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Damn you Frys and your motherboard combos!!!

spacejamz

spacejamz

Lifer
Cant believe I still have these boxes in my closet...

Courtesy of Fry's except for the top right one from Microcenter last week...
Motherboard1.JPG


My first combo...Anyone else here ever use this board? 🙂
Motherboard2.JPG
 
harbin said:
Peace, the combo at frys are gone....... forever.
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That true, thanks to that embezzlement crap a couple years ago.

I had a K7S5A combo from Fry's. I've also had the NFORCE4-A939 that I see you got two of.
 
Zap said:
That true, thanks to that embezzlement crap a couple years ago.

I had a K7S5A combo from Fry's. I've also had the NFORCE4-A939 that I see you got two of.
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well the embezzlement thing was for ECS combos.

they did biostar and MSI combos for a while and just randomly stopped like mid 2010.
 
3 ECS motherboards? You did not learn your lesson the first time?

Wait about 1 - 2 weeks after an ECS motherboard sale, go back to frys and go to the returns department. Then look around for the pallets of returned ecs boards.

One time I must have seen 3 pallets of returned ecs motherboards stacked 3 - 4 feet tall.
 
tcsenter said:
Surely the fact that for a few years, Fry's primarily used ECS for their best bundle/combo deals wouldn't have anything to do with it.
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Nope, not when just about every ecs board I ever bought had to be returned. I lived just north of houston for about 4 years and frys was my primary computer store during that time.

Out of every brand name motherboard I have used in the past 13+ years, ecs had the highest failure / dead on arrival rate then anything else.
 
OILFIELDTRASH said:
Can someone elaborate on why they quit selling the combo's I haven't heard any of that?
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There is a thread in the frys forum that talks about how much money the company was losing due to people buying "just" the cpu + motherboard combos. It seems that computer repair people were buying the combos to build computers with, or piecing the cpu and motherboard out on ebay.

I dont know how the embezzling case and the cpu/motherboard combos are related? But on the frys forum, there was talk of the company losing too much money by people buying just the parts that were on sale and nothing else.

If companies like tigerdirect can make cpu/motherboard combos, I see no reason why frys can't either.

Maybe there was an under-the-table deal for frys to promote boards like the ecs? I dont know.
 
Texashiker said:
Out of every brand name motherboard I have used in the past 13+ years, ecs had the highest failure / dead on arrival rate then anything else.
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Out of 40+ ECS boards (including PC Chips) that I've used in the past five years, I've had two DOA and maybe three fail prematurely (within one year). Evidently, some people have some "magical" aura that induces more failures than others (i.e. incompetence).
 
tcsenter said:
Out of 40+ ECS boards (including PC Chips) that I've used in the past five years, I've had two DOA and maybe three fail prematurely (within one year). Evidently, some people have some "magical" aura that induces more failures than others (i.e. incompetence).
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I stopped using ecs motherboards 6+ years ago. Maybe the quality of their product has improved since then? But I doubt it. Did you get your ecs boards from frys? Maybe frys got factory second boards?? I dont know, nor do I care.

Out of the dozens, maybe even hundreds of boards I have installed in the past 13 years, ecs had a much higher failure rate then say asus, msi, abit, intel,,,, and everything else I have used. And that is why I stopped using them.
 
hans007 said:
well the embezzlement thing was for ECS combos.
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It was, in addition to other things.

GoSharks said:
I got an nF4-A939 combo. That system was actually rock solid.
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Yup, mine was too except for the USB 2.0 bug. It was an NFORCE4 BIOS bug that ECS never fixed. Sometimes the higher speed USB devices (USB 2.0 drives, network adapters, etc.) would just suddenly cause hard lockups.

Other than that, yeah, mine was perfectly fine even overclocked. It was my main rig that I lived with for a couple years, so it got used daily.

Texashiker said:
just about every ecs board I ever bought had to be returned.
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You have... exceptionally bad luck with ECS. My ECS failure rate is no higher than any other brand, and I've used a LOT (=100's) of motherboards.

Was it any particular model? The early K7S5A were problematic until BIOS updates, plus they had the crappy caps. Also, for some reason they were really picky about PSUs, so perhaps they didn't work well with the PSUs you were using at the time.

OILFIELDTRASH said:
Yeah I even had the salesmen at Fry's warn me about ecs boards and tell me to look for something else.
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That's because they charge more (upsell) for other boards. Remember they make commission off you.

tcsenter said:
Evidently, some people have some "magical" aura that induces more failures than others (i.e. incompetence).
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Hey hey now, easy there partner! This is Motherboards, not Video Cards and Graphics. We're more civil here. Don't make me put on my mod hat. It's uncomfortable. :colbert:
 
Zap said:
You have... exceptionally bad luck with ECS. My ECS failure rate is no higher than any other brand, and I've used a LOT (=100's) of motherboards.

Was it any particular model? The early K7S5A were problematic until BIOS updates, plus they had the crappy caps. Also, for some reason they were really picky about PSUs, so perhaps they didn't work well with the PSUs you were using at the time.
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I dont remember the model of the boards, that was 6+ years ago. Whatever frys was selling between 2001 - 2004, that is what I bought.

One time while I was standing in the returns line at frys (north Houston store), there was a customer next to me that was also bringing back an ecs board. We talked for a few minutes - he told me that he did computer repair as a side job and used a lot of ecs boards. Just opposite of my experience, he said he had installed maybe hundreds of those ecs boards and had very few problems.

I dont know if the ecs boards are just more picky of memory, or power supply like what you said. To me, they were more trouble then they were worth and I stopped using them.
 
Texashiker said:
I stopped using ecs motherboards 6+ years ago. Maybe the quality of their product has improved since then? But I doubt it. Did you get your ecs boards from frys? Maybe frys got factory second boards?? I dont know, nor do I care.
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I know how you feel. Back in the Athlon XP days, I bought one of those Athlon XP + ECS mobo combos. I've just never seen so much fail after trying three ECS mobos that didn't work.

Fast forward a several years to the debut of Conroe. I actually ended up picking up a E6300 + ECS mobo combo (so cheap! couldn't resist!). That mobo actually worked! It was low-end and pretty crappy, but at least it worked!

Well, with the demise of the Fry's CPU+mobo combo deals, I don't think I'll be picking up another ECS mobo ever again.
 
that's a walk down memory lane... don't think i did all those combo's but i sure did a handful of a bunch of them...

rip fry's combos, you allowed a lot of kids in my neighborhood to have much nicer pc's than they would have had otherwise...
 
I liked those combo's, only thing was you had to be extra observant sometimes cause what was advertised in the newspaper wasn't what you got. Last winter, there was an ad about the Athlon II X3 435 with a Gigabyte 785GM microboard for 79.99 with $10 MIR. What was given out was a 425 with the same board for 79.99.
I had to point out to the manager the ad and the $10 difference between the two cpu's. So I ended up with a slightly cheaper cpu but the combo at a $10 reduced price with the MIR. So I could not complain to much, I got a CPU and m/b for around $66 after taxes and taken into account the MIR.
I do miss those combos though sometimes you could get a real good deal on a cpu and later on upgrade the m/b as your budget allowed.😎
 
Yeah, I used to check the fry's ad daily for good mobo deals. Now they don't really have anything worth getting. I bought my current mobo two years ago, an i5 750 and a gigabyte ud3r with an additional rebate for less than $199. Man that was a great deal.
 
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Nice work! 🙂 And yes I built using a K7S5A with a AMD 1.4ghz tbird in 2001 for a good buddy and it's still running today as a web surfer for his 83yo dad.

I got rid of some boxes a few years back, but I still have an embarrassing amount of old boxes and obsolete hardware😳
 
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