Calling all ECS K7S5A (SiS735) motherboard owners!

[osage]

I have 2 of these boards, one in the wife's machine and one in my own comp. Both have been solid,trouble free for me. Cheap and fast, just as it should be.

I know that some of these boards have problems as I have recently worked on one for a friend. Very funky board, sometimes won't boot cold, sometimes won't boot warm. It will freeze for no reason at other times.
It took me several days to even get this board to post and read a floppy so I could update the bios. I suspect that the board had incountered a malfunction during a previous bios upgrade.

If you get a board that dosen't work properly,whan used with approved,quality components, return it .............when you get a good one as I have you will be a happy camper.

 

[VBboy]

I want to thank everyone who's been kind enough to post reply.

The way I see it, this board is pretty good, but the average failure/defectiveness rate is somewhat higher than with other boards, including the dying battery and other problems. What sucks is that the person I'm building this PC for wants to use his existing PC133 memory (Crucial), and there aren't that many boards left out there that support it... Of course I don't want to get an older KT133A-based board...

I wish life was easy

 

[Uclagamer_99]

great board...not much in overclocking options (there's a way to mod your bios so you can change the fsb but the options are limited)

but other than that great board for an awesome price...the only thing i dislike about the board is the location of the ide 1 and ide 2 slots on the mobo...they get in the way of my agp card and my short ide cables have trouble reaching my cd drives (i have an antec 1030)

 

[Talonvar]

I'm on my second board. I found the first one to fail consistantly when it reached 38C. The replacement seems to have no problems whatsoever. I must agreee with jerboy- cheap board=low consistancy.

 

[Shiori]

Been working with an ECS Elitegroup K7S5A for a month now with a Duron 900, and it's super stable....haven't had a single problem with it, and is very easy to configure and flash. The Sdr/ddr slots are neat, too. With the latest bios, it can support an XP 2000+ and supports up to a gig of RAM. You can't beat that value.

*one note though....I bought the board in the Philippines. Maybe ECS ships a different kind into the USA, hence the varying differences in quality....although I've observed that those without onboard LAN have less intances of board failure. But that's a VERY rough observation.

 

[Ronzon]

Good board when working, but frustrating. Just when you think you have a stable, functioning system, something goes awry. In my second K7S5A system, the CMOS settings are lost regularly on a very cold (ie powered off overnight) boot. Nothing changed, just decided to do it on its own. Changed to a brand new battery, cleared CMOS, latest BIOS...same symptoms. Seems related to the cold surrounding air temperature.

When it works it runs fast and well. But this is the finickiest MB that I have worked with (built 50+ systems in past 3 years). Other MBs, unless defective, just work. The K7S5A's low price is attractive, but I recommend only to the computer enthusiast who knows how to get into his/her system. Not for the general public who wants a no-fuss computer.

Just my opinion...

 

[dannymac]

i strongly do NOT recommend buying an ECS motherboard. i'm no newbie, and have had major problems with the ks75a. sure, maybe you'll be lucky and get a board that works... but do you wanna risk 65 bucks? i CANNOT get this board to run properly with the FSB at 133.

i'm STILL WAITING for you people that are so confident in this board that you will buy it from me. when jerboy posted his stuff in an earlier thread, i saw several people boast that they would have bought it from him before he nuked it. (am i mistaken?)

well, i can only get this board to run properly with FSB at 100Mhz. any buyers? my AIM screen name is dannymac64.



i've tried revision 4 and revision 3.1 boards. here's my stats:

ESC K7S5A
AMD AthlonTbird 1.2GHz/266MHz (ya right... have to run it at 900MHz/200MHz... what a waste)
2 x 256MB PC2100 DDR crucial
Maxtor UATA100 30GB
300W Enhance PS
MSI Geforce3

 

[WhiteWizard]

Got selfrebooting ripping movies with DVDx, perhaps the cheap memories were the problem, anyway, I try with several sticks.


A7V266-E
Athlon 1.2b @ 1301 (9.5x137Mhz)
Titan D5T cooler and 4 case coolers (just in case!)
512Mb DDR RAM (unbranded, 2x256Mb sticks)
Promise RAID 0 on 2 IBM Desktars 15Gb
CL Anihilator II
CL Live! Platinium
Aopen Hq08 full tower case (300 What PS)
DVD and CDROM on normal IDE channels
Win XP Pro OEM

 

[NTB]

Got mine fixed - looks like I wasn't getting enough power to the ram slots; I pulled one of my PC133 sticks out and it's been runing beautifully ever since. I'm happy

Nate

 

[render]

Duron 1.0 Ghz
ECS K7S5A R3.1
a stick of 256MB SD ram
SBLive
Radeon 32MB DDR
40GB Maxtor 5400rpm
Evercase with Enhance 300W
12X Acer CDRW
WinXP

This setup was the most easiest one I've ever had. I've never encountered any problem so far. From my experience, it's great for that price. I built above system for $300

 

[Spike]

I have loved this board since the day I got it. $55, built in NIC, sdram slots (I was not ready to upgrade to DDR at the time), DDR slots for later, and it uses nifty black PCB. I have heard of some people having problems, but overall, this board has been wonderful. The only downfall was the skimpy package extras (there were NONE) and pansy manual, but hay, for $55, you can't really complain.

 

[joe4324]

For what its worth I have built 12 of them now, 3 of them are currently running in my house right now. NO PROBLEMS on any of them. the board in my system is the oldest, I bought it a week after they first went retail, I've updated the bios several times just because I wanted the OC options.

I'm 12 for 12, Possibly 13 for 13 because I'm probably going to be picking another one up this weekend.

I'm not sure were so many problems come from that people complain about. I've bought all 12 boards in chuncks of 1-2 at various times from multiple vendors. According to the way some of you talk I shouldnt have been this consistant...

there are 2 things I've done with every system that has been built with the k7s5a, Offical "approved" 300watt+ powersupply. and Crucial ram, (ddr and pc133) beyond that its been basically hodgepodge components. I dont really consider these premuim parts as well. when the ram was purchased Crucial was the cheapest ddr you could find. and approved PS's are a dime a dozen...


I find this board to be a godsend. the free Lan and Sound and DDR/SDR capability allow me to offer a "decent" computer for half of what most people would think.

Do I consider it a high performance board? no, But I've been fairly happy with mine. I'll be upgrading soon to a xp333 (possibly, k7s6a), but its not because I dislike the k7s5a, its because I want more oc options.

I give it 2 thumbs up.

 

[joe4324]

I'll buy it off you dannymac, But its not gonna be full price there $53 on pricewatch and your clamig its not working right... PM me what you'd like for it and I'll let you know.

 

[MrMaster]

No problems here. Runs very smoothly

 

[edfcmc]

Ive had two ecs board no problems

 

[LongCoolMother]

no probs for me...i love this board! its fast n rock stable...no joke! I flashed the bios bad a couple of times...used a floppy to recover though...its a great board, trust me

 

[vemish]

Had one - Fry's w/ 1GHz Duron. At first it wouldn't boot, finally did
and ran very solid for a couple days. Back to no boot.
Took it to Fry's - of course it worked on their bench immediately.
They took it all back and I got an Epox 8KTA3L+, which has been great.

From all the threads I've seen, my guess is that they have a design
flaw in the neighborhood of the CMOS ram. Probably a timing problem
on one or more of the signals. That would make it temperature and
voltage sensitive. Some boards would be better than others, and
many would work or fail depending on the particular part(s) on the
board and on the board's environment. Of course, there are lots
of other possibilites - I'm guessing based on heresay.

 

[RazB]

4 boards built...1.4 TB 900 TB 1000 Duron 950 Duron
(also have had 3 built by friends and family - no problem other than on board sound card)

All problems caused by builder(me) my favorite being that I didn't check the voltage on the PSU (set to 220) the thing wouldn't post..no beeps, nothing. I even accidently started a small....really small glowing flame when I turned it on and it touched a standoff...guess what, the board still works.
Issues...drivers a little flakey with win2k(get newest from OCWorkbench) - difficult oc'ing ability
Plusses, SDRAM or DDR..can accomodate as high as AMD can go right now, meaning I don't have to chuck the board when I upgrade my boys 950 or 1000 in the future

 

[ReCo]

I used the K7S5A in four computer that I put together for my friends using the AMD 1800+ XP and no problems at all. The only minor problme that I had was installing the board drivers from the CD and I resolved this problem by installing the drivers manually. I also downloaded the latest drivers from the ECS web site. I used Win98SE, WinME and WinXP home edition in these computers. Needless to say that all are running with not problems and my friends are happy.

 

[billyzbear]

I had one, it worked great for about 2 months. I started to get cmos and window errors. I turned down ram settings to 100 and everything was fine again for 2 months. When it started getting problems at that speed I rma'd it. I haven't gotten it back yet. The sound onboard is bad if nobody has told you yet.
Billy

 

[cavemanmoron]

out of the box had problems,put in a newer bios,and took the 1.4 tbird out,no more problems,
running an 800 duron in it now,
spend more money ya get what ya pay for,if you want to overclock do NOT but this board
No adjustments,\

 

[pyjujiop]

Bought one back in September, stuck a 1.4 Thunderbird in it and installed Windows 2000. To this day I have no idea what a Win2K BSOD looks like.

I think 99 out of 100 K7S5A's are just fine, if you put a quality power supply on them (I have a 400W powering mine). There are too many newbies out there who bought this to build their own and didn't know how to set it up properly. Of course they're going to have more complaints about it than most other boards. Why? Because it's one of the best-selling mobos ever.

It's a heck of a lot better than any VIA-based board I ever owned, and as good as any Intel BX board. It is the only AMD board I ever hooked up, powered up and installed the OS without a hitch.

 

[Crassus]

Lucky you. I had a A7V133 before, and had it running around the clock without reboot for up to two months under Win2k.

The K7S5A is a different story. It barely manages 2 days without BOSD under Win2K, while I had to forget about Win98SE altogether. Couldn't get my USB devices to work reliably. I will keep it, but IMHO its not the very best board out there. BUT, for that price its the best performance you cen get, esp. together with CPUFSB. If you're around to do the occassional reboot, you might end up liking the board.

 

[Hendrik]

Phantastic board, incredible value for the money - I recommend it without hesitation.

We've had it in our most-used system in the household for three months, and its stability has become proverbial. It just doesn't crash, no matter what you do to it. It probably helps that we run Windows XP on it, and that it has just one 512 MB Crucial DDR RAM stick in it. I also right away replaced the cheap battery that it comes with with a Sony one.

(I did experience some crashes when I used it with two 256 MB 133 MHz SDRAM sticks, one of which was CAS2.5, the other CAS2. Removing the CAS2.5 stick solved the problem, though.)

 

[cricky]

Excellent board for the money... I've got two systems running on it, and have put together two other systems with it. Haven't experienced that many problems, and nothing near the problems others have.

Only problems I had. I blew a capacitor on one by putting a wrongly pinned USB expansion card on it. And the board still worked fine afterward. Just could never get the extra USB ports to work. And I tried putting a Netgear LAN card in another one, and the motherboard would just not recognize it. It would do the cold boot problem that people have mentioned with the Netgear card in. No other problems to speak of. 1.4/266 TBird and a 950 Duron running smooth (along with another 1.4 and a 900 Duron).

Best bang for the buck, I'd say. Just make sure you have a GOOD power supply, and know that it is a bit flaky with PCI cards...

--Christopher