"New" motherboards

[Jlo555]

Does anyone have any sugestions on relatively good motherboards with socket A for AMD Athlon XP, DDR400, SATA150 and driver support on Windows 98SE fully? I've found several motherboards with these features, but a lot of them lack good support for 98se. I had a Gigabyte one but it's proved to be unstable on a lot of OS's, especially windows 98.

[ssmokee]

For 98se compatibility I think you might want to go with an SiS of VIA chipset. From what Ive read (no hands on experience mind you) nvidia's 98se drivers leave much to be desired. SiS makes a very capable chipset, but motherboard manufacturers tend to keep them relegated to budget boards for some reason. VIA's native S-ATA controller in the 8237 southbridge also has problems with S-ATA II devices, so all isnt rosey in their camp either.

[newsposter]

www.abit-usa.com

Find the mobo you want then look at newegg.com or techbargains.com for prices.

froogle.com is a good place to start shopping too.

Edited August 30, 2005 by newsposter

[eidenk]

Abit NF7-S is very stable and cheap. That's what I have got. Weak point is the mobo fan.

http://www.directron.com/nf7s.html

http://www.dealtime.com/xGS-abit_nf7_s_motherboard

[Jlo555]

Yeah, the Abit NF7-S V2 is what I've been looking at now. I think that one may be a winner after reading some of the 98se compatibility reviews on newegg. I just hope it doesn't arrive DOA; that seems to be a recurring problem when I build computers.

[Eck]

You'd be okay with a SATA 150 drive on the VIA boards. That's SATA 1. Even SATA 2 can be used with the VIA 8237 Southbridge, but you would need to set the jumper on the drive to the SATA 1 speed.

The Asus A7V880 I have ran Windows 98 fine, but did not allow me to play with Ms-Dos Mode stuff like emm386 or expanded memory while using a SATA HD. No dos memory management stuff in Autoexec or Config.sys either. The system wouldn't boot if I added the standard calls to himem.sys, etc. 98 ran fine though. Just no dos mode for my old stuff.

With a regular ATA HD, the dos functionality is restored, however this board does not let the SoundBlaster Live's dos mode driver function. It doesn't support the non-maskable interrupts that the Live dos driver requires.

I don't have a board with an Nvidia chipset so I can't share any dos-mode experiences on those.

I will tell you that the A7V880 has been stable for me on XP or 98SE. And that's with using a Maxtor 250GB SATA HD. Of course, I used Partition Magic to show 98 just 120GB. I made that Fat32, and the rest a big NTFS second primary partition that I installed XP on. I then used BootMagic to choose which OS I wanted to boot with.

I now just run XP on that board, as without the dos stuff I find 98 incomplete! I just use the latest Dosbox with the compiled CVS build and vdmsound for my dos thrills.

If you get a board with the Marvell ethernet chip, do not let Windows Update install its driver for it! Download it directly from Marvell's website. Although normally the Windows Update Marvell driver is safe, the latest one was pulled by Marvell after folks found it was causing Windows XP to freeze. For me, it was doing that, and one time the freeze corrupted my boot sector and I needed to use Recovery Console and run FIXMBR and FIXBOOT to access my hard drive again! Luckily, chkdsk showed no errors and everything else was untouched. On 98, you won't have that choice since the Marvell update is only on XP's Windows Update.

Of course I had no idea it was the ethernet driver at first and thought my board was shot somehow. I went so far as to unhook everything, turn the board over, push out the Northbridge heatsink, clean off the cheap little circle of conductive paste Asus put on there and placed a thin layer of Arctic Silver 5 on the heatsink. After rehooking everything I was still freezing, so I checked the pcper forum and the Asus official forum and found 2 references to the Windows Update Marvell driver.

Heh, well I've got a better cooled chipset now anyway!

[Jlo555]

Yeah, that's what I like to call the tedious part of building a computer. I was putting my old PII in a new case about 2 years ago (don't ask why), and everything work ok, except for the floppy disk drive. It's always the FDD!! It kept showing errors in the BIOS, like "floppy disk failure". So, I changed around the FDD cables about 10-20 times, until I got it running. About a year later, I put that FDD in a newer computer, and it shorted out when I turned the computer on. Smoke was chuggin' out the front disk slot of the drive, so I ripped out the drive and literally tossed it in the garbage can, out of rage.

Thanks for the suggestions on the motherboards; I think I'll stick with the Abit one. I did check out the motherboards with the SiS chipest. The highest priced one I found was $45. Somehow, I just don't trust something that cost that low to run my system, although the Foxconn one's I read about did get pretty good reviews. I'm trying to avoid the VIA chipset for now, because that's what my Gigabyte motherboard had. I prefer to try something new every once in a while.

[Jlo555]

Well, I finally got the Abit NF7-S v2 and put my computer back together. I reformatted and installed 98SE and all the drivers. Anyway, there is one major annoying issue. Random crashes every so often. I'm pretty sure it's the nForce 2 chipset drivers that are causing it because I've heard other people talk about how they were a bit "flaky." The motherboard seems pretty good though. I am debating on whether or not I'll just stick win2000pro on this computer and just leave 98SE on my other desktop. :Sigh: Oh well, 98SE runs better on my other computer anyway. With the service pack I can keep the computer going for days without a reboot, although I don't actually use it that much.