No onboard sound is more of a positive point instead of a negative one imo. I'd assume most onboard solutions from that time would be subpar, except maybe for the rare Yamaha ones...

As for the board itself, I have it too and I like it a lot 😀 same revision but mine has some different components (caps, BIOS chip, etc) compared to yours. Also one of the IDE connectors on mine is dead for whatever reason.

Yeah it has all the goodies to expand on, maybe I was kinda annoyed I didnt find a separate soundcard to test it on but yeah now that I think about it its better to have 6 PCI slots than 1 onboard sound, also if you have IDE problems try using one cable with two connectors and set your HDD with a jumper to primary master and your CD-rom drive (trust me you will need it xD) to secondary slave, or I think there are PCI cards out there with IDE connectors on them :]

Yeah I did it that way and it worked just fine 😀 but I switched to a CUBX-E which is essentially the exact same thing but with an onboard UDMA66 controller and Socket 370 instead of Slot 1 (the faster Coppermines are a lot easier to find as Socket 370 versions). It also has two ISA slots compared to just one for my P3B-F.

wow the CUBX-E looks kickass and seems to have a lot of IDE connectors and also 2 ISA 😁 there is a adapter for the slot 1 where you can put socket 370 CPUs on I think, but my god my annoyance with USB and Windows 98 SE grrrr 😁 FAT32 man I already forgot about that and the 32GB limit and how unfriendly WIn98 is about USBs, still bringing a good ol rig to run again is such joy !

98 SE and USB? No worries. Install this: http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/win9 … age-drivers.php

thanks a lot I will burn a 700 mb disc with useful files like these in case I need to reinstal fast again 😁 also Fat32 you cant access NTFS files or drives :[ I managed to format a HDD to enable dual boot from Win 98SE and Windows XP the partition for Win 98SE I formatted in 32GB Fat32 and the rest of the other partition I think 46Gb I formatted in NTFS and slapped WinXP on, and I must say the The ASUS P3B-F boots up pretty fast even Win 98 SE but its so annoying every time I am into Win 98 I have this weird feeling that something is gonna crash 🤣 dunno I didnt have that feeling with Windows Xp or Windows 7 but WIn98 is kinda jumpy on me

The reason I like this board is because of the flexibility options. It can use the whole range from the PII 233 up to the 1400mhz Tualatin. The board do have a DIP switch box, but that is just for extreme overclocking and/or people who won't use the BIOS. You can change everything in the BIOS which for me is quite handy. If you look closely on the PCB you can see there are room for two ISA slots, and some boards were delivered with 2 ISA slot. It just happens yours have one. Anyway it doesn't matter much because in a system like this you preferably want more PCI slots and you just need one incase you want a soundcard for DOS games.

If you want UDMA 100/133 support and/or S-ATA, just plug in an additional PCI card. They work very well on this board. I have had no problems with my Promise TX133 IDE controller and the Silicon Image S-ATA controller. When it comes to formatting, incase you have a very large drive, it is best to format the drive in another computer using software available on the internet. You can then set it up just how you want.