sfg wrote on 2023-03-30, 00:53:

I gave up on the mATX thing. I want more slots to stick things in. Thanks for the "all in one build" suggestion. I'll look into […]
Show full quote

I gave up on the mATX thing. I want more slots to stick things in.
Thanks for the "all in one build" suggestion. I'll look into it. But as I said, I'm not necessarily looking to get the cheapest thing possible. Consider that I'm thinking of things like Voodoos and MT-32s. 😀 Even started looking into getting a Vortex 2 card.

But getting back to a P4 build, anyone see anything bad about this board? I can easily find on ebay and very cheap.
Doesn't have a 3.3v AGP slot, but I figured that maybe if I want to play around with Voodoo I could either get a Voodoo 2 or leave that for some other build later.

Seems like a decent board aside from maybe caps (most if not all boards have bad caps from that era).

It's got 865PE so it should work great with 98SE (depending on the graphics card you pick) and have enough power to handle most of the WinXP era.

sfg wrote on 2023-03-30, 00:53:

I gave up on the mATX thing. I want more slots to stick things in. Thanks for the "all in one build" suggestion. I'll look into […]
Show full quote

I gave up on the mATX thing. I want more slots to stick things in.
Thanks for the "all in one build" suggestion. I'll look into it. But as I said, I'm not necessarily looking to get the cheapest thing possible. Consider that I'm thinking of things like Voodoos and MT-32s. 😀 Even started looking into getting a Vortex 2 card.

But getting back to a P4 build, anyone see anything bad about this board? I can easily find on ebay and very cheap.
Doesn't have a 3.3v AGP slot, but I figured that maybe if I want to play around with Voodoo I could either get a Voodoo 2 or leave that for some other build later.

If money isn't an object Id look at having a professional recap job done to any of these era P4 boards or do it yourself. That gigabyte board will be great with awesome CPU support, Id recommend the 3.0-3.4ghz 800FSB Northwoods over the Prescott. Run cooler and easier on the motherboard VRMs!

sfg wrote on 2023-03-30, 00:53:

I gave up on the mATX thing. I want more slots to stick things in. Thanks for the "all in one build" suggestion. I'll look into […]
Show full quote

I gave up on the mATX thing. I want more slots to stick things in.
Thanks for the "all in one build" suggestion. I'll look into it. But as I said, I'm not necessarily looking to get the cheapest thing possible. Consider that I'm thinking of things like Voodoos and MT-32s. 😀 Even started looking into getting a Vortex 2 card.

But getting back to a P4 build, anyone see anything bad about this board? I can easily find on ebay and very cheap.
Doesn't have a 3.3v AGP slot, but I figured that maybe if I want to play around with Voodoo I could either get a Voodoo 2 or leave that for some other build later.

For a Win98/XP build it should be very good (depends on the video card in XP). I have it's lga 775 younger sister. The caps can be replaced if they fail, many boards have failing caps, is not just Gigabyte. For s478 i have a QDI PlatiniX-2A because of the PC/PCI (SB-Link) connector. As i said, there are allot of components and choices, it all depends on what/where do you want to stop.

Cool, thanks for the replies!

What PSU wattage would be safe for say a:

- 3ghz P4 Northwood
- GeForce 4 Ti
- some floppy emulator like Phil from Philscomputerlab is using
- some SD or CF to IDE adapter
- 1 or 2 sound cards... current plan is getting a SB Live and a Vortex 2 (if I ever find one of those) to juggle between EAX and A3D.

I was looking at this specifically because it has a lot of power on the 3.3 and 5v rails and I understand that's important?

If the motherboard has the 12v cpu connector (EPS) and that s478 board has it, you don't have to go for very powerful 3.3v/5v rail PSU's. Any modern REAL 300w+ psu (i tend to go for Seasonic, Enermax, CWT, Delta, Super Flower because they are already established in the psu market, but remember that no mater how good a company is, they will have bad products) should be more then enough.

sfg wrote on 2023-03-30, 08:52:

- 3ghz P4 Northwood

If power usage is your concern, get rid of NetBurst P4 and use 90 nm Athlon64 instead.

sfg wrote on 2023-03-16, 14:58:

Would something like this PSU be suitable?
Has 150W on the 5 and 3.3 rails. Looks like a lot of the Corsair PSUs do. Anything else should I look for? Max load maybe?

A PSU I have which is still sold new and has +3,3V 28A and +5V 30A is this one: https://www.lc-power.com/produkte/archiv/pc-n … 650gp3-v23.html
Also https://www.lc-power.com/en/product/pc-power- … /lc6560gp3-v23/ with 25/27A.

So, some questions about sound. I read about getting stuff like MT-32 to work through a gameport + SoftMPU. Or a Sound Canvas through the gameport.
But from the threads I've found, that's not working in pure DOS with a SB Live. Is that correct? Are there any PCI sound cards (Vortex 2 maybe?) that allow that or that works only with ISA?

Should still work in W98 DOS mode even with a SB Live, right?

Basically I'm trying to find out if I could play around with an MT-32 and/or a Sound Canvas on the P4 build I mentioned above before doing a build with ISA.

Edit: Would the CT4660 Daughter Board allow external midi devices in pure DOS or its use is just for the ports?

Slim chance that you'll run into this issue, but just in case.

"I wanted to get this out there in case anyone else with this board has this issue. I was given this board a few months ago and it had some obvious failing capacitors, but it still booted into Windows when I replaced the blown power supply. So I recently got around to replacing the bad caps, and installed Windows XP on a 240 gig SSD connected to the SATA 0 port by using the CDROM on the SATA 1 port and everything went fine. It was on BIOS FC from 11/18/2003 and I decided to update it to FG dated 9/9/2004. When I rebooted after the update, it wouldn't load Windows and the message was "Error loading operating system." I tried many different things, but had no luck. I then stepped it back by flashed it to FF which was dated 8/11/2004, but I still had the same error!

I went into Standard CMOS Features and changed IDE Channel 0 Master's Access Mode from Auto to Large and then it loaded Windows with no issue."
GA-8IPE1000 Pro (rev. 2.x) BIOS FG

For anybody who was wondering I finally lookeed it up and the two cheaper HP OEM boards are P4S-LA and P4SD-LA.

P4S gets you universal AGP
P4SD gets you SATA at the cost of universal AGP

Both should be relatively cheap and plentiful as OEM boards, and I think P4SD-LA can be flashed over to retail using the BIOs for another P4 series from ASUS.

For matx i ended up buing a 754 Gigabyte GA-K8VT800M (K8VM800m works also), with a Sempron 3100+ that i had. What i like and Intel doesn't have is that if you update to the latest bios(F12) you can change the multi from the bios (5x-9x) 1000-1800 mhz or use Setmul directly 800-1800 mhz (4x-9x). It has a Via chipset so it has support in Dos for Ess Solo 1 in tdma mode.