ECS boards are kind of YMMV. I've seen some last quite a while, also some other brands are manufactured by ECS, such as Shuttle (back when they did motherboards) and I've also heard Abit uses ECS for manufacturing.
A bit of information about people in this thread with USB problems,
in this thread someone mentioned "the USB problem that all NF4 boards have." Perhaps it isn't just the ECS board?
Anyways, after a successful test bench install of the ECS board (testing by running benchmarks, Memtest, Prime and sustaining a 7 hour USB 2.0 transfer) I installed it in my "main" rig. I use that computer daily for many, many hours and so far (only a few days) no problems.
I still might get a board to replace the ECS board because of the board layout. I like the layout of the Abit KN8 board that I'm using for my wife's system. The ECS board has the chipset too close to the PCIe 16x slot, plus uses loops for chipset HSF attachment, unlike every other AMD board under the sun that uses push pins. I had to use a Thermalright NB cooler with the 7000RPM fan (undervolted) plus I had to cut up some of the mounting hardware to make it all fit. On my wife's Abit KN8 board, I just used the Zalman passive heatsink (the taller one) and it attached really easily, is more secure and didn't have to be modded, plus everything clears it. I'm using a heatpipe heatsink on the video card and a Zalman 7700 series cooler, and everything fits nicely. That reminds me of one other thing, the Abit BIOS will let you specify the CPU fan control for speed down to 40% and temperature. I'm using that set to minimum with the Zalman instead of the included Fan Mate 2, confident that if CPU temperatures climb over 50°C the fan will automatically kick up.
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