[geeks] Interesting low-end MB found for current Intel CPUs

[Mark]

On 30 Jan 2008, at 00:30, Lionel Peterson wrote:

>> From: Mark <md.benson at gmail.com>
>> Date: 2008/01/29 Tue PM 06:06:59 CST
>> To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>> Subject: Re: [geeks] Interesting low-end MB found for current Intel  
>> CPUs
>
>> On 29 Jan 2008, at 23:52, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
>> Hold it there sir, look who makes it - ECS. Don't you remember the
>> K7S5A? I'd never use another one of their motherboards if my life
>> depended on it after that screw-up-on-silicon...
>
> Mark, I don't - care to elaborate?

The K7S5A was a AMD Socket A (Althon XP/Duron) board with a SiS  
chipset that stands in history as possibly (at least IMHO) one of the  
single worst motherboard models ever made. They had issues with  
forgetting the BIOS settings completely. Sometimes they'd run the  
battery flat in a year (something I've never had in any other PC) and  
sometimes they'd do it despite a known good battery and just do it for  
the funnies. Some just flat out died. Some would power up okay, but  
not reboot (although my Asus one started doing that eventually too).  
Many suffered bus instability from bad cooling of the min bridge chip.  
BIOS revisions designed to fix the firmware issues made some better  
and some worse.

I don't know if it was down to the choice of chipset but (SiS never  
have, in my experience, had a solid reputation for anything), or just  
sheer bad manufacturing, but I've had cause to work on 5 or 6 K7S5A  
based PCs, with boards made over some 2 years (so not even all one  
batch) and non worked right. My dad put one in a PC he built and that  
worked ok for 6 months then went totally bananas. They are truly crap  
boards.

I might be being unfair on ECS, but not only do I have bad karma about  
them but I also never buy cheap motherboards. It's just bad news IMHO.

> (I've used other ECS low-end MBs before
> without incident, but I also felt I knew what I was getting. I'm  
> choosing to
> not go with a $100 Intel MB and instead "cheap out" and give this a  
> try).

Chances are there's nothing wrong with it, but like I say I personally  
wouldn't use an ECS board, and I'm sure I'm ontthe only one who's had  
bad experiences with them...

> This is what I found: http://www.ocworkbench.com/hardware/elite/k7s5a/k7s5ap1.htm

That's the one.

Here's a small list of people with issues, some ar PEBKAC but a lot  
are down to the boards:

http://p199.ezboard.com/Problems-with-K7S5A/fk7s5amotherboardforumfrm10

-- 
Mark Benson

My Blog:
<http://mdblog.68kmac.org>
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"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."