ECS K7S5A dies, problems with K7S5A Pro replacement.

[ries]

My K7S5A died after two years last week in a puff of smoke and a orange glow out of one of the diodes. Got a Pro from Newegg to replace it. Everything installed and moved over ok for about 10 minutes, then BSOD in XP when running Photoshop. Safemode rebooted as well. Win98Se runs OK. Could not repair/install XP Pro due to BSOD on STOP: fastfat.sys error. Checked that out and found it could possibly be memory as well.

Got memtest86 V3. Ran it and got test #5 errors on the installed SIMM Crucial C2, 133 512Mb and 256Mb SIMMS. Switched them around, same errors. Tried them one at a time in both SIMM slots, same errors. Got a working Crucial C2, 133 256Mb SIMM from a working Win2K machine and it got memtest test #5 errors as well.

Updated to the latest Cheepos 120 Pro bios from ocworkbench and that made no difference.

RMA'ing it to newegg to try another unit. If it fails, I'll give up on the ECS stuff and move on. I don't have any DIMM memory and if I were to buy one, it would be for a new mobo and faster ram.

 

[pspada]

I believe the board has problems if you install more than one stick of PC-133 at a time.

When you do buy DDR, forget the PC2100 and PC2700, go for the PC3200. You'll be happier longer.

 

[Peter]

No room for belief here.
With two DIMMs in, you should set "RAM slew rate" to "Fast" to compensate for the many chips.
But if your DIMMs do show errors no matter whether you run them one at a time or together, then you do have a problem.
Either the DIMMs died along with the board AND your other DIMM is good enough for the (older?) box it came from but not for the higher performing SiS chipset, or, more likely, you're still using the probably faulty power supply unit that killed your first K7S5A.

 

[ries]

Well, I'm basically through with ECS.

I RMA'd the PRO for a new one, got a new PC Cooling 400w power supply and new stick of Simpletech PC2700.

Installed everything back in the case. Memtest86 still show errors on test #5 (both DIMM slots). Simmtester says it fails the "Burst" test. Same failures while trying to install Win XP (copied files don't match and BSOD STOP in atapi.sys (NTFS) -- this from two different XP install CDs). Still runs the existing Win98 install. Scandisk advanced says no disk errors (so I can't seem to blame the hard disk).

It's very possible that the new memory is (again) faulty, but it's going to cost me more money to find out. I'd rather count my losses now and move on to better things.

Just for some piece of mind I've ordered a pre-tested setup from Monarch (an Abit NF7s, 3000 barton 400Mhz, 1GB Corvair C2 3200) and am waiting for my AIW Radeon 9800 to arrive before finishing the installation of two new WD 160GB/8MB cache IDE (for a SATA RAID setup) drives. Hey, at least this gives me the excuse to "upgrade" the system...

 

[Slogun]

Hey, my 2 year old K7S5A just died this week.
Not sure what the problem was. There was a burning smell. Mighta been the CPU, but temp readout looked normal at the time. I haven't gotten around to testing the parts yet.
Gonna switch to a P4 system this time around.

 

[lbmcleod]

so many probs with that ECS board. eugh. Get sum crucial ram

 

[PCHPlayer]

Give up on ECS. Go with Epox, Asus or other higher quality brands.

 

[pspada]

I've put a number of those K8S5A Pro into the field, and not had a single problem. But I buy quality ram and power supplies from the start, don't overclock them, etc.

But it occurs to me that you are using the CPU from the "puff of smoke" machine? maybe the mobo toasted some of it's leads?