Reply 20 of 29, by tayyare
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wrote:Agreed with Jorpho and oerk. The only drivers I've ever seen an old motherboard really "need" are for AGP or some onboard device. Old AGP may or may not work very well; depends on the chipset and the board. Most other onboard devices, barring a quality ATA controller or something, should be turned off as previously stated. If you go with a fairly well known motherboard you shouldn't have problems finding whatever it needs, and it shouldn't be too hard to find someone else who has owned (or maybe currently owns) one to help you with information.
On the NIC - agreed on 3Com or Intel (I haven't spent much time with Realtek devices in general, oddly enough). I've got some older Etherlink PCI cards that work out of the box with most versions of Windows, and other operating systems, and provide good performance to boot. I know there are ISA variants of some of those cards as well (some even have thin-net connectors).
When they first start integrating EIDE controllers to the motherboards (late 486 era - mostly 486 PCI boards) and they generally came with drivers for Windows 3.x (32bit disk access) but nothing more. With Windows 9x around, they all work out of the box anyway. Early Pentium and late 486 era boards with onboard devices (graphics, sound, etc. ) was a rarity rather then the rule. And I'm sure the drivers for them can be found around, since they were mostly not board specific, but chipset specific, so even if you want to use them for a reason, there won't be much problem.
As the most other guys said, 3Com and Realtek NICs are super compatible, mostly even out of the box in case of Windows 98 and mostly with Windows 95. I have no personal experience with Intel, but especially 3Com 3C905 (PCI) and 3C509 (ISA) cards have no problem with Windows 9x, either with native drivers, or their own drivers (available in every corner of the web).
GA-6VTXE PIII 1.4+512MB
Geforce4 Ti 4200 64MB
Diamond Monster 3D 12MB SLI
SB AWE64 PNP+32MB
120GB IDE Samsung/80GB IDE Seagate/146GB SCSI Compaq/73GB SCSI IBM
Adaptec AHA29160
3com 3C905B-TX
Gotek+CF Reader
MSDOS 6.22+Win 3.11/95 OSR2.1/98SE/ME/2000