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ECS vs MSI Reliability

M

MortaniuS

Senior member
What do you people think of ECS quality/reliability compared to MSI? I sell probably 3 times as many ECS boards as MSI but i have way more MSI failure after 6 months than ECS.
 
one should get pabster and Lxi in here ...🙂
I have used 4 ECS k7s5A without any problems...Have not used MSI personally but a friend had one die after 1 month.
 
I prefer MSI to ECS,infact I prefer lots of brands to ECS, I`m not keen on ECS,however I`m sure lots of ECS owners are happy with their boards.We all have our favourite brands etc.


My MSI board is still going strong after 20 months of use,never had any problems with it,however I could say the same thing for my Epox board as well.


🙂
 
ECS and reliability in one sentence, you must be kidding
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Do you actually have any first hand experience with ECS to qualify that statement? I know that the general impression people get from ECS is that because its so cheap and "entry-level" or "budget", it must cut corners in terms of reliability/stability/performance/etc. That was my impression about them before I bought the K7S5A/Tbird 1.4GHz last october because of its superb price/performance ratio. Since then I've run that system 24/7 with not a single major crash at all. That led me to look at ECS again when my dad was looking for a budget upgrade. In this case I got the K7VTA rev 3.1 in early May, along with an Athlon XP 1800+, and that has been running 24/7 as well with no crashes. Since then I've recommended 2 other friends to get the K7VTA rev3.1, both of which has no problems so far. Whenever people post questions about which budget motherboard to get, I'd always recommend the ECS K7VTA rev3.1, I believe its price/performance ratio is even greater than that of the K7S5A during its time...

MSI however is a brand I don't have personal experience with, other than recommending my friend a GF2MX based card of that brand due to its price. Because of this I will refrain from commenting on its reliability.
 
Many ECS are fine, but first hand experience with MSI says "no contest" for me. My MSI K7T Turbo (plain) - my first build- and Turbo2 have been flawless with Duron and XP CPUs. Just compare forum threads to confirm which is the most stable, tho you'll fine FAR fewer re MSI due to far less complaints. I realize that ECS sold a terrific number of cheap K7S5As compared to MSI or about anyone, so that weighs in their favor on the number of complaints. But the number and seriousness turned me off, and the number of repeat customers ECS can garner remains to be seen.

An important comparison for me has to do with makers support. User after user said they couldn't get adequate support from ECS, and that they only cared about their big OEM cutomers. On the contrary, MSI replaced a 1.5 yr old MB for me with a newer model with no aggravation. They also sponser a good forum. Obviously, I'm a happy MSI user.

 

Yep, I have, plenty, enough.
What helps any price/performance ratio when the QA and QC fall behind.

I totally respect your opinion, if their products worked for you so far, all the better (knock on wood).

I know their stuff not only from a private point of view. Don't get me wrong, but your experience with five or six boards is not very representative in my eyes. In this case I could argue that I know several people who had five or more boards from ECS fail on them also in a very short period of time. I would even say that it's a known fact that ECS is troublesome.

To make a long story short, I just couldn't help giving my two cents when I read the subject of this thread 😀.
 
of course, of course...its not like I'm trying to force my opinion on you. Perhaps I've just been lucky. Other than a crap Matsonic VIA Apollo mainboard and a brandless Pentium mainboard, I've never had any other motherboard problems in my entire computing life.
 
I've built 2 systems using the K7S5A for friends and had no problems at all. I've done the same with 2 or 3 pcChips branded boards.

That being said, the 2 biggest mom&pop shops here sell ECS as well as the other major brands. They sell TONS of ECS and use them in their store branded machines as well. Both of them will not sell an ECS board without testing it in house first. They don't test the other brands. I've had the owners of both stores tell me that for the most part, they don't have any more problems with ECS/pcChips then ASUS, Abit, MSI, etc., except the DOA rate which is why they won't sell the boards without testing them first.

 
WEll for the longest time MSI was FAR superior to ECS in quality. But its seems ever since the K7s5a my store has had awesome luck with any othjer board we have got from ECS. Ive had the k7s5a, k7s6a, and p4s5a, and they have been rock solid. The only problem i had was with the k7s6a that it enables fastwrites by default and it was causeing problems in games, but once i figured it out it was rock solid. MSI really left a sour taste in my mouth with the K7 pro2a. That board was a complete POS. I must have gottan back at least 35% of the ones i sold. Then after we had lots of pronlems with k7master, kt266 (usb was horrible).

So me personalyi would by an ECS over a MSI any day. But things always change ;-)
One thing great about MSI IS their support. they replace the 100+ pro2a's no questions asked, and many other boards, which was great. Fortunaly i rarely ever have a bad ECS so i dont have to deal with ECS 😛
 
This is what I have learned about ECS. I have built a ECS system myself (which for me being a newbie was a lil pain, building a whole system from scratch) ... So, nobody can accuse me of being partial 😀

If you are lucky with K7S5A, the system would be the best system you can have out there (in terms of price and performance)...
otherwise, it will be the most crappy system out there. And this I am saying based on the people's experiances that I have read...
Number of people who hate ECS K7S5A is equal to number of people who love it more than their life ... 😉


JoKer
 
Now isn't it strange that so many people have GOOD experiences with ESC gear THEMSELVES and nonetheless feel inclined to echo the BADmouthing of unknown OTHERS?

Share your own experience, refrain from spreading the usual FUD. It's getting old.
 
I've got no personal experience from ECS. I've had 2 MSI so far. One K7T Turbo and a KT3 Ultra (plain). The K7T was rock solid as I have used it with my Duron, and then later on with my Athlon XP 1700+. I've then recently upgrade my computer to the KT3 Ultra. When I had finished installing the hardware, booted up it worked fine. Changed some settings in the BIOS and then rebooted then the system would not post. Tried clearing the CMOS and changing the battery still no go. I then gave up, went to the shop the very same day and changed the board for a Abit AT7 MAX and I am now very happy with the AT7. Getting good performance and all. I've had a Abit in the past, the KT7A, and before that, the Gigabyte 7ZX.
 
I've been using my MSI H61M-P31/W8 (MS-7788) for more than a year now and it's also a second hand board but I haven't experienced a single problem with it, although I just bough a new ECS board H77H2-M3. I'm still not sure which is better because I haven't tried out my ECS. What do you guys think?
 
Haha, look at us 🙂 how things have changed now !!
I believe that now both the makes are equally good enough and reliable
 
Way to necro a decade plus old thread! ECS sure has come a long way! My sister had a MSI K7N420 Pro (AMD Athlon XP / nVidia nForce 1) that lasted from shortly after this thread was created up until October 2012 when it was still running Windows XP but only decomissioned to run a MSI NF980-G65 (nVidia nForce 9) AMD Phenom II Windows 7 machine.
 
I have had good luck with my Z77A-GD65 from MSI.
 
Shmee said:
I have had good luck with my Z77A-GD65 from MSI.
Click to expand...

I just bought 2 x Z87-GD65 Gaming for my parents new computers. I've had good luck with MSI boards and obviously my sister / parents don't game or overclock which doesn't put them under much stress.
 
I had a GD45 P67 MSI board, it was awesome! And when my board had issue's MSI showed me some great customer service, which was second to none
 
Goi said:
Do you actually have any first hand experience with ECS to qualify that statement?
Click to expand...

Back around 2003 or 2004 Frys in north Houston was running sales on ECS boards.

I bought an ECS board, which was dead, so I brought it back the following weekend.

Care to guess what I saw at Frys when I brought the board back? Pallets stacked 3 - 4 feet high with returned ecs boards. This was not "a pallet" as in a single pallet, there were "pallets" of returned ECS boards.
 
in my experience, ECS reliability is significantly worse than MSI, which also has pretty terrible reliability.

so, i pass on either of them.
 
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