Double spaced for your reading convenience
Copied and pasted from a thread in General Hardware, I felt that this deserved its own thread in this forum.
I had a rather poor experience with an ECS KS75A approximately a month prior to this time. A friend of mine desired a new computer, but for a very low
price. The ECS seemed like a fine value, so I decided on it. I had heard that it had some issues, but I dismissed these as the errors of incompetent
builders. Unfortunately, the KS75A proved me wrong. The case was a simple Antec SX635, so there were neither case nor power issues. I used a 900MHz
Duron and a Millenium Glaciator II (great HSF, quiet, small, and good cooling). For the memory, I placed a single Kingston 256mb PC2100 DIMM in one of the
DDR slots. It was a tight fit, so I used contact lubricant (which is proven safe, and I've never had an issue with it). The graphics card was an old Voodoo 5
5500 I had lying around, which as we all know, had no quality issues in any way. As for sound, I used a Philips Rhythmic Edge--great card, superb quality.
Every time I tried to start the system, I encountered one of the following problems: the system would either fail to post, fail to give a video signal, or simply
refuse to power up. I then began a roulette of component interchanging that proved time consuming, frustrating, and disappointing. I tried changing the
CPU to an Athlon Thunderbird 1.2GHz, a Duron 600MHz, an Athlon XP2000+, and an Athlon MP1900+. I tried changing the memory to a Crucial DIMM, a
Mushkin DIMM, and Corsair DIMM. I tried changing the graphics card to a Matrox Millenium II, a Matrox G400, a Matrox G550 Dual Head, a GeForce 3 original,
a GeForce 3 Ti500, a Radeon DDR 64 VIVO, a Voodoo 3 3000, and an ATi FireGL 2. I tried changing the sound card to a Sound Blaster Live! Gold, an Aureal
Vortex SQ1500, an Aureal Vortex 2 SQ2500, a Hercules Game Theater XP, a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, a Philips Acoustic Edge, and no sound card. I changed
all of these configurations around, until every possibility had been tested. Nothing worked. I try modifying the capacitors and voltage regulators. Nothing
worked. To those of you skeptics who would question my ability, I tell to simply look at my current Athlon rig. I'm using a 350w peltier, a custom-built power
supply, and a custom hacked case. I don't think that ability is the issue. After this entire ordeal, I RMA'd the board to Newegg, and they promptly sent a
replacement. I built it to original configurations, and when it failed, I gave up on ECS. I really have to wonder why they deem themselves to be elite. I
returned this board, and then paid a bit more to get a Gigabyte GA-7DX+, which is, in all honesty, probably the most stable socket A mainboard ever sold
(ignoring the 686B south bridge issue with SB Live! cards, of course). I built that up with the original equipment, and it worked immediately. The $30
premium that it commanded was a cheap price to pay to avoid the issues that Elite Group foisted upon me.
Copied and pasted from a thread in General Hardware, I felt that this deserved its own thread in this forum.
I had a rather poor experience with an ECS KS75A approximately a month prior to this time. A friend of mine desired a new computer, but for a very low
price. The ECS seemed like a fine value, so I decided on it. I had heard that it had some issues, but I dismissed these as the errors of incompetent
builders. Unfortunately, the KS75A proved me wrong. The case was a simple Antec SX635, so there were neither case nor power issues. I used a 900MHz
Duron and a Millenium Glaciator II (great HSF, quiet, small, and good cooling). For the memory, I placed a single Kingston 256mb PC2100 DIMM in one of the
DDR slots. It was a tight fit, so I used contact lubricant (which is proven safe, and I've never had an issue with it). The graphics card was an old Voodoo 5
5500 I had lying around, which as we all know, had no quality issues in any way. As for sound, I used a Philips Rhythmic Edge--great card, superb quality.
Every time I tried to start the system, I encountered one of the following problems: the system would either fail to post, fail to give a video signal, or simply
refuse to power up. I then began a roulette of component interchanging that proved time consuming, frustrating, and disappointing. I tried changing the
CPU to an Athlon Thunderbird 1.2GHz, a Duron 600MHz, an Athlon XP2000+, and an Athlon MP1900+. I tried changing the memory to a Crucial DIMM, a
Mushkin DIMM, and Corsair DIMM. I tried changing the graphics card to a Matrox Millenium II, a Matrox G400, a Matrox G550 Dual Head, a GeForce 3 original,
a GeForce 3 Ti500, a Radeon DDR 64 VIVO, a Voodoo 3 3000, and an ATi FireGL 2. I tried changing the sound card to a Sound Blaster Live! Gold, an Aureal
Vortex SQ1500, an Aureal Vortex 2 SQ2500, a Hercules Game Theater XP, a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, a Philips Acoustic Edge, and no sound card. I changed
all of these configurations around, until every possibility had been tested. Nothing worked. I try modifying the capacitors and voltage regulators. Nothing
worked. To those of you skeptics who would question my ability, I tell to simply look at my current Athlon rig. I'm using a 350w peltier, a custom-built power
supply, and a custom hacked case. I don't think that ability is the issue. After this entire ordeal, I RMA'd the board to Newegg, and they promptly sent a
replacement. I built it to original configurations, and when it failed, I gave up on ECS. I really have to wonder why they deem themselves to be elite. I
returned this board, and then paid a bit more to get a Gigabyte GA-7DX+, which is, in all honesty, probably the most stable socket A mainboard ever sold
(ignoring the 686B south bridge issue with SB Live! cards, of course). I built that up with the original equipment, and it worked immediately. The $30
premium that it commanded was a cheap price to pay to avoid the issues that Elite Group foisted upon me.
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