Looks like a great build for 99. I'll admit that I envy that mx300.

So some news on this, the original Soyo board I had bought on ebay turned into a mess. The seller never sent it out and abandoned his ebay account as far as I can tell, he never accepted my paypal payment and I am 99.9% sure that I saw it relisted as a $30 buy it now later under a new account. Same inaccurate add for a SlotA motherboard that was really a Slot1 board and everything. Cancelled the payment, ended up digging up a 1998 Gigabyte BX motherboard. Well after doing some minor repairs to a bad cap it became even MORE unstable and It now freezes in the bios or halfway through POST. I give up, having a stack of 10 slot1 cpu's and not a single good motherboard is slightly annoying. Athlon xp 3dfx madness 98se time? YEP!

ODwilly wrote:

So some news on this, the original Soyo board I had bought on ebay turned into a mess. The seller never sent it out and abandoned his ebay account as far as I can tell, he never accepted my paypal payment and I am 99.9% sure that I saw it relisted as a $30 buy it now later under a new account. Same inaccurate add for a SlotA motherboard that was really a Slot1 board and everything. Cancelled the payment, ended up digging up a 1998 Gigabyte BX motherboard. Well after doing some minor repairs to a bad cap it became even MORE unstable and It now freezes in the bios or halfway through POST. I give up, having a stack of 10 slot1 cpu's and not a single good motherboard is slightly annoying. Athlon xp 3dfx madness 98se time? YEP!

Not that I have any real love for Slot 1, but there's that seller that's got stacks of 440BX and BX2s for $20-$30 on ebay/amazon that you might consider if you want to keep the CPUs. But recognize that while I'm saying this, I also have a Pentium 4 for my Windows 98 machine. It's correct for '01 at least. 🤣

AthlonXP isn't a bad choice if you find a board in good condition, and don't mind the increased power consumption and potential for heat/noise. I had a few of them back in the day - they made nice gaming machines until the lack of SSE2+ and overall performance became a problem (around 2006). 😀

No love for slot 1? Slot 1 was probably the last platform I gave a damn about. Nothing after that has had any character.
The move from slot 1 to a socket was a real mess. First you had the Mendocino socket 370, then the coppermine socket 370 and then the tualatin 370, none of which were compatible without an adapter or modification.

I thought that 1999 was the year of cheap SDRAM? I remember buying 128MB for next to nothing (compared to what it had been previously) in July for around $100, and I was considering upgrading to 256, but didn't really need it so put it towards a V3-3000 instead.

In general I found boards from this era, including P4 stuff, much more fragile than 386 or 486 gear. I am very picky and with slot 1 stick with AOpen. I got three AOpen slot 1 boards now and they all work. Following my Time Machine concept (going with something newer and slowing it down) I skip all the Socket 754/939/775 PCIe era and go with a modern Socket 1150. You can disable cores and lower the multiplier to 1600 MHz and such a machine is top notch reliable and a joy to work with. Old cards like a 7800 GTX for compatibility for example for games like Pandora Tomorrow.

I lost money on cheap motherboards but shipping. Most are just mass stock shifted by recyclers who pass on the testing to you the end consumer. Refund policy is useless if half the boards are DOA and you lost $20 shipping each time.

I got two decent S478 Asrock P4i65G with Intel 865 chipset and they are ok but otherwise I'm hesitant to get more boards.

Ya, I might end up selling my horde of Slot 1 stuff for cheap at some point, I love it but I like the original Pentiums better. Only have so much space and after spending $30 total for a NIB Athlon xp and used but complete Abit kx7-333r (last purchase for a good long while) the Athlon just looks so tempting. AGP 2x support for that pesky picky Voodoo3, 4 usb 2.0 ports total that 98se picked up right away, 6 pci slots and a HP raid controller. In the process of finishing that system up and it shall find it's way to a photo shoot 😉