I'd take the first board if I were you simply because it's easy to deal with.... old P4 chips are cheap and as long as you don't need more than a gig of ram, the DDR1 RAM is cheap also.... the only downside is it's "slow", and DDR1

I'm just chewing the fat, not really intending to buy either of them but I agree the 865 one looks more useful/usable for retro games purposes. The price is a bit steep for me as a not-quite-a-spare for my P4 box - it doesn't quite have the same functionality as the board I'm using.

I figure these Industrial boards are only useful for a Windows plus DOS retro gaming combined machine. As far as DOS is conserned a 500MHz@100FSB Pentium is top notch. Actually quite a few DOS games prefer 200MHz or less. DOS sound needs ISA, but for windows one doesn't need the ISA slots as they only slow you down.

gerwin wrote:

As far as DOS is conserned a 500MHz@100FSB Pentium is top notch.

Are you absolutely sure? I'm very interested in the "frame rate appearance" of old DOS games on very fast machines. In this Vogons thread, Prophase_j said:

prophase_j wrote:

I do remember with the dos version [of Jane's ATF], a voodoo5 and my Athlon XP running at 11.5x100 I could get about 50fps at 1024x768.

Personally speaking, in order to get buttery smooth framerates, I would prefer to have a framerate greater than 50 FPS. 😉

ratfink wrote:

The price is a bit steep for me as a not-quite-a-spare for my P4 box - it doesn't quite have the same functionality as the board I'm using.

Please can you explain the difference in functionality between the first ebay board you linked to in your o.p. above, and the Phoenix industrial mobo you are currently using? Thanks.

On my board you can select dma type as LPC or PC/PCI, the latter is what you need for sound in dos. On the 865 board the LPC element on the board is not connected to the PCI/ISA bus or whatever so you don't need to worry about LPC. Doesn't matter either way but I think it shows how these industrial boards can vary quite a lot in their internals.

What I really like about my board is that you can change the multiplier if you have an engineering sample cpu [this is specifically mentioned in the manual]. From what I can see you can't do this on the 865 board - you can possibly change the fsb but it's not clear from the manual whether that just means selecting 533 or 800, or whether there is flexibility around that.

It was important to me to be able to slow the system as I wanted it to replace a k6/3 box but extend the high-end capabilities a bit, so the p4gax meets my needs better than the 865 would.

retro games 100 wrote:

Are you absolutely sure? I'm very interested in the "frame rate appearance" of old DOS games on very fast machines. In this Vogo […]
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gerwin wrote:

As far as DOS is conserned a 500MHz@100FSB Pentium is top notch.

Are you absolutely sure? I'm very interested in the "frame rate appearance" of old DOS games on very fast machines. In this Vogons thread, Prophase_j said:

prophase_j wrote:

I do remember with the dos version [of Jane's ATF], a voodoo5 and my Athlon XP running at 11.5x100 I could get about 50fps at 1024x768.

Personally speaking, in order to get buttery smooth framerates, I would prefer to have a framerate greater than 50 FPS. 😉

I am usually satisfied with anything consistently at 30FPS or above. I have a DOS Pentium which I can easily set to 400MHz/133FSB with MTRR LFB enabled. At that setting I can play games like Quake, Screamer and System Shock at 640x480 fine. My conclusion from the PC Player benchmarks we did earlier was that 640x480 games love MTRR LFB and a fast FSB.
Though I also have Jane's ATF on there, and you sure pointed out a demanding game. At 640x480 with all textures enabled: 20 FPS. With Ground/Sky/Ocean textures disabled: 70 FPS. With Sky/Ocean textures disabled: 37 FPS. It seems very inefficient. Fortunately there is Jane's Fighters Anthology for windows.