Hmm G41 chipset would make a very fast Win98SE. The USB 2.0/1.1 would work fine under 98se and depending on the Realtek chip there are drivers...
Other good i865 are MSI 865PE series but very high $$$ like all i865 boards lately...you might want to consider a MSI P6N-SLI (have seen them very reasonable) and they will work under Win98SE irrc...

Horun wrote on 2023-08-27, 00:42:

Other good i865 are MSI 865PE series but very high $$$ like all i865 boards lately...you might want to consider a MSI P6N-SLI (have seen them very reasonable) and they will work under Win98SE irrc...

MSI's web site for the P6N-SLI has a big note saying "MSI Reminds you...
1. NVIDIA nForce Series boards DO NOT support Windows® 98/ME"

Now, how true that is, I don't know, but I had gotten the impression that the AMD nForces, several years earlier, were trouble in 98SE already...

In terms of cheap boards, I did find some Asus board running some weird VIA chipset. I admit that I didn't even remember from back in the day that VIA had a chipset for the late-LGA775 Intel platform.

IMHO Gigabyte GA-G41M-ES2H was way too new for Win9x: it was released just six months earlier than Win7 and was designed with XP and Vista in mind.

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-26, 14:43:

In an ideal world, I'd probably get an Asrock 775i65g, but those no longer seem to exist. i865/ICH5 AGP/DDR1 boards with, ideally, support for 45nm processors (I have both a Q8300 and an E5200 sitting around) but even 65nm are... again, rather hard to find.

IIRC no motherboard that supports 45 nm CPU supports Win9x officially; this applies to corresponding PCIe graphics card as well. Not to mention that you have to limit DDR2 to 512 MB or less unless you patch your Win98SE.

Believe it or not, the only two 65 nm CPU I've got (Core 2 Duo E6300 and Athlon 64 X2 5000+) and their respective motherboards (Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 and MSI K9A2 Platinum) were literally picked up at roadside. Both were designed much earlier (2006 and 2007, respectively) than GA-G41M-ES2H (2009) with no Win9x support. Unless you really want a matching motherboard for your Q8300 and E5200.

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-26, 14:43:

I would really rather avoid going 90nm Pentium 4/Ds (although I did impulsively buy a very cheap 945 on eBay last week).

I'd avoid NetBurst as well. Have you considered Socket 754 or 939? They are inexpensive (with the exception of flagship models of 939) and not too difficult to find; you can build a highly capable Win98SE system around one.

Good points and yes the Nforce4 chipset did not officially support Win9x/ME except you could make it run well with a few tweaks on it (like you can with Z370 and Windows 7).

dormcat wrote on 2023-08-27, 01:59:

IIRC no motherboard that supports 45 nm CPU supports Win9x officially; this applies to corresponding PCIe graphics card as well. Not to mention that you have to limit DDR2 to 512 MB or less unless you patch your Win98SE.

Does that include the Asrock boards?

dormcat wrote on 2023-08-27, 01:59:

Believe it or not, the only two 65 nm CPU I've got (Core 2 Duo E6300 and Athlon 64 X2 5000+) and their respective motherboards (Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 and MSI K9A2 Platinum) were literally picked up at roadside. Both were designed much earlier (2006 and 2007, respectively) than GA-G41M-ES2H (2009) with no Win9x support. Unless you really want a matching motherboard for your Q8300 and E5200.

I guess I was hoping that the odd combination of a later north bridge and an earlier south bridge (ICH7 is from... what? 200...5? Did it come out with the last hotburst i945s?) would be somewhat promising, but I guess there's also the BIOS and other things to think about.

And I don't know to what extent I really care about the E5200 or the Q8300 - really, the Q8300 sat in a motherboard in a case in the closet for 7 years, then this forum inspired me to take that system out of the closet and turn it into an XP system and... well.. let's just say a Q9650 on eBay was hard to resist 😀 And I don't hugely care about the Pentium D 945 I just bought for very cheap either...

That being said, I do absolutely love the 45nm LGA 775 platform. At one point in time, I had multiple 45nm LGA 775 systems, my family members all had 45nm LGA 775 systems, etc.

dormcat wrote on 2023-08-27, 01:59:

I'd avoid NetBurst as well. Have you considered Socket 754 or 939? They are inexpensive (with the exception of flagship models of 939) and not too difficult to find; you can build a highly capable Win98SE system around one.

That's an interesting thought. I've pretty much been an Intel fanboy since 2000 (had some lousy non-Intel systems before then), so I admit the idea of a VIA chipset AMD system is... a radical one. And I think it means reusing zero spare hardware lying around - really, at that point, you want to be on the lookout for someone who still somehow had a full system trying to get rid of it. Probably much cheaper than trying to find individual parts... not to mention... how hard to find would, say, a socket 754 cooler be? LGA 775 coolers are... much more challenging to find than they used to be..., and there were a lot of LGA775 systems sold into the early 2010s. But I'm not necessarily against it if something interesting pops up. I will take a look to see...

Maybe I'll just keep the eBay alert on the Asrock board, try to get my hands on an Audigy 2 ZS (no disagreements that that is a wise acquisition for a future 98 SE project?), and park this project for a while.

(Oh, how I have suddenly been regretting that I ewasted my Dell XPS T700r a decade ago. Obviously much slower than anything we're talking about here, but that machine originally came with 98 SE, outgrew it in less than six months, but would have done quite well as a retro 98 SE machine with perhaps the right GPU.)

I tried to install Windows 98 on various Intel PCIe platforms. I had perfect success with a very similar Gigabyte model, so I do suggest you give it a shot. You will required the custom INFs which you place in the Win98 CAB directory prior to installation. It was even easier than the officially supported AMD K8M890 PCIe platform. Everything just worked after the install, and device manager was fine as well, with all system devices showing as properly installed.

For GPU, I recommend something like a GeForce 6800 or similar with driver 77.72. That gives you pretty good compatibility with older games, not nearly as good as 45.23 or earlier, but far, far better than an equivalent ATI PCIe (X800 for example, because Catalyst 6.2 on Windows 98 has little or no table fog support).

Yes, PCIe for Windows98 is highly underrated.

Does "officially supported" matter to you? Windows 98 supports all of the critical chipset features (PCI bus management, bridges, clocks/timers, memory addressing, etc.) out of the box. If you plan to use supported PCI or PCIE expansion cards for video, audio, networking, or any other functions, then it will work on many newer boards.

You'll need to keep some things in mind, though.
Patches and/or drivers exist to fix memory management (greater than 1GB) and SATA/AHCI drive adapters, but you'll need to apply them at certain stages and/or order. After that, you'll have a working system. It just might take some trial and error to get to that point. Of course, that's the fun part!

fosterwj03 wrote on 2023-08-27, 16:34:

Does "officially supported" matter to you?<snip>

Yes! Officially supported was perhaps not the best choice of words. The Intel 915 and the VIA K8M890 were officially supported but they do not install properly without some tinkering.

It matters to me not to have devices with exclamation marks in system devices. On my Asus P5B (i965) I had weird delay ticks which made the system unusuable. Yes, maybe with some tinkering, it could be made to work.

A good place to start in general is to try and install Windows without ACPI. Even if your BIOS forces you to use ACPI, you can install Windows with "setup /p i" which will ignore ACPI and give you a better chance of success.

SATA port functionality is also nice to have.

fosterwj03 wrote on 2023-08-27, 16:34:

After that, you'll have a working system. It just might take some trial and error to get to that point. Of course, that's the fun part!

Maybe my idea of fun is narrower than others', but I admit that I would prefer that kind of 'fun' with hardware I already have. It's one thing to say 'gee, I wonder if this random thing I've owned for a decade and a bit can do this crazy thing that never occurred to me until now', that's fun. It's quite another thing to pay eBay prices for NOS or good-condition (random aside - why is it that most used motherboards don't seem to come with I/O shields?!) hardware without any reasonable certainty that the thing will actually accomplish the intended goal.

And I think this is why you guys have successfully scared me away from this motherboard - there's no real clarity how well it will do at 98SE, and if it doesn't do well, then... what? I have a passably competent XP system that I have no need for with the wrong motherboard and GPU that I've poured way too much money into?

And that actually leads me to a completely different question - I have had for 15 years an Asus P5QL-E. P43/ICH10R. Dug it up out of the closet a few months ago to turn it into a vintage XP and 11 dual boot system (it makes me laugh to see how well 11 runs on a machine that doesn't meet any of the insane requirements - no TPM of any sort, no 8th-gen CPU, no UEFI, no secure boot, etc.) with some modest upgrades. Obviously the GPU in there now has no 98 SE support... but... if, say, I moved that GPU to a newer XP machine (a friend of mine has a nice ivy bridge desktop I would love to buy from him...) and got one of the rare PCI-E GPUs that work with 98 SE, do I have any chance of success at 98SE with that? (There's also likely to be a NIC problem - that board has a weird Atheros chip, not a Realtek or Marvell or Intel, but who needs anything beyond sneakernet on a 98 SE system?) Probably less of a chance than with the G41/ICH7 board, but that board I paid for in 2008... and rather ironically, not adjusted for inflation, it cost me less than the Gigabyte G41 board today would. And not surprisingly, I would be a lot more willing to try this out if all I need to buy is a GPU...

I suspect I need to do a lot more reading into how 98 SE handles SATA controllers in non-AHCI compatibility modes.

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-27, 17:10:

<snip>do I have any chance of success at 98SE with that?

Yes. It's definitely worth a shot. Some things to consider:

1) Disable all superfluous devices in the BIOS before proceeding (serial ports, parallel ports, on-board audio, LAN, third-party IDE controlloers, etc) to give you the best chance of success. You can re-enable these as needed after the install to see if they interfere with anything.
2) Install the modified INFs into the Windows 98 cab directory before you run setup. If you need these, let me know I can post them here. Obviously, this necessitates that you copy the Windows 98 CD to the hard drive before installation (or that you burn a custom install CD with the INFs on it).
3) Keep the RAM size in mind. Yours is a DDR2 board. So either find some 256MB DDR2 sticks or a single 512MB DDR2 stick, or be prepared for an error after the first setup reboot if you have more than 512MB of RAM installed, which in that case will necessitate the usage of RLOEW's patchmem (press F8 after restarting after the first failed reboot, select command prompt, run patchmem)
4) Regardless of RAM size, you want to run RLOEW's PTCHSATA after the first setup reboot (read: before Windows carries on with the second part of setup in which it detects your devices). It's good to do this right after you run PATCHMEM

If you boot into Windows and you have devices with exclamation points in system devices, then judge whether you're OK with that (i.e. if the system runs properly), and if not, try installing Windows again with "setup /p i" which will force-install Windows in APM mode as opposed to ACPI mode.

If that doesn't work, try the Gigabyte board. This particular family of Gigabyte models have been known to have excellent compatbility with Win9x.

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-27, 02:31:

Does that include the Asrock boards?

Their famous 775i65G maintained the compatibility with (relatively) old 865G chipset, DDR, and AGP. ASRock has a "tradition" of designing niched, non-mainstream motherboards; other major MB manufacturers simply don't bother.

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-27, 02:31:

That being said, I do absolutely love the 45nm LGA 775 platform. At one point in time, I had multiple 45nm LGA 775 systems, my family members all had 45nm LGA 775 systems, etc.

Same here: I've got eight 45 nm CPU; four of them are LGA775 (the rest are laptops). They dominated the Core 2 era before being replaced by Core i.

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-27, 02:31:

That's an interesting thought. I've pretty much been an Intel fanboy since 2000 (had some lousy non-Intel systems before then), so I admit the idea of a VIA chipset AMD system is... a radical one. And I think it means reusing zero spare hardware lying around - really, at that point, you want to be on the lookout for someone who still somehow had a full system trying to get rid of it. Probably much cheaper than trying to find individual parts... not to mention... how hard to find would, say, a socket 754 cooler be?

I forgot to mention Socket A (462) Athlon / Athlon XP; it could handle all but the very last generation of Win9x games. The last Win9x games in my collection were Call of Duty: United Offensive and Il-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles; both were of 2004 vintage and required P3/Athlon 800 MHz minimum so any Athlon XP or Socket 754 Athlon 64 / Sempron should be able to handle most if not all Win9x games with ease, although I'd rather play those DX9 games on WinXP instead.

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-27, 02:31:

Maybe I'll just keep the eBay alert on the Asrock board, try to get my hands on an Audigy 2 ZS (no disagreements that that is a wise acquisition for a future 98 SE project?), and park this project for a while.

Guess what? I happen to have an Audigy 2 ZS sitting around 😉 , although personally I'd reserve it for XP builds; IMHO Audigy or even Live! should be fine with Win9x.

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-27, 02:31:

(Oh, how I have suddenly been regretting that I ewasted my Dell XPS T700r a decade ago. Obviously much slower than anything we're talking about here, but that machine originally came with 98 SE, outgrew it in less than six months, but would have done quite well as a retro 98 SE machine with perhaps the right GPU.)

Could this one be yours or similar to yours? Picked up by an YouTuber 9 years ago from e-waste.

While only had AGP 1.0 (2x), it did have an ISA slot, as well as Voyetra Turtle Beach 64 Voice Montego II as the default sound card. Hope you didn't recycle it together with the system......

mockingbird wrote on 2023-08-27, 17:30:

3) Keep the RAM size in mind. Yours is a DDR2 board. So either find some 256MB DDR2 sticks or a single 512MB DDR2 stick, or be prepared for an error after the first setup reboot if you have more than 512MB of RAM installed, which in that case will necessitate the usage of RLOEW's patchmem (press F8 after restarting after the first failed reboot, select command prompt, run patchmem)

Crazy thing is, I'm... pretty sure... I have 2x512 megs of DDR2 in a drawer somewhere. I ran Vista 32-bit for a little while in 2007-8 or so (on a different DDR2 board), and Vista really need more than 2GB of RAM, so I bought 2x512 to go up to 3GB. Then I decided to live dangerously and switch to 64-bit Vista, by that point DDR2 prices had plummeted, and... well, I think it's quite likely the 2x512 are still in a drawer unless I tossed them out for some reason.

(Isn't this way more fun when you have reusable parts sitting in drawers?)

mockingbird wrote on 2023-08-27, 17:30:

If that doesn't work, try the Gigabyte board. This particular family of Gigabyte models have been known to have excellent compatbility with Win9x.

Well, by that point in time (I more or less need to build a new XP system before doing this, which is not a priority unless my friend wants to sell me his ivy bridge setup next week), it's most likely that the Gigabyte board will have been sold to someone else... but hey, that's okay, maybe something better will have turned on eBay between now and then 😀

Although, hmm... I suppose... do I even need a supported GPU to figure out if the rest will work? I presume an unsupported GPU will still display 640x480...

dormcat wrote on 2023-08-27, 17:38:

I forgot to mention Socket A (462) Athlon / Athlon XP; it could handle all but the very last generation of Win9x games. The last Win9x games in my collection were Call of Duty: United Offensive and Il-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles; both were of 2004 vintage and required P3/Athlon 800 MHz minimum so any Athlon XP or Socket 754 Athlon 64 / Sempron should be able to handle most if not all Win9x games with ease, although I'd rather play those DX9 games on WinXP instead.

I've thought about socket 462 too, but doesn't that have additional complications for PSUs?

dormcat wrote on 2023-08-27, 17:38:

Guess what? I happen to have an Audigy 2 ZS sitting around 😉 , although personally I'd reserve it for XP builds; IMHO Audigy or even Live! should be fine with Win9x.

I have an X-Fi that can come back to life if I find a capacitor for it, apparently, for XP builds.

You're going to think I e-wasted way too much good stuff, but I had an Audigy Platinum Ex or whatever the model with the external drive was called on a P4/RDRAM system in late 2001 that... well, got e-wasted...

If I'm going to go out there and buy another Audigy-era card, I'd rather not buy the exact same thing I had and e-wasted. So might as well get a 2 ZS, no?

dormcat wrote on 2023-08-27, 17:38:

Could this one be yours or similar to yours? Picked up by an YouTuber 9 years ago from e-waste.

While only had AGP 1.0 (2x), it did have an ISA slot, as well as Voyetra Turtle Beach 64 Voice Montego II as the default sound card. Hope you didn't recycle it together with the system......

Mine had an SB Live Value, not a Turtle Beach card. Two optical drives, I think the original 48X CD-ROM and a combo CD-RW/DVD-ROM. ATI... 9100?... GPU, I forget, it was a GPU I had lying around from an RMA (I had a VisionTek GF3 Tisomething in a different system, but when it died, VisionTek had switched to being an ATI shop so they sent me some random ATI card and I put it in the T700r years later), etc.

I loved that system, I had it for a while, my dad had it for a while, then I had it as a secondary desktop, then it was a Win2003 server for a project for a while, but then by the early 2010s I had tons of LGA775 machines so... just didn't see the use for it anymore. 🙁

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-27, 17:10:

And I think this is why you guys have successfully scared me away from this motherboard - there's no real clarity how well it will do at 98SE, and if it doesn't do well, then... what? I have a passably competent XP system that I have no need for with the wrong motherboard and GPU that I've poured way too much money into?

I'd emphasize on stability than ultimate performance (especially if the latter requires SW/HW tweaking), particularly if the system is a first one of specific era. While tweaking is fun, I'd leave it when I've got enough time and money -- neither is in adequate supply for me. 😿

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-27, 17:10:

And that actually leads me to a completely different question - I have had for 15 years an Asus P5QL-E. P43/ICH10R. Dug it up out of the closet a few months ago to turn it into a vintage XP and 11 dual boot system (it makes me laugh to see how well 11 runs on a machine that doesn't meet any of the insane requirements - no TPM of any sort, no 8th-gen CPU, no UEFI, no secure boot, etc.) with some modest upgrades. Obviously the GPU in there now has no 98 SE support... but... if, say, I moved that GPU to a newer XP machine (a friend of mine has a nice ivy bridge desktop I would love to buy from him...) and got one of the rare PCI-E GPUs that work with 98 SE, do I have any chance of success at 98SE with that? (There's also likely to be a NIC problem - that board has a weird Atheros chip, not a Realtek or Marvell or Intel, but who needs anything beyond sneakernet on a 98 SE system?) Probably less of a chance than with the G41/ICH7 board, but that board I paid for in 2008... and rather ironically, not adjusted for inflation, it cost me less than the Gigabyte G41 board today would. And not surprisingly, I would be a lot more willing to try this out if all I need to buy is a GPU...

P43 chipset came out even slightly earlier than G41 chipset but paired with a newer southbridge (ICH10 vs. ICH7). IMHO if you want a very first Win98SE build with minimal hassle and investment, go for either an Intel with late (1 GHz or better) S370 Coppermine (Tualatin would be great but really expensive), or AMD S462/754/939 (Athlon XP/64 or Sempron) boards with VIA chipsets.

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-27, 17:54:

I've thought about socket 462 too, but doesn't that have additional complications for PSUs?

As long as 5V is sufficient. That's another reason for S754/939.

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-27, 17:54:

I've thought about socket 462 too, but doesn't that have additional complications for PSUs?

As long as there is enough amperage on the 5V rail, you should be fine.

I have an Windows 98 / Athlon XP build with a Seasonic Focus GX-1000. While a 1000W PSU is overkill, it has 25A on the 5V rail, which is why I chose it for that build.

dormcat wrote on 2023-08-27, 17:56:

IMHO if you want a very first Win98SE build with minimal hassle and investment, go for either an Intel with late (1 GHz or better) S370 Coppermine (Tualatin would be great but really expensive), or AMD S462/754/939 (Athlon XP/64 or Sempron) boards with VIA chipsets.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I am tempted to buy a Dell Dimension 4100. The S370 Coppermine successor to my much-regretted T700r slot 1 system, but the fact that it has proprietary PSU connectors makes me... nervous... especially if the goal is to put some fancy AGP GPU from 2004 in there...

That being said, those are probably a lot easier to find than a good 'enthusiast-grade' motherboard from that time. And all the matching other parts, e.g. heatsinks.

Oh well, this is a long term project. Let's just focus on acquiring some good flexible parts first... and I think that starts with an Audigy 2 ZS...

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-26, 14:43:

So... for some strange reason, I am intrigued by the idea of building a Win98 SE box. I think I've been lurking here too long.

In an ideal world, I'd probably get an Asrock 775i65g, but those no longer seem to exist. i865/ICH5 AGP/DDR1 boards with, ideally, support for 45nm processors (I have both a Q8300 and an E5200 sitting around) but even 65nm are... again, rather hard to find. I would really rather avoid going 90nm Pentium 4/Ds (although I did impulsively buy a very cheap 945 on eBay last week).
...

Some i945 motherboards do support 45nm Wolfdale CPU. What 's the model and hardware revision of yours?

Bottom line, AthlonXP should be the maximum CPU for a "slow" Win98 build (i.e. you want to run old games as well), in which case you're only going to be using DirectX7. I don't do "slow" builds with CPUs that can't be clocked down quickly and easily. And even in this case, AthlonXP is overkill, because you're not going to be using all of its performance and you're better off with a Pentium MMX system, which has far more convenient throttling options, not to mention ISA slots on 99% of its motherboards, as opposed to AthlonXP, where you're stuck with PC133 RAM if you decide to pay the premium for a model with an ISA slot, which 90% of the time will require re-capping.

If you want a fast build, the sky's the limit. Use anything you can as long as you can get it working, because you're going to be installing DirectX 9.0C which will affect compatibility with a great deal of older software titles anyways, so compatibility be darned.

Roman555 wrote on 2023-08-27, 18:23:

Some i945 motherboards do support 45nm Wolfdale CPU. What 's the model of yours?

i945 (unofficially) and i965 motherboards may support Wolfdale, but be advised that the northbridge was not designed for more than 533Mhz or 800Mhz operation, and while it may work, it runs uncomfortably hot. G31 and later don't break a sweat, even at 1600Mhz with DDR3.

mockingbird wrote on 2023-08-27, 18:25:

Roman555 wrote on 2023-08-27, 18:23:

Some i945 motherboards do support 45nm Wolfdale CPU. What 's the model of yours?

i945 (unofficially) and i965 motherboards may support Wolfdale, but be advised that the northbridge was not designed for more than 533Mhz or 800Mhz operation, and while it may work, it runs uncomfortably hot. G31 and later don't break a sweat, even at 1600Mhz with DDR3.

Agree. For those i945 ones it's better to find C2D E7x00 or Pentium E