There are win98 drivers for the i800 series of chipsets they are not available for download from manufacture websites for some odd reason they used to be, I remember running win98se on my old D875pbz and I downloaded that driver package. If you have any OEM desktop discs from that time they may have win9x drivers on them, I have a disc that came with a Dell Dimension 4600 it has win98 drivers. It may be tricky getting all the hardware to function in dos but it should work, also I remember reading a post about how some voodoo cards will overheat in certain Pentium 4 compatible motherboards you may want to look into this

Makes sense. It would essentially be a ridiculously fast directx 7 and below machine. The lack of agp would be the only limiting factor. You can get directx 9 and even later cards with pci, but it quickly becomes a bottleneck.

Another plus would be the faster bus speeds between the processor and ram. That extra bandwidth would let you run software rendered games in higher resolutions than an equivalent high end p3.

Would be good to have a system that never needs its processor or heatsink messed with. Sata would be nice and is common on boards this late, but not a requirement for Win 98. No floppy port either but again, not essential for 98. Don't expect much documentation. Or very flexible bios options.

If you already own a later pci voodoo card its worth trying I think. If you don't, I would buy something with an agp slot.

I had a pair of 12mb voodoo 2s but they got dumped at some point when moving homes (little did i know that these will end up becoming hard to get/expensive!). If I can't find a PCI 3dfx card I'll get a budget pci card of the era like a geforce 2/4mx which are easy to find for cheap on ebay.

CPU and chipset are both a good choice, but as has been said: no AGP, no floppy, no SATA - just too many drawbacks IMO.

Yeah...the only thing that actually bothers me is no agp since it's a lot harder to find pci graphics card at reasonable prices than agp ones.

Don't care about floppies and fine with using CompactFlash with an IDE adapter (already own some & it will still be faster than the HDDs of the time & more than enough for dos/win9x era games).

What would be a good agp-wielding alternative? I'm ok with pentium 4 based solutions as well.

I should add that when looking for pentium 4 boards I wanted to use a Pentium 4-M, which has a voltage of 1.2v & most desktop boards I found didn't support such low voltages (I know the P4-M would still work with a higher voltage but just thought it would be nice to minimize heat/power consumption, especially on such a notoriously hot-running architecture).

Just answering myself, in case someone else is interested in running P4-Ms at their "native" voltage under win98:

old list of undervoltable motherboards. Look for boards supporting at least 1.2v and below for the socket 478 P4-M.

EDIT: crap, all these motherboards are pretty hard to find 🙁