Meaning ECS might have changed a couple of parts, but the board is still a cheap ECS board.
That it is a cheap board is kind of the point. If not, who would buy them? it would likely be a mistake to try to build the highest performing system out there with such a board, saving ~$30-50, only to find that maybe it isn't up to handling high-power CPUs and video cards at the same, or whatever else (it's usually voltage regulation where they really fail).
We are not talking about Intel who has a reputation of making solid boards. We are talking about a company who in the past has had quality issues.
One time I walked into frys in north Houston, there were pallets, and I mean several pallets of returned ECS boards. There must have been 100+ boxes of returned boards. I looked around and said "there must have been another ECS sale last week." Because that was how it went. Frys had a sale, a week later there were pallets of returned boards.
So I've read. IMO, it was either a failure on ECS' part, or on Fry's, and that selling such cheap parts plain retail may have been a bad idea (if Fry's got compensated for returned boards, it would have been ECS' failure, and Fry's gain).
I've also seen, both with PC Chips/ECS and others (Gigabyte and FIC, mostly), and have found other supporting both individuals and businesses at the time, the same common problem: RAM and PSU. A Gigabyte SiS 73x/74x board was, big surprise, also very picky, for the time, about PSU and RAM. SiS was right at the bleeding edge, trying to squeeze as much as they could out of a couple sticks of RAM. When harry homeowner goes and puts that fancy new Athlon XP board in, with the same old RAM from his PII, and the same old PSU, surprise surprise, it's not the best experience. While a Fortron FSP-*, Enlight, Antec, etc., from that time were good enough, along with any decent brand name of RAM, people commonly wanted to be able to either get by with crap like a Deer, or re-use an aging OEM supply, and spotty memory (with regards to performing to SPD timings with new chipsets) that was only
just good enough for what was being replaced, and nowhere near good enough for the replacement parts. Should this be a surprise, that many people buying cheap parts were trying to be too cheap, and getting burned by that cheapness?
By a year and half later or so, we were getting used to it with Athlons, and by the 865, it was the case for the P4s, too. If you built a whole PC, or including PSU & RAM in the upgrade, and made it all from value parts, but not too cheap crap (Fortron/Sparkle, instead of Raidmax PSU, Corsair instead of bargain-bin RAM, get a case with decent cooling), and didn't try to re-use PSU & RAM from an old PC, the tendency was for everything to work just fine. NF2 boards of all brands were categorically worse than SiS 73x/74x boards, in reliability, but they got passes, by and large, thanks to improved dual-channel performance, and I'm as guilty of going along with that as everyone else chasing bang/buck at the time.
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