Are Pentium 4 Boards with ISA slots worth it?

I bought this Pentium 4 motherboard with ISA slots! Will it be compatible with ISA sound cards and is it worth considering?

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[DropDeadFrederick]

Besides games, boards like that are great for industrial purposes. You'd be shocked at how many vintage systems are still in use daily on manufacturing floors.

I have a few systems where I work that still use ISA cards (I'm 100% serious about this). One of the systems uses ISA cards for a vision system that controls a precision adhesive applicator.

Besides the ISA slots that parallel port is very useful too. I have another AOI (automated optical inspection) system that communicates with the vision and motion control system. You can't try to use something like a parallel to USB adapter since the software does some strange things like try to control specific data lines on the parallel port so a USB adapter is a complete non-starter.

[casualretrocollector]

I had excellent luck with one. Found one in a charity shop for about 15 euro. The end result was a 2.4 ghz p4 with an ati Radeon 9000 along with an Isa sound blaster 64 gold. Simply in heaven I was :)

[dennisp.]

The AGP slot is likely running as a PCI slot, as AGP is a subset of PCI. I'd be careful of the voltages on it too!

[saxxonpike]

I have both the 3-port ATX and 1-port mATX variants, used them for a couple years. The AGP slot is a trap! The integrated GPU is actually surprisingly capable for games through 1999 and looks great in DOS, so I don't bother with adding graphics cards to these. With onboard LAN and sound card disabled, this is actually a quite good (if not odd) platform for retro gaming. But definitely not suitable as a Pentium 4 "retro rocket" platform. Also, I never did get the USB 2.0 drivers working, for some reason.

[thej]

you have the coolest hobby. I wish I could afford to play around with old hardware from when i was younger. this is the next best thing, I guess.

[unimportant]

AGP is a superset of PCI, so even if the chipset does not support AGP they can still place a AGP slot and connect it to the PCI bus. It'll work fine but without the AGP specific features.

[appwraith]

The AWE64 is an absolutely legendary card in my book. I wanted one so badly back in the day :)

[Crazy_Borg]

Pentium 4 S478 boards were a real heap of weirdness.
I remember ASRock boards with both AGP and PCI express slots on them. P4Dual series, they worked great!
PCIe slots in those days were quite rare.

[rjazz]

Love your videos mate, no one else does what you do!!!

[warre]

I used to had ASRock motherboard with both agp and pci- express ( worked only in 4x mode) slots . It also supported both DDR and DDR2 ( not the same time)

[lucaspam]

I do own an industrial-grade pentium 4 motherboard with ISA slots. Sadly there's no AGP slot - there's an exquisite slot on place of it that I don't know nothing about. It has an CF card slot embedded instead of one of the IDE slots, for a change! So, about using it, it works like a charm. It's unbelievable. I have tested a sound blaster 16, an AWE 32, two AWE 64 and they all worked well with Win98 and DOS. There's a catch: the Pentium 4 of the era have high TDP. Coolers for the socket are noisy and obnoxious. I was able ro get a 1.4 GHz Tualatin kit and the pentium 4 board now is my backup. But it works well, with surprising high ISA compatibility. I am not into 286 and 386-era games, so I don't need a slow CPU. I do recommend it to anyone that wants to build a retro PC but is afraid of the old motherboards.

[CaptainDangeax]

Out of subject from this vidéo, thank you for the ess solo1 driver I found on your website, it allowed me to revive a Piii PC dos + win98se to a playable machine for dos games

[shponglefan]

I've spent this past year exploring building an all-in-one retro PC with an industrial LGA775 P4 motherboard w/ ISA slots. It's fantastic having DOS, Win98, and WinXP all on one system. And disabling cache turns it into the performance equivalent of a mid-range 486. It even runs Ultima VII at a playable speed with no issues. It's honestly the most versatile retro PC I have. I really think the P4 w/ ISA is an underrated platform for retro gaming.

[RetroPcCupboard]

Nice! It's great that all of the ISA soundcards worked in it. You are right that it would be great for an all-in-one machine. Though, in reality I think you would be better off with a Pentium MMX machine for DOS, a Pentium 4 for Windows 98 and a Core 2 or early i5/i7 system for XP. Of course that would take triple the space and cost more overall.

[TexasAgg]

ISA is a pain... but good audio is worth it. Great video. P3 systems and earlier seem to have fewer ISA problems. It was nice the BIOS had the legacy options. I really want to see the dISApointment project take off. I would love to have an AM4 (x370) board with ISA.

[blakegriplingph]

An LGA 1151 motherboard with ISA slots is even more cursed.

[pjcnet]

My first PC after finally moving on from the Amiga had an AMD K6-2/500 in the late 1990s, at first I used AOL dial up and then I was one of the first to get an amazing ASDL that at first was 0.5 megabits, it felt so amazingly fast and you could even stream a very grainy video that I'd think was incredible, my second PC was a Pentium 4 running at 2400Mhz with an Ati Radeon 9550 GPU, I remember playing GTA3 on it and being amazed. Oh how far we've come.

[MisterLettuce]

Oh dang, I wish I had that board in my P4 system back in the day. I had to give up using my AWE32 when I upgraded to it, and that almost broke my heart.

[AshtonCoolman]

I have a Portwell LGA775 motherboard with an ISA slot that has a DOS Compatible bridge chip. It's pretty neat💪

[lexatwo]

Be sure to press Ctrl+F1 at the initial BIOS setup screen for Phoenix/Award - it will unlock a lot of additional options in most cases.