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ECS K7S5A Questions... can you help me?

SunnyD

SunnyD

Belgian Waffler
Hehe... I bet you're all thinking "oh, another one bites the dust"... whelp, nope. Everything seems to be running smoothly. I just have a few simple questions regarding this motherboard that someone might just be able to help me with.

#1 - I need to get the latest BIOS installed on this board, but I now (regretfully) realized this board comes equipped with an AMI BIOS. I'm from the land of Award where you can update the BIOS from any OS, just format a floppy, copy the .bin file on it, reboot and hit F2 to flash.

Problem is, I'm running WinXP, and don't have access at this moment to a DOS boot floppy (I have one somewhere, probably in storage). Is there any way to update the BIOS safely and reliably via some other means, or do I absolutely need a boot floppy?

#2 -I just plugged in my headphones to the onboard sound. Yeah yeah, get a real soundcard you say. But the whole point was to put together an inexpensive system (which for $250 I think I did pretty well)... Anyway, my gripe/question is: The volume on the output is extremely low, with both WAVE and MAIN volumes in windows turned to max. Is there any way to fix this?

#3 - What other patches for this motherboard should I be using? Direct from SiS? From ECS? Audio drivers? What.

Thankee, and other than that, all is well.

SunnyD (So far relatively happy with this board)
 
1. Why do you want to flash the BiOS? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Had to say it. Now, for BIOS flashes go to OCWorkbench. They have all the BIOS updates and utilities you need to create a bootable floppy for this mobo.

2. Never used onboard sound on this board, but you might try looking in Control Panel/Multimedia to see if there is a setting there to optimize your headphone volume.

3. Go to the ECS website. They have updated drivers for AGP, sound, LAN and I think one for IDE. At any rate the drivers there willl probably be more recent than those on the CD.

Enjoy.
 
Ok....
ad 1)
Get the ami flash utilityhere
get the aminf329.exe one
Get the latest BIOS here
get the latest BIOS, if you have the board with LAN scroll down to get the BIOS for the board with LAN
create a pure dos boot disk, if u have win 98 just insert a blank floppy go to command mode
and type sys A:
copy the ami flash utility and the uzipped latest BIOS to the dos boot disk
leave it in a floppy drive, reboot the computer
on the A prompt type:
aminf329.exe 020206L.rom

thats it. This should flash the BIOS on your ECS, I assume that your board has the onboard lan....

ad2)

With the integrated sound on this board, you NEED TO USE POWERED SPEAKERS, so headphones won't do in this case, but any other
regular powered speakers should work just fine....
Sorry I guess you gotta love the crappy integrated codec.... 🙂

ad3) get the SiS AGP driver (off the SiS web site), if you want you can upgrade the sound and LAN drivers off the ECS website.

This should help

 


<< Ok....
create a pure dos boot disk, if u have win 98 just insert a blank floppy go to command mode
and type sys A:
...
thats it. This should flash the BIOS on your ECS, I assume that your board has the onboard lan....
 >>



Problem is... like the original post says (I think), I'm running Windows XP - there is no "sys" command in WinXP. In fact, there is no DOS in WinXP. So what I'm saying is that I have no way to make a DOS boot disk. Is there any other way to flash this board without a DOS boot disk?

BTW: From those still in the Win9x days, an easier way to create a bootable floppy is format a: /u /s. 🙂



<<
ad2)

With the integrated sound on this board, you NEED TO USE POWERED SPEAKERS, so headphones won't do in this case, but any other
regular powered speakers should work just fine....
Sorry I guess you gotta love the crappy integrated codec.... 🙂
 >>



Ahh, thank you! That answers my question satisfactorilly.



<<
ad3) get the SiS AGP driver (off the SiS web site), if you want you can upgrade the sound and LAN drivers off the ECS website.
 >>



Actually, Windows Update has updated drivers for the SiS chipset... including sound drivers. The drivers that Windows Update provided for sound are actually "newer" than the ones provided by ECS and/or SiS. The version is 1.04, whereas the ones SiS and ECS provide are 1.03.

I'm not certain about the AGP driver though, I'm going to check now.

And to answer the question "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" to the BIOS update - often times, a BIOS with CPU additions contain updates to the CPU microcode as well, which fix minor performance and stability problems in CPU's due to bad steppings and/or microcode. Thus., you SHOULD update your BIOS with stable updates.

SunnyD
 
everything is up and running without any major hitches. Thanks for all the info and help folks.

SunnyD
 
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