Asus P4C-800E is a good one, also if you want to give up the onboard MIDI and just use the MIDI port on a pci audio card an LGA775 board would be a cheap and easy solution. You can pick one up off of Ebay for $20 and a 3+ghz P4 for another $3-15 depending on how fast ya want to go. Heck there are MIDI to USB adapters for the Sidewinders so that would free up the MIDI for an external device if you went the lga775 route 😀

I tried to use a Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro via the onboard gameport on my P4 3.0HT system and was completely unable to get it to work. The only available joystick drivers don't run with >66MHz FSB and have never been fixed. Maybe it works under DOS but I doubt it - seem to remember DOS support for any of the MS controllers was extremely limited.

BTW as far as mobos go I have a few Gigabyte 8IPE1000-Gs which seem to be nice, solid & quick. They do AGP8x, hyperthreading & dual-channel DDR RAM. Can't complain.

I have a soft spot for the ASRock P4Dual-880Pro / 775Dual-880Pro for this era, purely because of both AGP and PCIe slots (RAID is also nice). The 775 supports DDR2 and both boards have good overclocking features and, most importantly, drivers for Windows 98 (VIA 4-in-1 driver set). No Intel chipset I'm afraid so that might be a deal breaker, but it does have a header for the game port.

@OP

I got an Intel D875PBZ and think it's excellent. I wanted CSA gigE and the 875 chipset. I put in a P4 3.4 HT Northwood, which is the fastest my board revision works with. P4s are so cheap these days that it was almost free 🤣. 98SE works well with it. No audio/gameports on mine though.

Something else I noticed is it doesn't have VRM squeal with high-end video cards. I've run into a lot of 2003-2005 era boards that do.

swaaye wrote:

@OP

I got an Intel D875PBZ and think it's excellent. I wanted CSA gigE and the 875 chipset. I put in a P4 3.4 HT Northwood, which is the fastest my board revision works with. P4s are so cheap these days that it was almost free 🤣. 98SE works well with it. No audio/gameports on mine though.

Something else I noticed is it doesn't have VRM squeal with high-end video cards. I've run into a lot of 2003-2005 era boards that do.

Great board, I have the same revision as you do (only Northwoods) and I can attest to its greatness and top notch performance. Unfortunately, mine just died on me one day and I have no idea what is wrong with it (caps seem fine for example and they are legit Rubycons), maybe I got super unlucky, but it's always something to keep in mind.

I Researched Socket 478 few years back and the P4P800 based boards seemed to consistently be in the top 5 of the consumer grade boards.
I say consumer as most sites don't review company's say like Tyan, plus being harder to find I didn't really research them much.
I didn't know about the USB issue above, My simple fix will simply be not to use the front USB ports. Not a big issue on a Win98 box anyway as long as its networked

The USB ESD discussion has been split to a new thread.
ICH5 USB ESD problems

It took me a bit of time but I found this motherboard for my XP build: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboar … 75/P4SCT_II.cfm

The damn thing is GLORIOUS. Stable as the day is long. I have a 3.4EE Chip in mine and at stock voltage it will do almost 4ghz. I can't change the cpu voltage so, I can't make it prime stable at 4g. 🙁

6 SATA ports? *Speechless*... And you can play both Ati CIF exclusive games as the bonus... 😀
Contra: only 4 USB ports, no integrated sound and you can't use normal/long cards in the left PCI slot because of PATA/Floppy connectors... 64-bit PCI - well, I'm not sure it have the meaning for home PCs. Same for Agp Pro.
IMHO, the best friend of a home user is P4P800 SE (P4P800-E Deluxe if you want 4 SATA ports). Or P4C800-E Deluxe. 😀

The big advantage of the board is linked is the server southbridge. This board has the bandwidth to support both gig ether net and super fast HDD raid.

luckybob wrote:

It took me a bit of time but I found this motherboard for my XP build: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboar … 75/P4SCT_II.cfm

The damn thing is GLORIOUS. Stable as the day is long. I have a 3.4EE Chip in mine and at stock voltage it will do almost 4ghz. I can't change the cpu voltage so, I can't make it prime stable at 4g. 🙁

I've used a LOT of Supermicrro boards.
When other people were using socket 775 I was using mostly socket 771 Supermicro boards.
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The problem you would have with that one and many of their boards targeted towards non-server use is that back in the day they were very expensive so few were sold.
That rarity usually makes them extra expensive today too.
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That said I see two on eBay right now for $100+ship and he has 'make offer' enabled.
There is one listed on Amazon for $599. I think I'd skip that one....
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luckybob wrote:

The big advantage of the board is linked is the server southbridge.

Yes. Exactly.
The 6300ESB is a server southbridge.

Another thing about server southbridges is they usually mean there are more than one PCI BUS on the board.
So PCI devices don't all have to share the same BUS.
That one has two. One 32-bit and one 64-bit.
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PCBONEZ wrote:

That said I see two on eBay right now for $100+ship and he has 'make offer' enabled.
There is one listed on Amazon for $599. I think I'd skip that one....
.

They come with some ram and a cpu/hs. It actually is a pretty good deal imho. Your going to spend about as much for a top end Asus or abit board from the same era.

luckybob wrote:

They come with some ram and a cpu/hs. It actually is a pretty good deal imho. Your going to spend about as much for a top end Asus or abit board from the same era.

Oh, I agree.
If I was looking for a skt 478 board you guys would never have heard about it. 😀

Gamecollector wrote:

6 SATA ports? *Speechless*... And you can play both Ati CIF exclusive games as the bonus... 😀
Contra: only 4 USB ports, no integrated sound and you can't use normal/long cards in the left PCI slot because of PATA/Floppy connectors... 64-bit PCI - well, I'm not sure it have the meaning for home PCs. Same for Agp Pro.
IMHO, the best friend of a home user is P4P800 SE (P4P800-E Deluxe if you want 4 SATA ports). Or P4C800-E Deluxe. 😀

Yes, the high-end ASUSes are quite nice, and are well balanced when it comes to integrated peripherals.

Like this one is awesome with 6xSATA and 2xGbE, but has only 4 USB ports, which could be quite limiting these days (or even back in the day) for home uses. Although you can use hubs.

There are other contemporary boards with 6xSATA actually, like the Abit IC7 MAX3, which uses a Silicon Image controller. That is one fancy board, but not legacy-friendly as it lacks serial/parallel ports.

If you need more SATA ports try a 3Ware 9500 series card. (Sometimes called 9500S.)
They are PCI-X but they work perfectly well in conventional PCI slots. (The backwards compatibility is required by the PCI-X Standard.)
The 9500 was the last series that ran in both 3.3v and 5v PCI and PCI-X slots.
The 9550 is 3.3v only so it won't work in most conventional PCI slots or in older 5v only PCI-X slots.
The 9650 is PCI-E.

The 9500 have been DIRT CHEAP for years now.
The server farms still haven't unloaded them all.

Make sure there is clearance for the extra card fingers that hang over the shorter slot.
I put electric tape over those to prevent mishaps while working on the system.
Some people actually cut the extra fingers off and that works perfectly well too. I prefer not to do that though.

Those with PNs that end in "Ml" (which is actually "ML" and often typed incorrectly in ads) use Multi-Lane cables which are expensive.
All the other 9500 I know of use standard SATA cables.

Differences.
The 2 port has no onboard RAM
The 2 and 4 port are low profile. - Good for those with 1/2 height cases.
The 8 and 12 port came optionally with the ML ports so if you want to use standard SATA cables pay attention to what you are buying.

The latest firmware is 2.08.00.009 it is found in the 9.3.0.8 code set which was a firmware only release.
That firmware + the appropriate driver works in W2k-SP4, XP-SP2, XP64-SP1, and everything up to Win8 in both 32 and 64 bit.
These also work with various flavors of Linux but I have not experimented with that.

I've done this 'trick' many times on many boards.
Never had a problem other than finding the best driver to use. That's mostly because the online documentation sucked by the time the company changed hands twice. (They have been LSI, AMCC and 3Ware at different times.)
The very first system I did this on is still running. 7 years and no problems at all.

Great way to get RAID on a non-RAID board or to get around OS/Driver compatibility issues with some onboard RAID chips.
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