Lowest price I've ever seen on this combo prior to this was $109. You may want to consider getting your heat sink and fan elsewhere, however - the Frys in Fremont doesn't have anything but a bunch of returned units in questionable condition. Prices good Weds and Thurs only.
Frys BA: AMD 2400+ bare and ECS MB only $99
- Thread starter Loqutious
- Start date
Yeah that is a very nice deal, was at Frys on Sunday and saw lots of new differently boxed k7s5a pro boards too. The 2.4C and Albatron deal looks good too for those that want a early start on 800mhz fsb.
Yes. I keep watching those CPU + MB combo deals from Fry's but can't take them 'cos I have a microATX case that I want to reuse. Fry's deal won't let you substitute a different MB. Does anyone know any CPU + MB combo deal with microATX MB, preferably one that supports SDRAM also?
Wow hot deal.
too bad
there is no frys here.
Why does frys sell these combos cheap? aren't these good ?
too bad
there is no frys here.Why does frys sell these combos cheap? aren't these good ?
this was in the la times also, so its good in socal. it looks like im gunna have to get a price adjustment on the combo i bought last week for $109.
I actually bought the combo 10 days ago on sale for $119, then pricematched last week to $109, now I have to go back in the next 2 days for $99. And here I thought it was a good deal at $119! Although, waiting in line for 45 minutes last week makes me think twice about going back for only $10 - it sure didn't seem worth it the other day.
Not the greatest but if you are in the market for a budget PC, the AMD & ECS Fry's combo is an excellent deal. I brought 2 combos 2 weeks ago and did have any problem setting them up. But if you are looking OverClocking save yourself some headache and pay a little more for name like Asus, Iwill, ect.
I am constantly looking around for good mobo/cpu combos for friends/family of mine. I have been upgrading a bunch of them lately and my usual fare is a ECS K7S5A with a 1700 or 1800 AMD CPU. They can reuse their old PC100/133 RAM and its pretty decent.
Then my own motherboard started working weird - also a K7S5A. I had 2 sticks of PC133 RAM (nice quality ECC stuff) and machine started hanging up for no reason. Same with a HTPC machine i am building - 2 sticks of PC133 RAM - locking up. Turns out the crap about "having both SDRAM sockets filled can cause instability" is true. I took one stick out of each and now they run like champs - one has been on non-stop for 3 weeks now with no hiccups at all and moderate/heavy use.
Enough of my tirade. My point is that I was searching around a certain auction site and I saw a guy selling CPU/mobo/case kits. This guy has huge rating and the things are going for between $50 to $90 ($48 shipping is bit steep). Boards look adeqaute and CPU's are 1800 to 2400 AMD. I am not going to list the link here cause of rules but feel free to send me a PM and I can give more detail.
The motherboards the guy uses are Asrock boards whcih allegedly are part of ASUS. The one that interested me was the K7VM2. Here's a review from UK. Seems really nice - not very overclockable but has some great features for low-end machines. Onboard LAN, sound and video. I dont really dig onboard video but it also has AGP slot. Nice for people like parents who dont need the newest vid cards out there.
The stats for the board are:
VIA KM266 (Northbridge) / VIA8235 (Southbridge) Chipset
Supports AMD® K7 processors
Supports 266MHz Front-Side Bus
DIMM & DDR 266 DIMM memory support
Integrated Graphic System & AGP 4X graphics port
USB 2.0 Support 6 USB Ports (Four back-panel ports, 1 USB headers providing two extra ports)
Supports up to 2GB of main memory
Ultra DMA ATA 133/100 support
AMR slot (AMR modem optional)
2MB AMI BIOS Flash ROM. Power Management CPU parameters and memory timing
Here is the product page from their site.
Dont mean to ramble but I've been looking for a good CHEAP alternative for SDRAM-capable boards and this looks like a winner. I dont need to overclock my CPU, just something solid.
Hopefully this will help some.
Then my own motherboard started working weird - also a K7S5A. I had 2 sticks of PC133 RAM (nice quality ECC stuff) and machine started hanging up for no reason. Same with a HTPC machine i am building - 2 sticks of PC133 RAM - locking up. Turns out the crap about "having both SDRAM sockets filled can cause instability" is true. I took one stick out of each and now they run like champs - one has been on non-stop for 3 weeks now with no hiccups at all and moderate/heavy use.
Enough of my tirade. My point is that I was searching around a certain auction site and I saw a guy selling CPU/mobo/case kits. This guy has huge rating and the things are going for between $50 to $90 ($48 shipping is bit steep). Boards look adeqaute and CPU's are 1800 to 2400 AMD. I am not going to list the link here cause of rules but feel free to send me a PM and I can give more detail.
The motherboards the guy uses are Asrock boards whcih allegedly are part of ASUS. The one that interested me was the K7VM2. Here's a review from UK. Seems really nice - not very overclockable but has some great features for low-end machines. Onboard LAN, sound and video. I dont really dig onboard video but it also has AGP slot. Nice for people like parents who dont need the newest vid cards out there.
The stats for the board are:
VIA KM266 (Northbridge) / VIA8235 (Southbridge) Chipset
Supports AMD® K7 processors
Supports 266MHz Front-Side Bus
DIMM & DDR 266 DIMM memory support
Integrated Graphic System & AGP 4X graphics port
USB 2.0 Support 6 USB Ports (Four back-panel ports, 1 USB headers providing two extra ports)
Supports up to 2GB of main memory
Ultra DMA ATA 133/100 support
AMR slot (AMR modem optional)
2MB AMI BIOS Flash ROM. Power Management CPU parameters and memory timing
Here is the product page from their site.
Dont mean to ramble but I've been looking for a good CHEAP alternative for SDRAM-capable boards and this looks like a winner. I dont need to overclock my CPU, just something solid.
Hopefully this will help some.
Actually worked for quite a while with the ECC memory (and I researched ahead of time to make sure they were compatible). The other motherboard was non-ECC - just regular Kingston PC133 memory.
It's a legitimate beef about the SDRAM memory slots on the K7S5A board. Plenty of forums out there with people having same problem. Damn shame - perfectly good board otherwise.
It's a legitimate beef about the SDRAM memory slots on the K7S5A board. Plenty of forums out there with people having same problem. Damn shame - perfectly good board otherwise.
Fry's used to sell a lot of different motherboards with its Socket A combos (Shuttle, Epox, etc.), but these days it generally just offers the ECS K7S5A (Pro). (Well, occasionally you see a DFI (Diamond Flower International?) KT400 board & yesterday they were even hawking a Nforce2 IGP board in a $400 combo, but these aren't really the budget combos for which Fry's is justly famous.) Still, the Fry's combos prices are so low that basically they are offering the motherboard for about $15-20 more than the CPU only would cost, so I've purchased a couple of the K7S5A combos, and they seemed to work OK (well, the volume on one is far too low to use the onboard sound), but I've heard too many reports of the K7S5A crapping out or acting unpredictably. After all, ECS is the "elite" division of PCCHIPS, probably lowest quality major mobo manufacturer. Moreover, the SiS 735 chipset is now seriously dated (its slower than the KT266A, KT333, KT400, NForce2, etc.). with limited overclocking potential and only 2 RAM slots (now that DDR seems like it is finally cheaper than SDRAM for the forseeable future, the only reason to use SDRAM is if you happen to have a pile sitting around). I'd just like to see Fry's combos finally move towards a better grade of board.
As to Asrock, though the company is owned by Asus, I get the feeling that the boards may actually be manufactured by PCCHIPS; some of the boards look exactly the same as PCCHIPS models. Hence, I'd expect the quality to be a notch or three below the Asus standard. Also, if I were going for a KM266 board, I think I'd look for one with a couple of additional features, like USB 2.0 and 6 channel sound, e.g. the Biostar M7VIG Pro (which Pricewatches for about $2-3 more than the K7VM2).
I'm in the market for a cheap combo to use a spare HD, CD-RW and some DDR sticks that I have sitting around, & I was I thinking about ordering a Biostar KT400 M7VIT-Pro & an Athlon XP1700 for $60 & $42 delivered from Newegg. People have been getting Thouroughbred B XP1700s from them and things will go hard if I can't run the combo at 166 FSB (~XP2266 speed) at default voltage on normal air, and with the added performance of the KT400 chipset, it would probably perform about as well as this combo. This would give me an extra DDR slot and 6 channel sound. Or I could pump out another $30-$45 and buy a Nforce2 IGP board with good quality onboard video (NVIDIA GeForce4 MX), possibly other goodies (e.g. dual VGA, SPDIF, firewire, TV-out, etc). I probably couldn't overclock the CPU to 200 FSB because of the IGP and my unimpressive DDR memory. Ah, decisions, decisions...
As to Asrock, though the company is owned by Asus, I get the feeling that the boards may actually be manufactured by PCCHIPS; some of the boards look exactly the same as PCCHIPS models. Hence, I'd expect the quality to be a notch or three below the Asus standard. Also, if I were going for a KM266 board, I think I'd look for one with a couple of additional features, like USB 2.0 and 6 channel sound, e.g. the Biostar M7VIG Pro (which Pricewatches for about $2-3 more than the K7VM2).
I'm in the market for a cheap combo to use a spare HD, CD-RW and some DDR sticks that I have sitting around, & I was I thinking about ordering a Biostar KT400 M7VIT-Pro & an Athlon XP1700 for $60 & $42 delivered from Newegg. People have been getting Thouroughbred B XP1700s from them and things will go hard if I can't run the combo at 166 FSB (~XP2266 speed) at default voltage on normal air, and with the added performance of the KT400 chipset, it would probably perform about as well as this combo. This would give me an extra DDR slot and 6 channel sound. Or I could pump out another $30-$45 and buy a Nforce2 IGP board with good quality onboard video (NVIDIA GeForce4 MX), possibly other goodies (e.g. dual VGA, SPDIF, firewire, TV-out, etc). I probably couldn't overclock the CPU to 200 FSB because of the IGP and my unimpressive DDR memory. Ah, decisions, decisions...
I'll secomd the Biostar. I just received mine from newegg this AM (yet another buddy's pc). I havent put it through its paces yet, but it looks promising. Again, dont overclock anything, so as long as its solid im happy.
Just mentioned the Asrock cause thats what I saw at the auction thingie.
Just mentioned the Asrock cause thats what I saw at the auction thingie.
KAMAZON
Golden Member
I bought this exact combo about a month and a half ago, when it was going for $129. Put the 2400+ in the a system I had running already with 1800+ and Asus A7V333 board. I put the 1800+ with the ECS mb, works fine. Have the 2400+ running on the Asus board at 166FSB@ 2166. Stable for 3 weeks at default voltage. I figure it's not a bad deal to get 3000+ numbers with this price on a board over a year old.
For those that don't have a frys nearbye, you can order them from Frys over the phone. Check out their website, FRYs.com You can order from the Sunnyvale store.
I just bought one of these. Can anyone recommend a good HSF for the chip? I'm thinking $10-15 max for the HSF.
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