ECS Motherboards

[tinman101]

Please could someone give me the true skinny of these boards? I read threads on 4 forums every day and according to all I read only 25-35% of them work decent or work at all. I relize that in todays market price dictates alot, but is it worth the crap-shoot of getting a working ECS board when spending a little bit more would give you a 90-100% chance of having a problem free unit. I am not an ECS basher just very interested in whether I am missing something. I'm just as poor as everyone else and if the ECS board is a quality board then help me justify purchasing one ......Thanks

 

[Boonesmi]

im not a big ECS fan, but... im sure its a lot higher then 25-30%

its probably more like 95% of them work good (its just that the 5% are the ones who do most of the posting... if your board works as expected you dont usually go posting anything about it


ECS is the largest mainboard manufacturer, asus i belive comes in a close 2nd

but ECS isnt the highest quality, its not uncommon for the boards to fail earlier then some of the "high quality" mainboard manufacturers

 

[tenoc]

It is probable that some of the earlier builds of the K7S5A had quality and consistency
problems. Hell, it's certain. But not to the extent you indicate. ECS is currently the largest
MB mfgr and have sold a ton of them in their transition from mostly OEM to the retail market.

A lot of info is available at ocworkbench.com for new users.

Plenty of people have built 10, 20 or 40 stable systems with no problems using good psu's
and reputable RAM modules. I've only done two, but with a large variety of components, and
all were stable.

Any board you buy now should be from a recent batch and shouldn't be difficult if you follow
instructions carefully, as you would with any new build.

If you're set on o/cing, pick something else like Shuttle or the K7S6A which has more options.

Look at the posts detailing problems with every other mobo out on the market!

 

[Regalk]

I have been thru a lot of boards from different manufacturers (Asus, MSI, Abit, Soyo, Tyan, Epox, Iwill, Gigabyte as I can remember) and all I got up and running in no time at all incl my latest Asus P4S 333. I wanted to try something cheap and different - so I went to ECS K75SA - first board worked for a few months and died. Second refused to post. after 2 days of trying I gave up on ECS and am thankfully back to the ones I mentioned above- I have laid my hands on my last ECS product - life was not meant to be stressful; kudos to those who made it in the murky waters. Sometimes cheap is not always a good thing.

 

[Buz2b]

There's no way in heck that only 25-35% of the ECS boards work properly. That is ridiculous. As was mentioned I'm sure their rate of failure is no worse than any other major brand. The difference is that many thousands more of these are sold because they are so inexpensive. The sheer numbers of these tends to magnify the appearance of more failures. Besides, forums like this are like a Dr's office. Almost every single person that goes to a Dr's office is there because they are sick or having troubles of some sort. The same goes for forum. For every one person who posts a problem there are thousands who have no trouble and never post. Then you have those like Regalk who go around to every K7S5A thread and bash them at every turn. So, don't worry any more about the ECS than you would for most other boards. Just be sure that you check to make sure that your PS is AMD approved for the cpu you install. Then follow good technique for building your system and you will be a "happy camper". Good Luck!

 

[AA0]

There is definitely a higher rate then that. When you see a bunch of problems on any particular hardware, even something as bad as ECS, you can be assured that probably 5% of people have problems at the most. Its still a horrible rate, but its not as bad as it looks. That being said, I wouldn't get one.

And since Asus sells their boards for a lot more, they don't have to ship nearly as many to make money.

 

[tritium4ever]

Personally, I've never had ANY problems at all with my ECS K7S5A. It's so true that it's the 5% who experiences problems that do 95% of the posts...as Boonesmi said, you don't post if you don't have problems. It's easy to make a company seem like a scapegoat for a number of negative posts, but in reality you'll find those posts for EVERY motherboard...it's just a matter of looking in the right place.

 

[tinman101]

The 25-35% was just a guess on my part because of the questionable reports I've read. Also I did not relize that ECS was the largest M/B manufacturer. Thanks All have probly got better info off these 5 posts than have in the past. May have to give ECS a whirl, don't think I'll be out much even if it does die. But will post if it does. Oh and Buz I think you may have hit the nail on the head about the fact that there are surely a ton of these cheap boards out there so there are bound to be more bad reports. But then again I read very few bad reports on the higher quality boards in comparision to the number of bad reports on the ECS.

 

[Odoacer]

Granted, the ECS is not the most user-friendly board. I had a few hassles in trying to set it up. And the BIOS likes to reset itself every now and then (hasn't done it in a few months now though).

But otherwise, it's a great board. Very fast and very stable. Once you spend a little time learning its quirks, you'll learn to love it.

Definitely worth the money.

I suppose it's like a car. Cars don't all drive the same. But once you get used to one specific car, everything goes along great. It's the same situation with the ECS. Okay, bad analogy. But I hope it gets the point across

 

[tolbyn]

I just used an ECS board for a budget system build I recently did. Like most others, I really don't like the mobo. I find that these things are "hit or miss". This particular build I just did worked out ok, except for a problem with installing a modem. But a previous ECS board I used worked for about 1 month before crapping out on me. Most of my friends have experienced the same. Some work fine, some don't. My advice is...unless you have no other options, go with something else other than ECS.

 

[dbal]

IMHO you are free to experiment with every single part of your computer when buying except one: THE MOTHERBOARD
If you like lottery, go buy an ECS you might be lucky.....