Here's a stupid question!
I'm going to buy a modethbord and an athlon xp 1.7ghz
The motherbord is also made for xp.

Would i be able to run win98se trouble - free?

I'm going to put the motherbord in an old gateway2000 case... Woould that be a problem?
The power supply seems to fit the motherbord but are there any other components i need to worry about?

It's like $59 for the modtherbord with both types of ram: sdram and the other newer one. It has a built in sound card, built in ethernet.
And the athlon xp is like $129 for a 1.7ghz + a cooling fan...

Will i be payiong too much?

Win98 will work with XP, we have a few here, in fact, AMD-XP are certified by AMD to work with Win95 onward.

Let me guess, this is the K7S5A with the LAN build-in ? While this board works well with the XP CPU, the size may be a problem when you try to use it in anything other than a large midi-tower size casing, as the board will catch the CDROM/CDRW drives otherwise.

As to the components inside, this will depend on what you have already, as the K7S5A does NOT have any ISA slots.

Personally, I find the K7VZA work a lot better, the VIA chipset seem to drive the IDEs a lot faster than the SIS on the K7S5A, may be its just me, but the batch I had, while works, but somehow I just dont feel they are as fast as they claimed them to be.

Actually, it did have 2 isa slots, 2 pci, and one agp slots.
But you're abslolutly right. It is a big motherbord and my friend tried it on two of his empty towers and it didn't fit at all.
But oddly, my old gateway2000 E-3000 been laying around the house being used as a spider solitare game for my girlfriend would make the perfect case.

Now, I argued with my good friend about this: does a motherbord have to be bolted down?
I think there's static that the case grounds....

i have an xp chip running on xp and to be honist i have had no problems at all ity still runs at the same speed as if was on xp, dont get me wrong xp does run a fraction faster than 98 but really not enough to notice:)