All of the intel chipsets should work really well, the 865p chipset just has the most features. 865p will have SATA 1.5 which is really nice if you are planning to use an SSD boot drive. Some 845 chipsets will have USB 2.0 support (the E and G series I believe). There might also be limitations on CPU or FSB support (could be limited to 533mhz when you might prefer to use an 800mhz part, ect). None of those are serious impediments. The biggest difference isn't stability it's I/O.

For a windows 98/xp hybrid the faster 3.0ghz+ CPUs northwoods and prescotts can make a difference if you are trying to play later XP games like FEAR and Farcry. For windows 98 (so pre 2003) a northwood 2.2ghz or 2.4ghz is plenty fast enough.

Socket 754 is another good option. An athlon 3200+ is plenty cheap and fast for a hybrid machine for any later XP game (except crysis). VIA 754 chipsets are also plenty stable and performant in windows 98. Make sure to get the 1mb cache CPU if you are reaching for later XP games.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2023-01-24, 18:44:

All of the intel chipsets should work really well, the 865p chipset just has the most features. 865p will have SATA 1.5 which is really nice if you are planning to use an SSD boot drive. Some 845 chipsets will have USB 2.0 support (the E and G series I believe). There might also be limitations on CPU or FSB support (could be limited to 533mhz when you might prefer to use an 800mhz part, ect). None of those are serious impediments. The biggest difference isn't stability it's I/O.

For a windows 98/xp hybrid the faster 3.0ghz+ CPUs northwoods and prescotts can make a difference if you are trying to play later XP games like FEAR and Farcry. For windows 98 (so pre 2003) a northwood 2.2ghz or 2.4ghz is plenty fast enough.

Socket 754 is another good option. An athlon 3200+ is plenty cheap and fast for a hybrid machine for any later XP game (except crysis). VIA 754 chipsets are also plenty stable and performant in windows 98. Make sure to get the 1mb cache CPU if you are reaching for later XP games.

So does that mean that the 845 chipset also has good windows 98 support?

Avoid socket 754 for Windows 98 as there are known performance issues with AGP. Windows XP is unaffected. P4 (Northwood/Prescott) and Athlon XP are excellent high end platforms for Windows 98. PIII is a hybrid for Windows 98 and DOS.

Basically what mothergoose was saying is both the 865 and 845 are so overkill for Win98 you wont notice any difference.
Main limitation is 865 gives you SATA where as 845 is IDE only (probably some exceptions but I'm talking in general)
I've 2 Win98/2k PC's based on 845 chipset with a 3.06 Nothwood CPU and can play my win9x games just fine

Win98 compatibility is the same between 845, 865 and 875 chipsets. 845 has single channel RAM and officially supports upto DDR333 speeds and FSB533, although some boards have unofficial DRR400 FSB800 support. 865pe and 875p support dual channel DDR400 and 800mhz FSB.

AlexZ wrote on 2023-01-24, 19:30:

Avoid socket 754 for Windows 98 as there are known performance issues with AGP. Windows XP is unaffected.

I concur, but would add that this issue only affects (certain) VIA chipsets. Socket 754 motherboards based on ULi and SiS chipsets should work fine, at least judging by the information available so far.

That said, it is possible to get some VIA based socket 754 systems to run properly under Win98, but it's kinda like playing the lottery. You need to use an older BIOS version, some very specific SATA settings and your southbridge needs to be a late revision model. I have such a system and it runs great, but it took a lot of research and tweaking to get it there.

There's also i848 chipset for P4 s478. It's similar to i845 but in fact simplified i865. It featured SATA controller because of ICH5

mothergoose729 wrote on 2023-01-24, 18:44:

All of the intel chipsets should work really well, the 865p chipset just has the most features. 865p will have SATA 1.5 which is really nice if you are planning to use an SSD boot drive. Some 845 chipsets will have USB 2.0 support (the E and G series I believe). There might also be limitations on CPU or FSB support (could be limited to 533mhz when you might prefer to use an 800mhz part, ect). None of those are serious impediments. The biggest difference isn't stability it's I/O.

For a windows 98/xp hybrid the faster 3.0ghz+ CPUs northwoods and prescotts can make a difference if you are trying to play later XP games like FEAR and Farcry. For windows 98 (so pre 2003) a northwood 2.2ghz or 2.4ghz is plenty fast enough.

Socket 754 is another good option. An athlon 3200+ is plenty cheap and fast for a hybrid machine for any later XP game (except crysis). VIA 754 chipsets are also plenty stable and performant in windows 98. Make sure to get the 1mb cache CPU if you are reaching for later XP games.

^excellent advice. I second this.

One note on SATA and Win98 -> for best results use windows 98 second edition. Also, make sure to set your SATA ports to "IDE mode" or "Compatibility mode" in BIOS, otherwise you will encounter issues ranging from "no fixed disk available" during windows setup to stability issues or even failure to boot after OS install. Some motherboards (like Abit) have a "Combo mode" setting in BIOS witch also seems to work well with win98.

Oh and stay away from "unofficial service pack".

chinny22 wrote on 2023-01-25, 16:11:

Basically what mothergoose was saying is both the 865 and 845 are so overkill for Win98 you wont notice any difference.
Main limitation is 865 gives you SATA where as 845 is IDE only (probably some exceptions but I'm talking in general)
I've 2 Win98/2k PC's based on 845 chipset with a 3.06 Nothwood CPU and can play my win9x games just fine

i845 is perfectly fine. I have an IBM Thinkcentre I'm current using as my main 98/early XP machine, which uses an intel i845 mainboard, and it performs beautifully. It came with a 2666Mhz Northwood which is borderline overkill for win98 games, but adequate for early windows XP titles (unreal tournament 2004 runs great for example). It also came with a Quadro FX3000 video card (basically a slightly underclocked FX 5900 Ultra) witch I kept in the PC - the only thing I upgraded is the memory (from 256MB which is perfect for 98 - to 1GB so XP will run as smooth as possible) and disk drive. I also installed Patchmem.

@OP - Another quick note - do not add too much ram to the machine if all you plan to run is windows 98. 256MB is more then enough, 512 is also OK. Note that unpatched, win98se will only be stable with a total (system memory + video memory) of 1GB. For example, 768MB of system ram + 256MB of video ram is OK. If you install 1GB of system ram and use a 256MB video card, you are likely to get instability or even failure to boot (the "out of memory error" on boot) after installing the video card driver. You can prevent or fix this by installing PATCHMEM - useful if you plan to dual-boot XP or 32 bit windows 7.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-01-27, 03:06:

AlexZ wrote on 2023-01-24, 19:30:

Avoid socket 754 for Windows 98 as there are known performance issues with AGP. Windows XP is unaffected.

I concur, but would add that this issue only affects (certain) VIA chipsets. Socket 754 motherboards based on ULi and SiS chipsets should work fine, at least judging by the information available so far.

That said, it is possible to get some VIA based socket 754 systems to run properly under Win98, but it's kinda like playing the lottery. You need to use an older BIOS version, some very specific SATA settings and your southbridge needs to be a late revision model. I have such a system and it runs great, but it took a lot of research and tweaking to get it there.

Setting SATA to "compatibility" or "IDE" mode should prevent that issue. All VIA based socket 939 or 754 win98 PC's I've built so far (and I've built dozens for friends and family, for retro gaming exclusively) have worked flawlessly provided sata is correctly configured in BIOS, virtualization is disabled, and total memory is kept under 1GB (video + system ram). For the 939 platform it also helps to install AMD cool and quiet or disable the feature in BIOS. Some games like NFS V do not like having CPU speed jump around. Same with intel Speedstep. If using some PCI devices (like the Aureal Vortex and in some cases the YMF725) it might also help to disable ACPI support in BIOS. This will let windows manage system resources instead of ACPI / BIOS and will permit the user to change IRQ and DMA for some devices in control panel. It also frees up an IRQ resource (usually IRQ 9). One example is setting the Aureal Vortex or Yamaha legacy virtual device resources to IRQ 5 and DMA 1 - needed to get sound in DOS games running under win98. IRQ 7 and DMA 3 will also work, but I've noticed that sometimes ACPI assigns higher resources, like IRQ 11 to this device, a resource witch DOS game setup programs cannot use as most only let you select up to IRQ 9, often no higher than IRQ 7... If the board does not allow you to disable ACPI, you can try setting IRQ 5 and DMA 1 to "reserved" under resource management in BIOS, and if you're lucky the virtual device will automatically be assigned those resources.

I've learned all these tricks by trial and error - by building dirt cheap retro machines for people who want to get into the hobby - because in my corner of the world socket 754 and 939 machines are more common and cheaper then 478 and socket A. Most of what I've come across use a VIA chipset. LGA775 builds are not scarce either, but 90% of what I've found use newer PCI-E and DDR2 intel chipsets like the i915. I've never come across a SiS 939 / 754 system board - you made me very curious about them. I know about the ULi boards, they are great for win98. The only one I have is a budget Jetway A689DAS and it's very stable and quite quick so it left a great impression.

Successfuly install Win98 on my Compaq W4000 system.
P4 2GHz/i845/1Gb RAM/ATI Radeon 9600 Pro AGP/AC97 AD1815codec/ADAPTEC PCI SATA card/NEC based USB2-FireWire card

Socket3 wrote on 2023-01-27, 12:24:

Setting SATA to "compatibility" or "IDE" mode should prevent that issue.

To clarify, there are two separate problems with (certain) VIA-based Socket 754 motherboards.

The first one is the GPU performance being halved under Win98 compared to WinXP. This has been well researched and documented in several threads on this forum. If the motherboard is affected (not all of them are) flashing the oldest possible BIOS can sometimes resolve the issue. No amount of tinkering with BIOS options can solve this, the problem is deep inside the code.

The second issue is with SATA II and SATA III drives not being recognized by the motherboard. This is also a known, well documented issue and was publicly acknowledged by VIA at the time. The solution is to either use a SATA I drive, or to find a motherboard with the VT8237R Plus southbridge which doesn't suffer from this problem. Again, no amount of tinkering with BIOS options can solve this issue on affected motherboards.

SIS 645DX is an option too.

The main trouble with I865 and Win9x -- there is no Intel Application Accelerator or similar. So 137+ GB HDDs aren't supported...

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.

_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.

Main reason for sticking with i865 or i875 is southbridge ICH6 supports DDMA routing for DOS supported PCI sound cards allowing one to play speed-insensitive DOS games. Other than that, I'd inclined to agree with you but I wonder how much of games that works perfectly on XP allowing us to not need for powerful 98SE PC?

Cheers,

_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.

Actually large numbers of late 98 games had issues on WinXP. Many were optimized and tested for Win98, and large swathes of gamers stayed on Win98 for a long time as a result. People forget WinXP had heaps of hardware/driver issues at the start just like Vista, although Vista gets a worse rep for it.

XP hesistance was very much a thing in the P4 era. P4 even launched when WinME was the latest OS from Microsoft. There was no mad rush for fisher-price'd NT5.1

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-01-27, 13:01:

To clarify, there are two separate problems with (certain) VIA-based Socket 754 motherboards. […]
Show full quote

Socket3 wrote on 2023-01-27, 12:24:

Setting SATA to "compatibility" or "IDE" mode should prevent that issue.

To clarify, there are two separate problems with (certain) VIA-based Socket 754 motherboards.

The first one is the GPU performance being halved under Win98 compared to WinXP. This has been well researched and documented in several threads on this forum. If the motherboard is affected (not all of them are) flashing the oldest possible BIOS can sometimes resolve the issue. No amount of tinkering with BIOS options can solve this, the problem is deep inside the code.

The second issue is with SATA II and SATA III drives not being recognized by the motherboard. This is also a known, well documented issue and was publicly acknowledged by VIA at the time. The solution is to either use a SATA I drive, or to find a motherboard with the VT8237R Plus southbridge which doesn't suffer from this problem. Again, no amount of tinkering with BIOS options can solve this issue on affected motherboards.

I apologise, I only superficially read the thread.

I've encountered something similar on one board - an ASUS A8V Deluxe (VIA KT880). Similar symptoms to what the thread is discussing - freezing with ATi cards (testing done with a Radeon X800XT, a 9600XT and a 8500) and poor performance with fast nvidia cards under windows 98. 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.

Since none of the other boards I've ever tried exhibited this behaviour (up to that point at least), I concluded the mainboard was on its way out, replaced it with an ECS KV2 and dumped it in my scrap bin. Admittedly I've never tried an MSI K8T, so I can't speak for that model, but I know the following models work perfectly in windows 98:

- ECS KV2
- Gigabyte GA-K8V
- Abit AV8
- Jetway 939AGP-P
- Biostar K8T890-A7 and K8VHA
- ECS K8M800
- AOpen AK86-L
- Soltek K8AV2

and there are a few others that elude me.

I've encountered the exact same issue described with the MSI K8T and the Asus A8V rather recently, while playing around with an K8Upgrade-VM800, but was able to resolve it by disabling AGP Fast Writes in BIOS.

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.

kolderman wrote on 2023-01-28, 01:36:

_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.

Actually large numbers of late 98 games had issues on WinXP. Many were optimized and tested for Win98, and large swathes of gamers stayed on Win98 for a long time as a result. People forget WinXP had heaps of hardware/driver issues at the start just like Vista, although Vista gets a worse rep for it.

I remember some games around 2001 having some patches for windows XP,

I did use windows 98se on my p4 in late 2002, but it was because with my PC, with 256MB of rdram was struggling a little on Battlefield 1942 under XP and ran with a lot less stutters on windows 98, due to the OS taking less ram I guess... I remember the i850 chipset and all of the devices having very good compatibility at least.