this is a rather rare industrial board and they ain't really selling it that dirt cheap, instead they know those who are really in need of it would pay a very high price. when they claim a price that low they are actually telling you to talk to them about the real price that they want, and to my experience i guess it would be well over $100 USD or even more.
besides, one line of red message below says: "no stock for sale at this moment".

noshutdown wrote:

this is a rather rare industrial board and they ain't really selling it that dirt cheap, instead they know those who are really in need of it would pay a very high price. when they claim a price that low they are actually telling you to talk to them about the real price that they want, and to my experience i guess it would be well over $100 USD or even more.
besides, one line of red message below says: "no stock for sale at this moment".

I see. Thats pretty unfortunate then. guess ill still to making a seperate dos machine. Maybe ill delve into 486

Unless you really need more speed, I'd look at Pentium 3s. They commonly have ISA slots which were still intended for mainstream consumer use (including legacy sound cards) and didn't rely on 3rd party bridges. A P3 should still be very fast for anything from the 90s, but it depends how late of games you want it to be able to run well.
The fastest Pentium 3 boards would be those that support Tualatin processors, those don't always have ISA but a fair number of them have 1 ISA slot. 2 ISA with a Tualatin would be uncommon. If you want multiple ISAs then you'd probably need to step back to Coppermine boards for them to be easy to find.

If you have a separate build for games that run on XP then I think a P3 Coppermine would be plenty fast for anything in the DOS-Win9x range. But if you want this machine to stretch from DOS all the way into the XP years then it would be a tough range to cover.
Since the P3 is where mainstream, well supported ISA slots reached their end, I think it's a good target for a high powered DOS capable build. Note that the P3 is not ideal however for slowing down to run very old speed sensitive games. If that's a primary concern then socket 7 is better for that.

As a compromise, P3 Coppermine boards with the Slot-1 CPU type make it relatively easy to swap CPUs down to a low end P2 when needed. If the BIOS allows it then some earlier P2s can be clocked down to a 2x multiplier which can give you a 133MHz CPU. But when it comes to disabling caches to reach down into 386-486 speeds, socket-7 boards are more flexible in that regard. Some slot-1 boards will allow disabling cache, but I don't think they differentiate between L1 and L2.

It's an 865-based board, so you should be fine on the ISA front. As I understand, the 8xx Intel chipsets were the last ones to have full-fledged native ISA, and 865 and 875 both have the nice perk of supporting 800 MHz FSB, and in turn the fastest Socket 478 Pentium 4s.

It's just that you don't get P4 boards with ISA outside of expensive, niche industrial boards. That goes double for the 865/875 chipset ones that still retain the AGP slot.

If the P4 runs way too fast, there's always Throttle, which tells the chipset to underclock the CPU at the hardware level.
http://www.oldskool.org/pc/throttle/DOS/

shamino wrote:

If you have a separate build for games that run on XP then I think a P3 Coppermine would be plenty fast for anything in the DOS-Win9x range. But if you want this machine to stretch from DOS all the way into the XP years then it would be a tough range to cover.

I don't think it's all that tough of a range to cover, so long as you don't need too many ISA slots for very specific hardware like sound cards (and I mean really specific stuff like SB16/AWE32 with the ASP/CSP) or Forte VFX1 VIP boards that you can't just emulate in DOSBox.

I tend to resort to DOSBox for the oldest of DOS titles, however - especially the speed-sensitive stuff. My own 98/XP setup is built with mid/late 1990s DOS titles in mind, particularly Build engine games that tank hard at higher resolutions if you don't have a ludicrously fast CPU.

Thanks for the info so far guys, extremely detailed. Don't really get that these days.

Since it seems theres a lot of complexities to get a dos-xp range pc I think I will go with mkaing two machines. One for 98/xp with two drives and selecting one at boot. And then a 486 machine. 486 is before my time of using pcs so Im actually pretty interested in it and VLB.

I went ahead with a 4coredual asrock mobo. While the offical page doesnt have 98 drives, the chipsets and hardware found on the board has official drivers elsewhere.

I once considered paying for those such 865 industrial board but I did read some review that they are not so great to use an ISA GUS/sbAWE32 card while using an agp8x 3d cards. I think they may be more suited to run an external control cards on the isa slot or slow stuff like that. Anyway I am sure an ati x1980 agp8x on dos/win98 is no good as an guspnp/sbawe32 arent best cards for winxp.