Win98SE P4 Mobo 4GB Ram

[aoresteen]

I am looking for a P4 motherboard that runs Win98SE and will support 4GB Ram. It also needs to have 4 PCI slots & an ISA slot.

I currently have a Slot 1 P3 800mz mobo running Win98SE with 1 GB ram.

I use it in my recording studio to manage vintage MIDI synths & samplers that have no Win2k or Win XP drivers.

Any sugestions? Thanks!

Please note that VM will not work as the samplers are SCSI based and one midi device has a proprity ISA adapter.

 

[ThomasLeong]

I googled for 'motherboard with ISA slot' and there are a few hits, eg.
http://www.nixsys.com/motherboards.html
or ones fro Ebay.

For P4, you would want an LGA775 socket, with onboard graphics and/or one PCIe slot for graphics.
Be aware that some have an AGP graphics slot and you would then need a graphics card with an AGP interface (not easy to find...but I have 4-6 units previously used in my old Shuttles). PCIe graphics cards are still current, therefore more easily available.

 

[Calvin7]

ISA support was dropped by Intel in i810 Chipset.
http://www.flaterco.com/kb/ISA_chipsets.html

 

[BFG-9000]

There are plenty of industrial boards with ISA slots in S478 or LGA775 with just about any Intel chipset you could want. I would suggest i875 or i865 as they were the last chipsets to fully support 9x.

The issue is if the PCI to ISA bridge chip on these will cause any latency issues for your audio application where DPC latency is critical. They are after all intended for use with low bitrate industrial control boards.

I've also had very poor luck with too much RAM in Win9x--even if you solve all of the problems with it (this patch works great!), 9x just doesn't seem to use it all anyway.

The problem with >2.1GHz processors also doesn't have a completely satisfactory fix. If you can't use a P4 faster than that, then a PIII-s at 1.4GHz would actually be faster.

 

[ragnar-gd]

Such boards exist, go to ebay.co.uk, and search for "motherboard ISA", i.e.:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/845GL-ISA-Motherboard-P4-2-8G-CPU-512M-X-2-1G-Memory-/262404265716?hash=item3d188356f4:g:kyoAAOxy47ZRyIlc
---
W98SE does not support more than 1.5 GB of Ram natively, 1GB being more on the safe side.
You can get a commercial patch (about $20) to extend the available memory to 3.5 GB (BFG-9000 provided the link), the patch works, but if i were you, I'd stay with 1GB, as not only do you have to spend more money on it, there are not many programs on W98SE that can make use of it (as W98SE was never written for that, so wasn't any software), and the memory gained for RAM is taken from swap-space. RAM + Swapfile = MAX 3.5 GB (- Graphics RAM), the patch won't change that.
Some remark here about the CPU > 2.1GHz is misleading, such a problem exists for W95, and (to some smaller extent) for W98FE, but nor for W98SE. Ask the person who wrote the RAM-fix...
All PCs i run with W98SE have 4GHz, i.e. AMD FX 8350@4GHz stock, AMD FX 4320@4GHz stock, going to 4.2 GHz on boost, and the only consequence for me is, that they are fast... :-D
Sidenote: W98SE tolerates multi-core CPUs, but neither does it recognize nor use more than one core.

 

[aoresteen]

I googled for 'motherboard with ISA slot' and there are a few hits, eg.
http://www.nixsys.com/motherboards.html
or ones fro Ebay.

For P4, you would want an LGA775 socket, with onboard graphics and/or one PCIe slot for graphics.
Be aware that some have an AGP graphics slot and you would then need a graphics card with an AGP interface (not easy to find...but I have 4-6 units previously used in my old Shuttles). PCIe graphics cards are still current, therefore more easily available.

Thanks! I'll look at it. I have plenty of AGP cards floating around here - and ISA, PCI, & PCIe 16x that I have accumulated over the years. And all the AGP cards have WIn98 drivers .

 

[aoresteen]

.....

The issue is if the PCI to ISA bridge chip on these will cause any latency issues for your audio application where DPC latency is critical. They are after all intended for use with low bitrate industrial control boards. .

I misspoke a bit. The ISA slot is used to program SRAM & linear ram PCMCIA cards for some of the MIDI sound modules. As PCMCIA readers developed they dropped 12v support in the latter years. The ISA slot based PCMCIA reader has 12V support & that's why I have it. It's never used in recording for exactly the reasons you stated.

 

[aoresteen]

So far I have tried a couple of motherboards. I dropped the need for the ISA slot by using an old Compaq 90's laptop that the PCMCIA has 12V support. I have been using a 478 P4 and a 775 P4 both seem to work well. There is little difference between 2GB RAM and 4 GB RAM for the apps that I am using. I do use R. Lowe's Mem Patch for 4 GB RAM (rock solid).

I found that the best way to install Win98SE is to put 256MB RAM on the board, load all drivers, then the apps are loaded. Lastly I apply R Lowe's RAM Patch. Once everything is running I bump the RAM to 2GB or 4 GB.

I recently bought an ASUS P5LD2 ATX mobo 775 socket that I will be testing & then make a final decision. Thanks all!