Fry's combos with ECS motherboards

[mercanucaribe]

I need to upgrade my old Socket A system, due to my Radeon 9800Pro dying. I already bought a 7950GX2 for $200 on Craigslist, and now I need the rest.

I have two choices now:
-Buy a good motherboard with an E4300 and maybe upgrade the CPU later when the budget chips get 4mb cache.
-Buy the Fry's combo with the E6600 and ECS motherboard, and upgrade the board later.

I'm leaning toward the latter, but only if the ECS boards aren't complete crap. It's basically a free junk board, but will it cause instability or corrupted data or anything like that? Or will it just not overclock?

 

[MDE]

My Dad's computer is running a Fry's combo (Athlon 64 3000+ and ECS 755-A2) and it's perfectly fine, even slightly overclocked. As long as you're not overclocking to the CPU's limit you'll be fine. Your second option sounds fine to me.

 

[mercanucaribe]

Hmm.. If I get an ASRock 775whatever, I can use my 1.5gb of DDR and save $100 or so total. Would the 4x PCIE slot bottleneck with a 7950GX2, since it's two cards in one?

 

[secretanchitman]

Originally posted by: mercanucaribe
Hmm.. If I get an ASRock 775whatever, I can use my 1.5gb of DDR and save $100 or so total. Would the 4x PCIE slot bottleneck with a 7950GX2, since it's two cards in one?

i thought that mobo had an x16 slot.....? if it has an x8 then you're fine, cause theres hardly any performance decrease.

 

[mercanucaribe]

I bought the E6600 with the ECS PT890T-A. I also got 2gb of Kingston DDR667 RAM for $120. Is DDR667 the right memory? There was also DDR800... but I figured I'd need to run DDR533 with the motherboard set at 1066FSB... the whole thing confuses me, even after years of dealing with FSBs and memory speeds with Athlon Slot and Socket As.

 

[Zap]

For the most part, ECS boards are okay. Nothing too exciting and some overclock okay while others won't at all. However, there is a stigma attached to ECS boards, so if you use on in your system, the cool kids won't let you hang out with them anymore.

 

[QueBert]

ECS is fine, I have a Gigabyte and I honestly hate it I'd trade it for a working ECS in a second You can get good/bum MB's from any maker, I have no preference, I'm a tech so I end up building people computers often. Some of them want exact components so they know what they're getting, but a lot are older people living off Social Security and monies tight, I mean like $15 dollars in a total system price will make a huge difference to them.

I typically go with ECS for the ones who can't afford anything but the cheapest, and have had 1 person call with problems that related to the MB, maybe I get lucky who knows? ECS works great, aside from OC'ing, besides on a stock system how much difference will you see in performance between an ECS, and an ABIT Fatal1ty? I mean real world not bragging right benchmarks.

 

[mercanucaribe]

I learned the hard way. I'm on my second ECS motherboard so far today. The first one spun up the fans maybe 1 out of 10 times, with no POST. The second one doesn't spin up at all. And I pulled out the PCIE slot trying to remove the video card, because the lock (why do these exist?) was stuck. Back to Fry's tomorrow for a decent board.

 

[tcsenter]

bought the E6600 with the ECS PT890T-A. I also got 2gb of Kingston DDR667 RAM for $120. Is DDR667 the right memory?

PT890 is single-channel memory capable only, quite unbelievably since its predecessor PT880 featured a very good dual channel memory controller with multiple revisions now (PT880...PT880 Pro...PT880 Ultra).

Try the ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA based on PT880 Ultra. This model will be in active support phase for a long time to come and ASRock has a good BIOS team that releases regular updates.

There is not much real world difference at all between DDR2-667 and good DDR400 with fast timings. You have to get into DDR2-800 and faster to really benefit from DDR2.