Honestly most Intel-chipset P4 boards will do the job, as drivers are available and as long as there's not capacitor issues they're pretty stable. I've had a couple 800-series boards. Stick to boards with AGP, PCI-E isn't really supported in Win98 (although a few video cards will work, still, not ideal). Otherwise I've had good luck with them as long as you are fine with the limitations of most P4 platforms - mainly lack of speed adjustments and no ISA, basically.

As I remember I had a pentium 4 northwood pc that i had xp running on. I decided to take its CPU driver and put it into a fresh windows 98se installation to see if it worked. It didn't just work it actually ran cooler (speedstep support) I generally recommend intel systems than AMD with windows 98se.

> Scanning ebay most of the offerings are of the 845/865 variations and not surprisingly they are expensive like anything else these days.

If there is one bit of advice about buying a P4 system is....it should not be expensive. Ebay is known as ScamBay for a reason. Make super lowball offers and see what happens. Look locally on classifieds. Otherwise they are excellent for high-end Win98 builds, with a Geforce FX and Audigy2 for example. They don't support 3.3v AGP so no Voodoo cards, or ISA sound cards (for the most part).

Recommended video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_TpsS3KNF8

We were shooting the crap, brainstorming on P4 as retro box in this thread...
Methods to enhance retro-flexibility on Pentium 4 class hardware...
might be some info there you can use (or contribute)

i845s, look out for early ones, you can get stuck with 400fsb max. SDRAM ain't so lovely either, don't really let a northwood stretch it's legs.

Last week I was on eBay and happened to notice that even P4 motherboards now have jumped from $15ish to $50ish for something half decent, yikes. Still bargains to snipe, or find on the curb though. Myself I accidentally a P4 machine the other week, for ~$10 USD 12.99CDN at a thrift just for it's LS-120 superdrive, but that only got me a 400mhz i845 board, SDRAM, Willamette 1.5, floppy, optical x2, questionable PSU, TNT2 and case... that might take a northwood. I'm probably going to use that one to confirm stuff in thread posted above... I'm a slow mover with too many irons in the fire.

Does it have to be northwood based though? Consider transitional boards with 865 chipset, LGA775 socket and AGP. Most of them have decent W98 support. I managed to get ASUS P5P800-VM for 15 USD. Bought nice, cool cedar mill P4 for 2$ and reused old intel stock cooler for 1$ 😀

kolderman wrote on 2022-03-08, 18:29:

> Scanning ebay most of the offerings are of the 845/865 variations and not surprisingly they are expensive like anything else these days.

If there is one bit of advice about buying a P4 system is....it should not be expensive. Ebay is known as ScamBay for a reason. Make super lowball offers and see what happens. Look locally on classifieds. Otherwise they are excellent for high-end Win98 builds, with a Geforce FX and Audigy2 for example. They don't support 3.3v AGP so no Voodoo cards, or ISA sound cards (for the most part).

To cut those bold ebay seller some slack - the honarable ones, at least:
If I were to provide a certain salvaged, cleaned, tested PC motherboard on a professional level with a correct, complete listing, warranty and all: There's really no point in starting below three figues, no matter the age.

But Pentium 4s, well, at least until a few years ago the easiest way to get them was to browse for complete systems from large OEMs, Dell, HP, Compaq, the craps, with a certain look or the right case sticker. And maybe look up the model number if the platform isn't noted in the listing.
Those old P4 machines got sold off by the bushel. Maybe because the specs said "2+ GHz" and the dealer won't believe that really, really nobody who pays their own power bill wants them any more.

Me looks and my multiple 865 S478 boards, most with ISA, most of that being PIAGP industrial parts.

The one ATX board I got lucky on because I only purchased a case and when it came, it had the motherboard in it.

If you don't care about ISA, then it is way, way, way cheaper.

If you can find a Dimension 4600 motherboard or XPS equivalent they literally support everything, used to be $20 on ebay, and besides a proprietary but well documented front panel connector are just well built, no BS systems. Bios has great compatibility settings despite being basic as heck.

i still have a northwood 2.8ghz running in a biostar p4m90-m4 micro-atx board, via p4m900 chipset with chrome9 integrated video, 5.1 ch sound (7.1 ch on v5 board revision) and 4gb ddr2 ram. it's basically a lga775 platform with a 478 socket. it's got 2 ide controllers which is the only reason it's still in service. i run 4 massive ide drives in a dual striped software (linux) raid array for the plex server i host on the box. no agp, but it still has 2 slots for pci video, plus it has full size pci-e.

for some reason i had a couple incidents of the bios spontaneously corrupting. at the time i had 2 identical boards so i just reprogrammed the chip in the other board. that was years and years ago and i've never had another incident since with frequent use and the original bios chip was never replaced.

stanwebber wrote on 2022-03-09, 06:51:

i still have a northwood 2.8ghz running in a biostar p4m90-m4 micro-atx board, via p4m900 chipset with chrome9 integrated video, 5.1 ch sound (7.1 ch on v5 board revision) and 4gb ddr2 ram. it's basically a lga775 platform with a 478 socket. it's got 2 ide controllers which is the only reason it's still in service. i run 4 massive ide drives in a dual striped software (linux) raid array for the plex server i host on the box. no agp, but it still has 2 slots for pci video, plus it has full size pci-e.

for some reason i had a couple incidents of the bios spontaneously corrupting. at the time i had 2 identical boards so i just reprogrammed the chip in the other board. that was years and years ago and i've never had another incident since with frequent use and the original bios chip was never replaced.

Does this system run Win98SE?

I use Win98Se on a i850e based mainboard (Asus P4T533-R), a P4 Northwood 3,06/512/533 with HT disabled and a WD Raptor as main HDD. It's a very snappy system.

I can recommend the P5P800-VM for Win98SE as well, it takes the cheap but fast Core S775-cpu's whilst giving you all the stability and compatibility of the S478 era: AGP, DDR and the i865 chipset.

Appreciate all the comments, plenty of food for thought. I'm taking my time with this because if I don't another "rabbit hole" ensues.

My main focus for this project is just win98 gaming performance relative to my weaker win98 system. Not concerned with DOS compatibility
so ISA is not a big deal. Northwood is preferred if only because it's predecessor Willamette is rumored to be a hot chip. Sticking with AGP on the
graphics front.

Regarding Dell mobo's, there are some Optiplex GX-270's NOS on ebay that are reasonable. Would these fit in a typical ATX case ok? Are any
connections proprietary as Dells ar prone to be?

Prefer Intel chipsets but are the others like SIS, VIA etc. reliable?

The caps on the Optiplex 270 boards don't look very good quality, but other than a typical proprietary front panel and only 1 pci slot it looks fine.

I love the SiS 645 chipset, cant comment on any others. VIA ones of the era seem good from what little experience Iv had, used to have a Biostar matx lga 775 VIA chipset on 478 that was no-nonsense, and stable.

A quick look at ebay and I can easily find name brand boards for 40$-60$. The only p4 boards that are that expensive are the industrial boards with ISA... which IMO you can make a case for I guess but it kind of misses the point of a high performance windows98 machine IMO.

I don't see much of a point to the 1.8ghz skews. You can get a 2.2ghz or 2.4ghz northwood processor with a very reasonable TDP, and that speed it will actually be significantly faster than the more retro friendly socket 370 and athlon XP options.

Another very good option is socket 754 with an athlon CPU. In my experience the higher clocked p4s perform a little better, but that is benchmark padding. You get way more than enough performance either way, and the ahtlon CPUs do have the potential to run a bit cooler and quiter.. although my 865p chipset does have better I/O.

You can always get a LGA775 board with AGP.

That opens up the Pentium D and Core2 chips as well.

The FX5950U is CPU limited until 3.2-3.3Ghz on a Core 2 X6800 in Win98

Went ahead and ordered this Intel D865GL mobo unused. Now to decide on a cpu, probably a P4 2.2ghz. or thereabout.

ODwilly wrote on 2022-03-09, 15:37:

I love the SiS 645 chipset, cant comment on any others. VIA ones of the era seem good from what little experience Iv had, used to have a Biostar matx lga 775 VIA chipset on 478 that was no-nonsense, and stable.

Had SiS645 on an Asus P4S333, it was unstable at anything but default speed. Moved the same processor and ram to a board with Intel chipset (845E IIRC) and it ran 50% overclocked for years ... (1.6A Northwood @ 2.4)

That's funny, I just finished up a Win98SE build on a Soyo P4I845PE Board with a Northwood 2.66 or 2.8 (Can't remember).

What I do remember is the setup went smooth as silk and I even found 98SE motherboard drivers without an issue.

Runs great with a GeForce4 Ti card....

H3nrik V! wrote on 2022-03-09, 21:44:

ODwilly wrote on 2022-03-09, 15:37:

I love the SiS 645 chipset, cant comment on any others. VIA ones of the era seem good from what little experience Iv had, used to have a Biostar matx lga 775 VIA chipset on 478 that was no-nonsense, and stable.

Had SiS645 on an Asus P4S333, it was unstable at anything but default speed. Moved the same processor and ram to a board with Intel chipset (845E IIRC) and it ran 50% overclocked for years ... (1.6A Northwood @ 2.4)

My Amptron M930 (SiS 645) has been stable and worked well for me with Win98, but it (probably wisely) has no overclocking options.