_tk wrote on 2023-01-27, 20:58:

I still don't understand a "fast" P4 for a Win98 only build. By that point almost everyone had moved on to XP. And any late 98 games can be played just fine (and likely better) in XP.

I get it if doing a dual-boot XP and you want 98 on there to cover the earlier 9x games, but otherwise I'd rather have something more period appropriate. I guess it'd be something to do or if that's what you already have, but otherwise I personally wouldn't go out of my way to seek out an i865 or i875 mobo for such a build.

I see purchase price as the main argument. PIII can run Windows 98 games just fine, but 440BX boards are scarce and can be expensive with a fast CPU. A P4 board can be bought together with CPU for peanuts. Very suitable for people who prefer to play Windows 98 games as opposed to DOS and will use Dosbox-x for the latter. Athlon XP is exactly in the same category - not sufficiently powerful for many Windows XP games, but excellent for Windows 98. Paired together with GeForce 4 MX440 (128bit) or FX5500/FX5600 will make an excellent Windows 98 rig.

Dual boot XP/98 is not a good idea as it requires a graphics card that is old enough to use compatible drivers in Windows 98 but too weak for Windows XP games. This includes FX5900 which is usually a waste of money.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-01-28, 17:44:

Socket3 wrote on 2023-01-28, 17:01:

The only difference is my board worked fine with slower cards - for example it ran well with the 8500, no freezing or crashing - same with a geforce 2 pro, geforce 4 mx460 and an FX 5700. Anything faster would perform poorly if nvidia or cause black screen / freezing with ATI cards.

Interesting. Back when my motherboard was still suffering from this issue (prior to downgrading the BIOS) I tested a bunch of different GPUs, including the likes of a GeForce MX440 and a Radeon 9250 and they all had the problem. Maybe it varies on different boards.

BTW, I believe that @bloodem has done the most research on this issue. He summarized his findings in this post. For my part, I became far less interested in troubleshooting this further since flashing the oldest BIOS completely solved the problem for my motherboard.

It seems @bloodem is having issues with the same Asus K8V I had problems with. I might still have the board in my junk parts bin, I'm going to pull it out and try flashing the earliest BIOS. Seems like he as two revisions of this board, I'll try to see what revision mine is. I believe I also have multiple examples of this board, or at least one in the scarp bin, one in the "untested" box, and another, socket 939 Asus A8V Deluxe (or something of the sort) also untested, still in a system I picked up in a lot from an office building.

I generally tend to stay away from low end stuff from asus and MSI - they never took low end seriously and lots of their entry level products are not of great quality. This was true in the socket A era, and is unfortunately still true now - if not worse. A friend who's still in IT recently built a couple dozen ryzen 5700g + asus prime B550M systems. In 10 months' time 5 of the systems failed... issues related to AGESA and flash eeprom. Odd, since he mentioned he never updated the bios on any of the machines. A couple of the working ones have issues waking up from sleep. We were talking about it when he got the commission for the systems and I suggested he go for the Gigabyte Aorus B550M Elite, which was also quite a bit cheaper than the Prime B550m, but he went with Asus regardless. In my opinion, Asus is better at building top-end stuff, while Gigabyte is significantly better building entry level and mid end hardware, while their high end offerings are a bit disappointing. MSI also used to make really bad entry level products back in the 478-775 days. I can still remember a lot of 60 MSI intel i915 or 925 entry level boards paired with Celeron D CPUs we used to build machines for a client back in 2006 I think - out of 60+ boards over half died within 2 years and 8 were DOA. That ment lots of lost time for us, having to go to the client, diagnose and pickup the PC, then RMA the board and setup a replacement unit until the new boards came back from RMA. We lost so much money of fuel and wasted so much time, we never bought entry level MSI parts again. Their higher end stuff did really well tough - particularly the P35 NEO2.

We highjacked the thread enough as it is, thanks for pointing me to the two threads, I'll have an in-depth look and maybe make some time to do some testing of my own... although unlikely since my hobby space is under renovations right now.

I would like to add that PCI sound cards have a greater likelihood of working in pure DOS on the i845 / ICH4. I have an SB Audigy 2 ZS running on an Abit BH7 (chipset i845PE) with drivers from Joseph_Joestar's guide. Sound in DOS games works just fine from a "restart in MS-DOS mode" environment in Win98. This was not the case with another board with an i865PE chipset (ICH5).
There may be exceptions depending on sound card and motherboard/and or chipset combination, but this seems to be the practical limit for DOS sound compatibility:
PCI sound cards and Chipsets from various manufacturers...
http://dosdays.co.uk/topics/pci_sound_cards_in_dos.php [find subheading South Bridge ISA Compatibility]
https://ilovepa.ws/pentium-4-dos-gaming/ [find subheading Chipsets: 845, 865, 875]
If working sound in DOS matters to you, I suggest going for the i845. As others have said, both chipsets are fine and have solid driver support, but the 865 is more recent and has slight improvements and changes, like AGP 8x support.

BoyCheeky wrote on 2023-01-29, 09:36:

I would like to add that PCI sound cards have a greater likelihood of working in pure DOS on the i845 / ICH4. I have an SB Audig […]
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I would like to add that PCI sound cards have a greater likelihood of working in pure DOS on the i845 / ICH4. I have an SB Audigy 2 ZS running on an Abit BH7 (chipset i845PE) with drivers from Joseph_Joestar's guide. Sound in DOS games works just fine from a "restart in MS-DOS mode" environment in Win98. This was not the case with another board with an i865PE chipset (ICH5).
There may be exceptions depending on sound card and motherboard/and or chipset combination, but this seems to be the practical limit for DOS sound compatibility:
PCI sound cards and Chipsets from various manufacturers...
http://dosdays.co.uk/topics/pci_sound_cards_in_dos.php [find subheading South Bridge ISA Compatibility]
https://ilovepa.ws/pentium-4-dos-gaming/ [find subheading Chipsets: 845, 865, 875]
If working sound in DOS matters to you, I suggest going for the i845. As others have said, both chipsets are fine and have solid driver support, but the 865 is more recent and has slight improvements and changes, like AGP 8x support.

That's really good to know.

I'd like to add - on topic - that I've had some success with the intel i915/925 express chipsets and windows 98. A friend needed a freebee win98 PC built from stuff I had in my inventory that were of little to no interest to me - so we picked a random office PC I had on a shelf - it had a 2.6GHz celeron D paired with a gigabyte i915 mainboard. PCI-E, no video card, 80GB SATA disk drive. I set SATA to IDE mode in bios, disabled virtualization, and win98 installed without any errors. We then added a 128bit PCI-E geforce 6200 and installed the driver.

Everything works as it should, no crashing, freezing or performance issues then or now. So far he's played Carmageddon 2, GTA 3, Heroes 3, Red Alert 2, Diablo II, Descent 3, NoX, Zax the alien hunter, baldur's gate and Mechwarrior 4 and he sais the PC ran everything without any issues.

The board in question is a Gigabyte GA-8I915P rev 1.1 if memory serves. I'll have him check to make sure. The video card is a PNY or Club3d (can't remember precisely) NV43 based geforce 6200. No-name PSU and case, 512MB of 533MHz DDR2, sata HDD and IDE optical drive.

Next weekend he wants to bring it over to install a PCI YMF744 he picked up online so he can have digital audio in DOS games ran under windows, as we could only get musig to work in dos games under windows, and we couldn't find a C-Media 9880 driver for native DOS either.

AlexZ wrote on 2023-01-28, 19:33:

_tk wrote on 2023-01-27, 20:58:

I still don't understand a "fast" P4 for a Win98 only build. By that point almost everyone had moved on to XP. And any late 98 games can be played just fine (and likely better) in XP.

I get it if doing a dual-boot XP and you want 98 on there to cover the earlier 9x games, but otherwise I'd rather have something more period appropriate. I guess it'd be something to do or if that's what you already have, but otherwise I personally wouldn't go out of my way to seek out an i865 or i875 mobo for such a build.

I see purchase price as the main argument. PIII can run Windows 98 games just fine, but 440BX boards are scarce and can be expensive with a fast CPU. A P4 board can be bought together with CPU for peanuts. Very suitable for people who prefer to play Windows 98 games as opposed to DOS and will use Dosbox-x for the latter. Athlon XP is exactly in the same category - not sufficiently powerful for many Windows XP games, but excellent for Windows 98. Paired together with GeForce 4 MX440 (128bit) or FX5500/FX5600 will make an excellent Windows 98 rig.

Dual boot XP/98 is not a good idea as it requires a graphics card that is old enough to use compatible drivers in Windows 98 but too weak for Windows XP games. This includes FX5900 which is usually a waste of money.

I tried an FX5500 on my "main" Win98SE rig and ran into a few oddities/poor performance in some Win9x games. I went back to a Geforce 4 Ti 4200 and subsequent older drivers and those issues cleared up.

Decent i815 boards with 133MHZ FSB PIII's aren't really too expensive (compared to good 440BX boards). And they fit the era a lot better. i810E boards are downright cheap if you have a decent PCI card.

P4's are a bargain because they run hot and the majority of the mobos have serious capacitor issues. Again, if one already has the system I can see trying to make it work but otherwise I'd spend a few more bucks and get a good PIII setup instead. I think a lot of us chose that route for our vintage systems as the early P4 just wasn't a system we really enjoyed (or was worth upgrading to). Personally, back in the era I ran a Tualatin 1.4 for the longest time with Win98Se/Windows 2000 dual boot until a P4 came out that was actually worth upgrading to (and XP with a decent service pack).

I never encountered any performance/compatibility problems with socket 754. The 2 boards I tested on are: Abit KV8-max3 and KV8 pro. Both running just fine with a wide range of video cards from geforce 256 up to geforce 5950 ultra/radeon 7500 up to radeon 9800xt. On the other hand on Abit NF8 pro there were constant crashes and something like small stutters even in simple 3d games such as NFS hot pursuit.
Anyway I would not consider socket 754 for use with 98SE unless you want some 3dmark score or bragging rights. Socket 478/462 is plenty fast for 98SE; 754 and 939 are XP territory, but again everyone is free to choose as he wishes.

nd22 wrote on 2023-01-30, 10:11:

Anyway I would not consider socket 754 for use with 98SE unless you want some 3dmark score or bragging rights. Socket 478/462 is plenty fast for 98SE; 754 and 939 are XP territory, but again everyone is free to choose as he wishes.

There are some games from 2000 and 2001 which can benefit from fast CPUs that are available on socket 754 (and comparative platforms). Examples would include Deus Ex and Max Payne. If one wants to run those titles at 60+ FPS using the 1600x1200 resolution with all settings maxed out (including Anisotropic Filtering where available) a powerful GPU and a fast CPU are very useful.

But that's an edge case, and not many people played those games at such high settings back when they first came out.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-01-30, 10:29:

nd22 wrote on 2023-01-30, 10:11:

Anyway I would not consider socket 754 for use with 98SE unless you want some 3dmark score or bragging rights. Socket 478/462 is plenty fast for 98SE; 754 and 939 are XP territory, but again everyone is free to choose as he wishes.

There are some games from 2000 and 2001 which can benefit from fast CPUs that are available on socket 754 (and comparative platforms). Examples would include Deus Ex and Max Payne. If one wants to run those titles at 60+ FPS using the 1600x1200 resolution with all settings maxed out (including Anisotropic Filtering where available) a powerful GPU and a fast CPU are very useful.

But that's an edge case, and not many people played those games at such high settings back when they first came out.

quite true, the very last win98 games ran under xp as well, I'd like to think of games released around 2003-2004 such as LoK Defiance or Myst IV as steep examples of 98 game requirements, requiring a 700mhz chip at minimum.

you can use anything that has driver , it won't make a difference on older games. I am still trying to fix my G80 GPU to add to my win98 Dell ( I have 2 dells GX270 w/ AGP & Precision 670 w/ pcie). They work fine w/ Win98sec