Probably the best all around boards use the Intel Mercury chipset. I've used a few OPTi based systems, and they're pretty craptastic. I'm talking about glorified 486s. Some people seem to like the SiS503 based Socket4s as well, but I personally have never tried one.

My current OPTi Socket4 board supports dual CPUs, and it has EISA and VLB rather than PCI. I keep it around because it was crazy expensive back when new and it's just pretty hilarious to use. The memory performance is abysmal. It is a standard full length baby AT board and I had no problem mounting it into an ATX case with the appropriate adapters.

Thanks for the info and went on the hunt on the bay and amazon only to turn up nothing board wise. Will have to dangle something locally as bait and maybe get lucky.

Socket 4 in general has pretty bad memory performance. I've compared the SiS 50X chipset against the Intel Mercury 430LX and it's about the same.

The Intel Premiere PCI board should be the easiest to get hold of. I'm using that board inmy Socket 4 system (which I just made a post about in system specs)

I don't mind the performance if I can just land a working board.

Basically with Socket 4, just be happy you can FIND a board. But from what i've seen the most common board is the one that vets has in his build.