad. I couldn't boot from a SATA DVD drive, and it insists on working only with SATA I drives. That means the newest drives you can use are SATA II drives with SATA I jumper.

The other, big, issue is that many Athlon XP boards draw most of the current from the 5V rail (newer boards have the 12V power connector near the socket, if you see one of those on a board, grab it). On a XP 3200+ and modern power supplies (which are all built towards systems that draw current from 12V), you will see the 5V plummet (4.3V or so) and 12V go up (past 13V).

I've got an old PSU with 40A on the 5V rail, but these power supplies get older and older and there aren't many options when you want to buy a new PSU. Even 1KW PSUs simply do not have beefy 5V rails anymore.

So looking at all of this, building a high performance (XP 3200+, maybe some overclocking), has a few challenges. But with a decent PSU, it was a joy to use. Had zero troubles and the system was very nice to work with.

Finding decent coolers for Socket A was easier than finding a decent S478 cooler. There are some new, all copper coolers, still being sold. I got some Arctic Cooling coolers, copper core only, but they are very good and super quiet. Tough finding something decent for Socket 754 is even easier.

Hence I prefer working with the Pentium 4. I know it's not a popular choice, but I never had issues with P4 gear.I never understood the hate for P4. I had a P4 2.6 GHz in the early 2000s with a Radeon 9800 and it was awesome. I made a video project about the P4 recently, it shows some of the benefits, and everyone can judge for themselves 😀

The platform as a whole, thanks to Intel chipset, is very mature, stable, compatible and reliable. They are also cheap, easy to find and lots of options regarding brand, features and all of that. Great SATA controller, compatible with SATA III drives too.

I never had a Socket A board with nForce2 and 12V connector, that would be nice to test.

EDIT: The Athlon XP is also lacking SSE2. This wasn't a big deal when I did my benchmarks, Steam worked fine. But Chrome wasn't compatible. So that's something to keep in mind and might become an issue going forward and into the future.

i've got an A76V00
heres a benchmark i did on it
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/2529138

im not familiar much with this board or the processor in it.. as it was given to me.
it definately feels as fast as a pentium 4 in fact i think it is technically faster then the very first pentium 4's.

Given that it is a board with SATA on it, I would very much hope it would beat the original Pentium 4s!

Seeing all this talk about Socket A stuff reminds me that I'm currently trying to resurrect one of my old Athlon XP systems myself. It's the only Socket A board I have in my house right now that actually works: an ECS K7VTA3 8.0 with a VIA KT333 chipset and a T-bred Athlon XP 2400+. That board has been rock solid reliable over the years I've had it, and the performance, as far as I remember it being, was always pretty good. To be fair, it only ever saw use as a workbench system without any real heavy duty applications running on it.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Firstly the VIA SATA controllers are bad. I couldn't boot from a SATA DVD drive, and it insists on working only with SATA I drives. That means the newest drives you can use are SATA II drives with SATA I jumper.

I've noticed this with two Socket A boards I used to have, both being Asus A7V8X-LA boards. Both came out of HP/Compaq OEM systems, and both have since died; one due to capacitor failure, the other due to... I still don't know, actually. Anyways, those boards used (correct me if I'm wrong here) the VIA KM400 chipset, and yes, I can say for sure that the SATA controller on these boards is very picky, refusing to recognize anything beyond SATA-I drives (at least, without a jumper).

The only other Socket A boards I remember dealing with off the top of my head are an FIC AM35 - again, from an HP Pavilion - and a Gigabyte board that I can't remember anything about, except that I think it had an nForce 2 chipset. Might've been this board. The system with the AM35 was given to me a long time ago, and the board died due to, once again, faulty capacitors, after about a month or two of me having it. It never saw any actual use during the time I had it due to me already having two Socket A systems: one of the A7V8X-LA-based HP/Compaq systems, and the rig with the ECS board, not to mention that both had better hardware than the AM35. As for the system with the Gigabyte board, I can't say for sure how well it worked due to it not being mine. It came into the shop one day for a virus/malware removal, and that's pretty much all I remember of it. Oh, and the case was kinda flashy, having a windowed side panel, which might be the only reason I remember this particular system so well. 😜

HighTreason wrote:

Ram prices got bad here too around that time and that was another factor against AMD. SDRAM was TEN TIMES more expensive than DDR (Literally!)

I remember that! I thought it was a strictly local thing. When people asked me to upgrade the RAM on their PCs I told them 'you can buy a whole new motherboard with a faster CPU and a good amount of DDR memory for less than the cost of one or two SDRAM sticks for your current setup'. They'd do exactly that, ending up with a much faster system as a result and they'd usually give their old mobo+CPU+SDRAM to me. 😀
High capacity SDRAM sticks were like gold nuggets for a long time, sending decent platforms into premature obsolescence. I believe it was all artificial scarcity, many years later I remember seeing tons of SDRAM being liquidated, when absolutely no one wanted it anymore.

Picked a up a reasonably tidy pair of powered beige speakers fo my 286

Nothing too over the top. Now I don't have to set the volume using the sound cards volume wheel.

Got these cards today:

HighTreason wrote:

nForce 2 boards are my most hated of the bunch, they never worked and they had very strange problems if you used Windows 98SE... The one I remember is how you could never use an SB Compatible card, regardless of how it achieved the compatibility. The board could see it, windows could use it and the software could detect it, talk to it and whatever but no sound came out in games that used it. Never understood why. DMA related I guess. The SATA never worked on them either though I was told nVidia never made that bit so I can only assume all board makers implemented the worst SATA Adapter available... Not that I used SATA back then, I was pretty much solely PATA until around 2008-2009.

Emm... GA-7n400s. 12V "CPU" power connector, SATA works flawlessly, boots flawlessly, interprets itself as a separate IDE device in BIOS - no SATA driver needed to install XP on SATA drive. All through stock nvidia MCP "RAID" south bridge... It also feels very fast, my newer 400Gb IDE drive feels much slower then my older 250Gb SATA. Both from Seagate, both 7200 rpm. I did not try SB (you mean for old DOS games?), but Audigy works fine as well. I added some extra cooling: a small heatsink for the south bridge and a huge Zalman north bridge heatsink. I guess, we all like extra cooling, everyone deeply interested in computers has this bug 😀

And by the way, Gigabyte was already well-known in mid-2000s. 60% of P4 boards found in Russia are Gigabyte. It first appeared long before P4, take a look at this baby: