asus p4c800 is a good one, but there can also be other choices.

The Intel 865 chipset seems to be really popular and very good. I like some of the later VIA chipsets for 478/775 as well. The Asus P4c800 as noshutdown suggested is a good one, but often expensive if you dont stumble across one. Honestly if you can find a good 478 OEM for free I would start there. The Dell Dimension 4600 is a great candidate for a P4 98/XP machine for example.

The Intel D865GLC is great for everything but overclocking. Fast, stable, reliable, and has features that weren't common at the time (fan control for case fans!).

Makes for a nice compact µATX build. There are full sized variants too.

Is the as rock P4i65G good? Also is it possible to install win98 directly on a sata HDD? or just use a sata-to-IDE bridge. And I am also interested with Enable48bitLBA since I don't want to waste the 900 something GB since I may be using a 1TB hard drive.

I used an Asrock 865 chipset board for my Pentium 4 Windows 98 SE video. It worked great, and yes, the SATA ports worked with the HDD. For the ODD I'd stick to an IDE drive because of the CD Audio support.

As for what board, I don't think it matters much. Do check the capacitors though, that can be a bit of an issue. 865 chipset board I own include boards from Intel, MSI, Asrock, Abit and AOpen. They all work great. The socket 478 is actually extremely stable and reliable. A real joy to work with.

Go with a lower clocked Northwood core, they run a bit cooler than the previous Willamette.

Intel 865PE (and 865G if you prefer onboard graphics) boards are rock solid and goes forever, as far as I'm concerned. Full official and still available online driver/manual support for Windows 98 is also a plus (at least for me).

I have Intel D875PBZ and it works great with 98SE. It has Intel CSA GbE, which I wanted to have. Some revisions support Prescott and P4EE. It is basically the same chipset as 865.

It is possible to use SATA but you can't use enhanced mode on the storage controller. It has a legacy / compatibility mode for Win9x. It does incur some restrictions on available pata/sata channels.

I use a an intel d850emv2 rdram based board and it has native win98 drivers. Of course, no sata but it has usb 2. Very fast and stable, easy to set up.

Problem now is a vid card. Will a Voodoo5 5500 AGP OR PCI work? If not what is the fastest yet compatible card? But if I use a voodoo2 in SLI, can I pass through the onboard graphics of the P4i65g?

Voodoo 5 AGP cards are 3.3v (AGP 2x) so no go on 865. PCI would be fine. You can run any AGP 4-8x cards. Geforce 6800 and Radeon X800 have 98 drivers. I'd lean towards Geforce instead of Radeon for games prior to D3D7.

Voodoo2 and onboard video should be fine.

With the V5 AGP version, it won't work to most modern motherboards since they do not deliver 3.3V and/or they have mechanical incompatibility.

For example, when you look at AGP slot of Asus P4P800, the slot is incompatible. PCI versions of Voodoo should then your solution. Or go with GeForce...

comteck123 wrote:

Problem now is a vid card. Will a Voodoo5 5500 AGP OR PCI work? If not what is the fastest yet compatible card? But if I use a voodoo2 in SLI, can I pass through the onboard graphics of the P4i65g?

What is the goal of this machine?

For a stock standard V5, just go with a Pentium III. a 1 GHz CPU is all it takes to saturate that card.

There are so many more cards to choose from that are also much faster that are worth considering. But yea it all depends what the plan is.

The V4 could be an option as they will work in newer AGP slots.

Best 478 win98 board is whatever works. There is no "best" board. My favorites are the Abit IS7 and AI7.

Does anyone know a 865/875 motherboard with Socket 775 that makes use of the Intel Gigabit NIC (CSA connected)? I've found many with Socket 478, but can't find anything with 775.

FWIW I will be doing a s478 build on a i848P chipset soon. Why the obscure 848 chipset? Well it's essentially the same as the 865PE but with only one DDR channel instead of 2 (thus supports only half the memory). But I found a motherboard with this chipset that has a SB-link header. 😀

I'd agree with just trying to get a working s478 motherboard which is able to run well as soon as you get it (no leaking caps).

OEM should work well too. I used an Intel board with this chipset and even though it basically has no overclocking features, it ran pretty well and was easy to setup with XP at least.

ODwilly wrote:

The Intel 865 chipset seems to be really popular and very good. I like some of the later VIA chipsets for 478/775 as well. The Asus P4c800 as noshutdown suggested is a good one, but often expensive if you dont stumble across one. Honestly if you can find a good 478 OEM for free I would start there. The Dell Dimension 4600 is a great candidate for a P4 98/XP machine for example.

I wouldn't know if a Dell is such a great start, as they tended to use proprietary parts. Standard ATX is better when it comes to doing repairs and replacements.

If he can get a complete and working Dell P4 locally for cheap, then this would be a nice start, but I found those systems rather limited (didn't like the case and other non-standard equipment).