ECS K7S5A.. read on

[Jerboy]

This is a long ass piece of writing I made when I was in bad mood because of ECS K7S5A that I was having problem with before I finally ditched that krap and got a Gigabyte 7DXR.


"
I hope you guys don't mind my ranting here. At least it gives me an opportunity to post my review and my time away from hands-on project on ECS board. I put so much effort into this board and it is not showing a single sign of appreciation.
Lets see countless trips to different stores for returns trying to figure out if components I've bought from them are causing trouble and countless time on BBS, on the web, reading pages and pages of newsgroup. You know... I am one of the user who just can't feel ok letting a computer win. I am clearly showing sings of temper by now. I am getting pretty damn close to drawing a line here despite my loathe for letting a computer beat me. This computer project has been using 1/2 or more of my free time for the past week or so. When I start working on project, I just can't let it sit around or go until I know I got it finished. Do you know what I mean????

consequently it wastes large portion of my free time.

Gosh I've been tinkerling with computers on regular basis for about 10years and this is the most problematic thing I've ever dealt with(my prior experience include building system from scratch, soldering mods, SCSI troubleshooting, lots of setting and much more). I'm sooo dumbfounded.

After spending tens of hours working on this spitting, dead looking, cold hearted, emotionless yet disobedient glass epoxy board with buncha plasticky thingy with silver legs sticking out,27°C body with 55°C hot spot, I am turning cold blooded. The more I work on perpetually troubled K7S5A, I am getting strong elevation in an urge to nuzzle about with a PERSON whose actually got some blood pumping, who shows HIS emotion/love/appreciation in POSTIVE way(i.e. just the opposite of ECS board, nice and comfortibly warm at 98.6°F(37C), doesn't smell so plasticky and who can put me to sleep in peace instead of keeping me awake in annoyed, pissy, angry mode. eeeeeeeeeerrrr!! .

To put it in simple words, its an endless up hill battle like arguing with parents.

I'm ticked off enough that I felt like I needed to express my honest feeling about this motherboard.


I AM going to buy a new motherboard, which will probably be an Abit KG7 or Gigabyte GA-7DXR and possibly something else. I hope I can get it working right. ..... well I went with GA-7DXR and its much better than K7S5A. Woo hoo..

I'm not going to even bother selling this junk, because I know the buyer is going to whine to me about all the problems!. I'm gonna kick K7S5A's ass as soon as I get my new mobo working.

Damn! I haven't done that yet. Its still in box sitting under my bed. I should drive it over with my car!

The end of this poor thing torturing me and the beginning of its new life in landfill.

Anyways, thanks for reading

Feel free to express your feeling

 

[polypterus]

Umm, so what exactly is wrong with it? I replaced a KT133 board with it, just took the old board out, put the ECS in, hooked everything up, plugged it in and its been perfect for a couple months. Didn't even have to format the hard drive, managed to switch from a via chipset to sis with no problems whatsoever. Oh yeah and I sold the old board for $90 and paid $60 for the ECS, so there ya go. Can I have yours? Seriously, I'll pay shipping.

?

dc

 

[Lord Evermore]

While the K7S5A isn't the most reliable board for getting it up and running (lots of problems) once it's up it's pretty damn good. However I don't think I'll recommend it to anyone simply because the of number of problems it has, I wouldn't want to have anyone else risk going through what some people have to.

www.ocworkbench.com has a forum devoted to ECS and there's constant discussion of the problems with this board, and all the workarounds that are available for SOME of the problems. However for me, having to work around an issue by modifying my processor or soldering resistors onto my motherboard is far beyond "reasonable". If it just takes not running everything at the fastest settings, that's fine, but I'm not going to become an electrical engineer to make the thing work at the basic settings.

For your case, jerboi, what exactly did you have problems with? Many of the issues that people ran into have resolutions that are reasonably easy to do.

By the way, I'm pretty sure it's illegal to dispose of computer equipment in the normal trash. At least in some places.

 

[The Dancing Peacock]

seems like it's hit or miss with these boards. I built one this past week, and it's working great, literally no problems. I have another sitting here with an XP 1600+ waiting for a case, that hopefully will be bought tomorrow at the Buena Park computer show. I know that since I've said this, the second one will not work at all, and I'm going to have the biggest headache in the world from it It sucks that you have had such a bad time with it.

 

[Jerboy]

<< While the K7S5A isn't the most reliable board for getting it up and running (lots of problems) once it's up it's pretty damn good. However I don't think I'll recommend it to anyone simply because the of number of problems it has, I wouldn't want to have anyone else risk going through what some people have to.

www.ocworkbench.com has a forum devoted to ECS and there's constant discussion of the problems with this board, and all the workarounds that are available for SOME of the problems. However for me, having to work around an issue by modifying my processor or soldering resistors onto my motherboard is far beyond "reasonable". If it just takes not running everything at the fastest settings, that's fine, but I'm not going to become an electrical engineer to make the thing work at the basic settings.

For your case, jerboi, what exactly did you have problems with? Many of the issues that people ran into have resolutions that are reasonably easy to do.

By the way, I'm pretty sure it's illegal to dispose of computer equipment in the normal trash. At least in some places. >>



My problem was, cosntant BSOD(even on OS isntallation), Hardware wizard detecting everything on mobo again(real time COMS clock, PCI IRQ steering host, BIOS(fail safe), and all the basic stuff and comptely messing up my system. The problem goes away at 100MHz FSB and even if I set memory at 133MHz and FSB 100Mhz no problem.. Also lots of errors with Memtest86.. Tried a new DDR and it seemed okay so I don't think board was defective. Just inherently krappy from design. If its illegal to throw K7S5A in trash, I'll shove it up Goodwill's a$$

 

[BP]

I've read on thier boards that it needs a high quality power supply or it has all sorts of problems.... Maybe try a good 400w sparkle or enermax.

 

[Lord Evermore]

jerboi, go to ocworkbench.com's forums. The issue with the memtest86 errors has been hashed out there for some time, they seem to know exactly what's causing it and how it's sometimes possible to fix it, but unless you want to downgrade your system or do some soldering, your only choice is to return it I think. But I quit reading the threads about it because my system works okay, and I've already decided not to recommend it anymore.

For the lazy, ECS made a modification to newer revisions of the K7S5A which makes it more compatible with the XP processors but sort of makes it stop working properly with older non-XP processors faster than 1GHz.

 

[FuZoR]

built a pc for my little sis with this motherboard 2 days ago. No problems whatsoever...
for a $50 mobo, it RULES.

900Duron
GlobalWin WBK68
20gig ibm 7200
Sparkle 300watt
ATI Rage 128
24x CDrom

Used old parts

 

[Lord Evermore]

900MHz Duron may well have made the difference between a good system and you ripping your hair out.

 

[yellowperil]

It has been working fine for me, except I had to replace my Enlight PSU with a Sparkle because of it. It kept making these weird screeching noises every time I scrolled the mouse wheel or Page Up/Down until I got the Sparkle and it stopped.

 

[Viperoni]

<< It has been working fine for me, except I had to replace my Enlight PSU with a Sparkle because of it. It kept making these weird screeching noises every time I scrolled the mouse wheel or Page Up/Down until I got the Sparkle and it stopped. >>



I have the same problem with my Intel system!
It's a deer 300watt PS powering a BF6 + celery 566......I always wondered what the heck it was.
Luckily it's my dads machine and he can't hear the screeches cuz they're so high in frequency, but I can

 

[polypterus]

<< If its illegal to throw K7S5A in trash, I'll shove it up Goodwill's a$$ >>



Why not just give it to me?

dc

 

[Fastball]

I absolutely love this board. I've built 4 systems with it and haven't had one problem. I used Durons in all of them and everything worked flawlessly. Beats the hell out of VIA.

 

[Soybomb]

I know some people have problems with it, but in the three systems I've used it in, I've got no complaints.

 

[Squisher]

I'm running a 1.4 @ 1.6 with latentcy set to ultra and CAS set to 2, -rock stable- ,with this board.

BTW, I have an Enermax 430w PS

 

[tcsenter]

I have used now 6 ECS motherboards, 2 K7S5A, 2 K7VMA, and 2 K7VZA, none of them gave me a problem. Granted, I had one HELL! of a time getting a NIC card to work in one each K7S5A and K7VMA, but it turned out to be just a matter of getting all the cards in the right PCI slots where they would work together. I have not used any 'bleeding edge' processors in them, they were all 1GHz or less, and I had little success overclocking/bussing all but two of them, but then I don't think anyone can blame ECS for that. ECS is NOT marketing this board as an overclocker's board.

 

[jbahseng]

Have one, works fine and i like it

 

[kylef]

Sorry to hear about your problems! I didn't really do anything special for mine to work: Crucial PC2100 DDR 256 meg stick, Maxtor 20gig HD, Radeon LE, Tbird 1.4gig, and Sparkle 350W power supply. Works like a charm...

 

[BeauJangles]

Anyone who voted 'Total garbage, I wouldn't take it for free!' If you have one... mind sending it my way

 

[Jerboy]

<< I've read on thier boards that it needs a high quality power supply or it has all sorts of problems.... Maybe try a good 400w sparkle or enermax. >>



Now this is the end of story as far as being "economical" goes. By the time you do all the RMA's, new PSU's and new memory modules, it is no longer economical. Power Supplies are not cheap. You can easily afford a nice board such as Abit, Gigabyte or Asus for the cost of K7S5A+new power supply.

 

[Nevyn522]

AMD techs (two independent ones) acknowledged issues with 1.4Ghz processors and the ECS K7S5A.

I had it destroy one 1.4Ghz processor with it's failure to provide constant voltage (the power supply is golden) after having it running stable for a month, and then I put a new processor in, on the off chance it was the processor.

On first boot, I sat at the BIOS hardware monitor and watched as the voltage varied over a .5V range. Yeah, that isn't supposed to be happening.

ECS tech support has failed to respond to me for three weeks.

I've heard many good things from people on this board, but it obviously just can't deal with the 1.4Ghz Athlon processor, as I've seen entirely too many complaints of those two parts in conjunction.

 

[Jerboy]

and yes I did use it with AMD Athlon® 1.4GHz, 266FSB Thunderbird. I KNOW its the mobo's fault, because my computer now runs acceptably well with Gigabyte board.

 

[jackywebdesign]

<< Anyone who voted 'Total garbage, I wouldn't take it for free!' If you have one... mind sending it my way >>



I'll be happy to take one too.