875p/Canterwood. I had a Asus P4C800-E Deluxe in 2004 for WinXP that later on became my Win98SE/DOS platform. Apart from the obvious speed issues some games will have with P4 CPUs it ran rock stable.
Only drawback is no universal AGP but really wirh a P4 you want at least a GeForce Ti 4200 so it's not really an issue.

Almoststew1990 wrote:

I had a 478 motherboard with a SIS chipset and it did not get on with Windows 98. It would throw up protection errors after installing chipset drivers. This also happened on a AMD 754 socket motherboard with the same / similar SIS648 chipset. Both motherboards then died anyway.

Tbh this sounds more like instability from dying motherboards (bad caps most likely) than any compatibility issue.

I'm looking to do another Pentium 4 build for DOS\W98\XP gaming. What chipset would be best for this? I don't need ISA slots or anything, i'd be going PCI sound for this.

If you're doing DOS, ISA would be very nice to have, and failing that SBLink to use say a Yamaha YMF74x card.

If you really don't care about that, I'd second the 865/875 option, unless you want to run an AGP Voodoo, in which case you want universal AGP and maybe i850E or i845D/i845PE would be a better choice.

dionb wrote:

If you really don't care about that, I'd second the 865/875 option

For Socket 478 I'd still recommend the i865/875 even if ISA is required. 😎 There are mainboards implementing ISA via a PCI-ISA bridge chip. They're industrial boards and ridiculously expensive but from what I know that's the case with any Socket 478 ISA board.
Intel dropped ISA support with the i810 chipset meaning on any Intel P4 motherboards an external PCI-ISA bridge chip had to be used. ISA didn't make any sense to most consumers in 2002 and onwards so that expense hasn't been made on consumer boards.
I think VIA still had a PCI-ISA bridge included in their south bridges with the VT8235 but I don't know of any consumer boards actually implementing that functionality and adding an ISA slot. So we're back to expensive industrial boards.
I don't know about integrated PCI-ISA bridges on SIS chipsets but again I have never seen a consumer Socket 478 board sporting a SiS chipset with ISA slots. So again with Socket 478 and ISA we're in industrial motherboard territory where everything is ridiculously expensive anyway so why not go for the fastest chipset with an external PCI-ISA bridge chip? 😀

And I guess we both agree that with the S478 platform there are drawbacks for older games, especially under DOS. 😉 But if a single S478 computer is the goal this is my recommendation. 😀

I have a slot 1 PC with ISA slots and a AWE32 for my pure 98/DOS PC. This is more of just messing around to see what is possible on pentium 4's!

Something with the i865 (maybe 875) chipset.

Not sure about overclocking, but probably something from ASUS or Gigabyte or maybe Abit would be the best.

Best CPU is the Northwoood based Pentium 4 Extreme CPU (3.2 or 3.4Ghz with 2MB L2 cache). Good luck finding one for a good price though. Took me around 1-2 years to find one not priced through the roof.

You could always get a 533FSB Northwood based P4 (512KB L2 cache) and probably overclock it which may end up being faster for some things.

The Prescott CPUs have a longer pipeline and thus a lower IPC.. so you really don't gain anything with them other than way more heat output.

Almoststew1990 wrote:

I had a 478 motherboard with a SIS chipset and it did not get on with Windows 98. It would throw up protection errors after installing chipset drivers. This also happened on a AMD 754 socket motherboard with the same / similar SIS648 chipset. Both motherboards then died anyway.

I have also had this issue with 2 SiS 645DX motherboards. Turns out it is related to the Openhci.sys that gets installed with the chipset drivers (USB driver). Just removing it from the drivers so it wont get installed or restoring the original one solves the problem. After that I have had no problems using Windows 98 with those boards and USB works fine.

Quite strange why they included that in the drivers when it obliviously does not work.

If you want good Sound Blaster support under DOS go for Yamaha YMF7x4 PCI with SiS southbridges up to 963 or Terratec Solo-1 for VIA chipsets. ALS4000 should work on both chipset options but it's a little bit on the noisier side. I would stay away from Intel chipsets unless you get a board with PC/PCI connector.

I have an Asus P4P 800-E Deluxe and it runs great in windows 98. It is an 865PE chipset. It has SATA, gigabit ethernet, and USB 2.0 integrated - All working in windows 98. It also has AGP, a floppy controller, Ultra IDE, and other ports that you might want on a retro machine. It also supports 800fsb Pentium 4s, which is nice because these CPUs have a lower multiplier, which allows me to underclock my 3.0ghz model to 1600mhz if I want to by setting an 100fsb. Most socket 478 machines are compatible with throttle and can at least L1 cache disabled, so you can drop them down to a pentium speeds or lower pretty easily. Also, my particular board is pretty cheap and readily available on the ebays. I paid 37$ for it with a CPU and some memory.

Honestly though, any intel chipset on socket 478 is going to work great. Later chipsets have better I/0, so I recommend looking at i865. If you don't need speed sensitivity or ISA slots (although you can do pretty well with certain PCI sound cards), then a socket 478 machine is in my opinion the best platform for windows 98. It is even more stable and fuss free than my slot 1 machines.