I am about ready to gte the ECS K7S5A, what else do I need/need to know

[mikef208]

I haven't seen much in the way of problems with it, did I miss anything major. It seems like a great board for the price. What else should I get with it, processor, memory?

 

[gcy]

A good power supply. I'm using an enermax 350 watts.

 

[mikef208]

Is the one that came in my Antec SX1030 okay?

 

[alpha88]

Im using that PS right now with my k7s5a + tbird 1.4

worked perfectly first try

 

[Athlon4all]

There's been one big issue with K7S5A. Something about the floppy in Win2k. But with the latest BIOS from OCWorkbench (check the forums), it fixes this issue.

 

[irichie]

Im with GCY, I had nightmares with boot problems with my old antec pp-303 300W that came with my case. I ordered 2 Enermax 350W that came in today, so far its booted up everytime I've tried.

 

[mikef208]

I have never had problems with my Antec PS, and GCY never actually said it was a bad PS, he just said he had the Enermax. So the only known problem is with the floppy drive and it's fixable, which it wouldn't affect me anyways since I use a LS120 drive instead of a floppy. I thougt I had heard issues with the 1.4 Palominos, but maybe those were PS related, that is what I think i am getting. And I haven't decieded between Crucial or Mushkin, i was originally thinking crucial, but they don't sell 512MB DDR DIMM,s and only having 2 memory slots I kinda want 512MB DIMMs. So what other files, or drivers, or BIOS version are needed.

 

[Athlon4all]

Oh, there's only the AGP driver. No IDE, or anything. Just AGP. Their website is SiS.com

 

[sash1]

ECS k7s5a is a b!tch to flash the BIOS with. A lot of people have had problems with it, and I am no exception. It took me four days (yes, four days) to recover from it, and I had to format my hard drive in order to get anywhere (luckily I had nothing incredibly improtant, as it was only in its third week and I hadn't installed much, so deleting everything was not a problem for me), and it wouldn't detect my video card, so it took me a while to figure that one out (I had to uninstall that to even make it boot up). So just be warned, and try not to mess up flashing the BIOS, or you will hate your life!

 

[mikef208]

I have been hearing a lot of people say they had trouble getting it to detect thier vid card, is this a problem, how do you fix it, if it is?

I thought I heard there was a way to fix the BIOS easily on this board if you screwed it up. All you have to do is boot off a floppy with some file on it, but anyhoo. Is there any reason to flash to another bios, can i just use the one it comes with? All you need is an AGP driver, I am assuming that should get installed first to maybe help detect the vid card? Anything else?