Hello! I am planning a build for a retro PC featuring the Pentium II. I Will post progress reports as progress is made, and post question regarding what you guys think, for example, What Slot 1 Motherboard should I use that's geared towards value? Please do answer that.
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Off the top of my head, I would look for a board that has plenty of expansion slots, a good combination of PCI and ISA, and as little “on board” stuff (like video, network, sound) as possible. That gives you the best flexibility. That way if you run in to a program you want to test with a different video card, you can do so just by changing the card.
I’d also make sure it supports two floppy drives (although most generic ATX boards didn’t cripple that until later), and ideally a FDC that supports FM encoding. But there is really no good way to determine that before buying.
Asus P3B-F is an amazing Slot-1 motherboard: very reliable, stable and good performer. It has 4 dimm slota for a maximum of 1gb of ram (maximum for bx440 chipset). I have models with 1/5/2 agp/pci/isa and 1/6/1. Manual say there ia also a 1/6/0 version, but why would someone want it?
Just out of curiosity, why the Pentium 2 requirement when you can just as easily drop a Pentium 3 in there?