I also have a P4VXASD2+
These pull power from the 5V line on the PSU, so you -do- need a PSU with a fairly strong 5V rail (15 Amps minimum * ).
* This will depend on how well your PSU can cross-load - i.e. have more of its power drawn from the 5V rail than the 12V rail. Some can and others can't... especially moder(ish) group-regulated designs. Many ATX 2.x -compliant FPS PSU from the past decade+, for example, are horrible for 5V-heavy systems like this, as are many of the "no-name" moder(ish) ATX PSUs. So do be careful. If in doubt, post PSU manufacturer name and model or a shot of the label to possibly try to identify who made it and what to expect from it. Worst case, your system will be unstable.
1.8 GHz Willamate is actually about as power-hungry as the higher-end Northwood cores >2.6 GHz. In my case, my P4VXASD2+ came with a 1.7 GHz Willamate. When I swapped it for a 2.66 GHz Northwood, the power draw actually fell by about 5 Watts at max load and even more in idle. I now have that system running with a 2 GHz Northwood and it's even cooler - 70-ish Watts with CPU at 100% use... which is not bad at all, IMO, considering the GPU is an GF FX5600.
Your RIVA TNT2's power consumption should be in the order of 5-7 Watts or less, so it will pale in comparison to the CPU power usage.
BTW, another thing worth noting about the P4VXASD2+ is that it may have developed bad caps at this point, so keep an eye of for those too.
Miraculously, all of the caps on mine board are still OK (OST RLX around the CPU and green G-Luxon + G-Luxon SM for the small caps elsewhere around the board), though I did replace quite a few of them preemptively.
Oh, and you get USB 2.0 on the 2 rear ports under the P/S2 ports. Just thought I'd mention it, in case you didn't see that in the manual/info. 😉
May not be able to get USB 2.0 to work with everything, though. Even under XP SP2 (what I'm running on that PC), IME only about half the time my flash drives will work at 2.0 speeds. "VIA doing VIA things" mentioned above sounds about right. 🤣
Also, not sure how the onboard audio will turn out on yours, but on mine, I can hear when the system is "thinking" through the line out jack 😀 (both when loading from the HDD or if the CPU is doing something.) In short: very noisy audio. But I imagine that probably won't matter for you if you plan to have your 98 build use some kind of discrete SB-compatible sound card.
Repo Man11 wrote on 2026-03-23, 18:14:
Worst case, you could go for a CPU upgrade and/or DDR memory with the ECS board to close the gap.
A CPU upgrade (to a Northwood core) is a must for these boards, IMO. The CPU VRM runs rather hot, as it's a single-sided 2-phase buck controller (controlled by a TL494/DBL494 PWM), so a lower-end Northwood should lessen the heat output a little in that area. Again, I had a 2.66 GHz in mine, and while that was still a slight upgrade in the power efficiency over the Willamate, I ended up swapping it with a 2 GHz, just so that the whole board would run cooler (and it does!)
And yeah, I see no reason to not use DDR in this board, unless SDRAM is all you have on your hands. In my case, I cobbled-up this system together back in the late 2000's just to have some kind of a gaming system separate from my hoard of P3/Athlon/Duron systems I used for school back then. It wasn't glorious at all, but still a slight step-up from my previous "gaming" PC. And was built with all kinds of hand-me-down / scrap parts I had available at the time. The GPU (FX 5600) was something I found on Craigslist locally for $5. The HDD was a 40 GB Seagate Barracuda ATA IV with bad sectors from an NGO I volunteered at. The CPU: 2.66 GHz P4 $5 refurb special from Microcenter (back when they still used to sell old, used system parts - I really miss those days about MC!). And the RAM was a stick of Corsair 1 GB PC3200 that I don't even remember where I got it from... but it would not run at full spec speed on most systems or even PC2700 spec. At PC2100 spec (133 MHz / 266 MHz DDR), it was absolutely fine, though... which is all the better, as that allowed for 1:1 ratio with the CPU.
Despite all of these crappy parts, I've never had this system skip a beat.
So my overall impression of the P4VXASD2+: it's pretty stable, if nothing else.
Actually on that note, my P4VXASD2+ came as a whole system (case + PSU +mobo... all other parts removed). What's interesting about it is that the PSU it came with was an utter guttless wonder with only a 15 Amp rectifier on the 5V rail and 2x 470 uF caps filtering this output. And worse, the 3.3V rail was non-regulated, and 5VSB was starting to sag badly due to failing caps. How the motherboard actually survived on that PSU is beyond my understanding. But I imagine that's probably why it was thrown out. I put one of my recapped PSUs in it, and off it went like it's never been used before.
