Decided I wanted a "top notch" dos and Win98 machine, and decided to go for a P3 machine, as it appears to be the latest where ISA support was available.

Got a Soltek SL-65KV2 mb with a 1GHz cpu installed, and 2x256mb ram(ram and cpu bought separately from mb).
Graphics is a Geforce 4 card, but have also tried a generic pci Cirrus Logic card of some kind, with the same result.

Not familiar with Soltek boards, but got this as it was reasonable, and it has a ISA slot for a sound card in dos.

Problem is that for most of the time it doesn't boot. Appears to be completely dead.
Tried 3 different power supplies, and no difference between them. All of them fairly modern, from a few months old, up to 5 years or so old.

Once in a while, I can get life into it, and all fans start, but no picture on screen.
I have managed to get it to boot 3-4 times, where I can enter bios, but of those 2 times the computer has frozen.

Looked over the motherboard, but can't really see anything obvious.
Neither can I find for why it will boot one time, but not the other.
Seems to be more random, rather than something with a pattern, at least as far as I have found.