I bought an Asus P4p800S SE on ebay, it was labelled as an Asus P4S800S SE, however if I'd checked the pictures more carefully I'd have seen it wasn't that. When I've searched for info about the P4S800S I've found the P4S800, because the P4S800S as far as I can see doesn't exist. It was a cheap board, it has a bad cap near the AGP port which I'll swap out. So if I do decide not to push ahead with it then it's not a huge loss.

I had been advised and a bit of googling showed that 865 was a great chipset if I wanted to have Win98SE capability into part of the Win XP era. I have another SS7 based machine to cover DOS so I don't need the P4 to do that.

The purpose of this machine is to have Win98 and WinXP covered. I appreciate that it'll only do Windows XP into the early 00s, but that's ok because I have another build to pick things up from that point.

I had planned on an 865 chipset, a middle of the road 2.4ghz p4 or so and 512meg of RAM (I understand Win98SE should be kept under 1gig). Maybe to experiment with 2GB of ram and trying to "hide" some from Win98 to get around that. I've not really settled on a graphics card, and I thought I would use the FX 5500 I have spare as a starting point and work out from there what to do.

Any board I am keeping I will recap with high quality caps, wash, reapply chipset heatsinks, add heatsinks, put with good airflow with the hope of lasting for as long as possible. So now that I have realised I've accidentally bought an 848 not an 865 I need to decide now if I stop and go shopping again for a new board, or if I stick with it.

These seem to be the downsides.

2 ram slots - I knew this was the case and I don't think it's a big deal.
Single channel memory - this has a performance impact but is it a big deal? I could just go for a faster CPU. On top of that this machine probably won't need that much more performance
Less support/compatibility? I know the 865 seems to be the top one, and I know that there's later BIOS updates for the 865 boards, but will that matter to me?

I'd welcome any thoughts on what to do, should I continue my search for an 865, or are there no real problems to make this my P4 "board for life"?