D-Generation wrote:Here is what I've come up with on my search. Opinions would be great. […]
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Here is what I've come up with on my search. Opinions would be great.
Supermicro P3TDL3
Supermicro P3TDLE
GigaByte GA-BX2000
I wouldn't go with either Supermicro board if you want an easy time. They will be stable, but need registered ECC RAM; have no AGP slot; and drivers for the boards, and the Serverworks chipset, are somewhat hard to find in my experience (if someone can prove me wrong, please do!) They are also physically large and may not suit all cases. My experiences are with the non-Tualatin Supermicro boards running the same chipset.
There's some info on them here: http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/tualatinsmp/
According to this thread - Motherboard with 1.4Ghz Tualatin support and 3 ISA slots? - IPOX did a P3 board with more ISA slots, and ITOX and other industrial manufacturers also do P4 boards with ISA.
I would second the idea to go for an Athlon-based build, KT133A as appiah said. Abit KT7A is one option, apparently with the newest BIOS it supports up to Athlon XP 2400+.
D-Generation wrote:
bakemono wrote:Fastest board that supports ISA and fastest board that supports Win2k are two very different things. I've heard of others running Win2k on Core i7. The challenge is locating drivers for newer hardware, but I guess it has been done in some cases. Personally, I've run it on Athlon/Phenom II boards so I know that nForce 4 chipsets have Win2k drivers, and some AMD chipsets. Extended Kernel enables quad core support (although I noticed that single threaded performance drops slightly when all 4 cores enabled, likely because of inefficiency in the Win2k scheduler). There are hacked drivers for newer video cards (GeForce up to 6xx and Radeon up to 6xxx seem to work well)
Speed of the board is secondary to support for both ISA and the OS, but I'd like it go up to 4GB memory if possible. Speaking of memory, how much of a difference in performance would I see between a 4GB 2k system as opposed to one under a gigabyte? I wasn't able to find any information on this.
I'd wager the difference would be larger between <1GB and maybe 1-2GB, but above that you might not see much performance improvement. It will come down to what you're intending to run. Maybe if you install a bootable PCI SATA card that will improve loading times, and paging file performance.