PC CHIPS motherboards

[b52]

i would like to get some feedback on motherboards made by PC CHIP i just bought two of their new 400 board that has the sis 645 chipset and it was said to out perform intel's 850 chipset according to the folks at tom's hardware, they did not say which board the cipset was on when they made their bencmark tests.



thanks paul.

 

[hunterxx]

I'm using a PC Chips 810 LMR. Had it for several months, never a problem. A friend at work recommended it to me after using several of their products. A low cost quality product but not for overclockers or hobbiests (not particularly upgradeable).

 

[b52]

thanks for the info the board looked pretty good it has 5 pci slots and it seems to be loaded with a lot of good stuff like some of the premium motherboards lan, wake on lan, wake on ring, acpi, it's a pentium 4 set upi paid $ 86.50 a pop for them. thanks again

 

[clumsum]

Basically, what I'm hearing is they are a "Value board" with good stability, lots of OEM experience ........ and not much for O-Clocking or Raid features available........

 

[Bobek]

I´m not sure about PC chips, I have really bad experience with their older boards (and the worst one with 800LMR - KX133 chipset).

 

[Jeff7]

I'll be getting an M599LMR soon; I'll let you know how it is.

 

[Ecliptic]

My 830LR was DOA. Would not boot, would not beep, would not do anything. Replaced every component except motherboard with same result. Conclusion: crappy motherboard.

 

[Jeff7]

My board just arrived; I skipped their site for drivers and went to the sites of the companies that made the integrated parts. PCChips' website isn't exactly the greatest or most up-to-date site out there; this board isn't even listed in the Products section.
However, the board itself looks impressive; the feature set is great too. Built-in video (yeah well), onboard sound that supports 4 speakers, onboard LAN and modem. Multiplier, FSB, and voltages adjustable in BIOS; HW monitoring - all in a Socket 7 platform. Got to see how this thing actually works now.

 

[Quino]

I have been recently working with the Amptron boards (ECS, PC Chips and Amptron are all under the same company). Amptron Used to be very bad in my experience. A lot of RMAs and they died soon However the new set of Amptron boards has been very good. They are the same as the ECS but with a regular amber color and not black. I have worked with the Amptron XP4-930LSD which is the Amptron counterpart for the PCchips one. It has been a great board so far. I have worked with a lot of 830XLM boards wich are the ECS K7S5A, I Hve even flashed the bios to the ECS one to OC and now they say ECS K7S5A Eventhough they are the same I would rather have a board from Amptron or ECS than from PC Chips Also the Amptron website is more uptodate.

 

[Zap]

Quino knows what he's talking about. I'll add my two cent's worth:

PCChips has actually been around since at least the era of the VLB (VESA Local Bus) motherboards for 486 processors. Anyone remember those? I actually still have some functional ones, hehe. Well, PCChips was REALLY notorious at one point for putting FAKE CACHE CHIPS on their motherboards. Remember that this was back when L2 cache was on the motherboard and 486 motherboards would have banks of DRAM cache chips.

Amptron has been around since the 486 CPUs also. I don't know how far back the two companies go. Amptron had some decent 486 motherboards. Starting with their Pentium motherboards, the quality went downhill. Now, this was before I got into "performance" so all I cared about was that it worked. Amptron Pentium boards died, and died often. I remember once scoring a great deal (this was also before I realized that "you get what you pay for") on some Amptron Pentium boards using the OPTi Viper chipset. 4 out of 7 died within months. Now, since some of their boards are really rebranded (some even use same model numbers, haha) ECS-et-al boards, I may try them out again. I do recall, even way back when the 486 was king and Pentiums were just a wet dream to be had for thousands$$$, at that time Amptron already had a website going with support documents, the works. Unfortunately at the time their site was extremely slow. But, few other motherboard manufacturers probably had web presence at the time, including full documentation. Amptron is also good about accepting RMA's (but probably due to their boards needing it so much at the time, haha).

Alton - this name is associated with the whole conglomerate somehow. They have a P4 board that is bright-red, while the ECS version is purple.

ECS - their boards seem overall to be decent. No "enthusiast" boards, just inexpensive ones that worked. Maybe the exception is the K7S5A which had a lot of teething problems. They may soon be getting into the "enthusiast" market, with the announcement of upcoming boards with Vcore adjustments. Also, they have started to use "cool" colors for their boards, such as black and purple.

If you compare products from these companies, you'll find identical boards with sometimes different part numbers and PCB colors. Packaging is different and sometimes the Alton/PCChips versions will include the impossible-to-find AMR/CNR cards.

 

[Peter]

ECS has been assimilated by the PC-Chips group some three years ago ... nowadays most of their
product are identical, just differently packaged (and colored sometimes). 830LR for example is completely
identical to ECS K7S5A. Buy PC-Chips and you get the OEM package (w/AMR modem mostly), buy ECS and you get
a more retailish end user box.
Alton, PC-Ware, Amptron, and all the others are resellers.

Remember, if you buy OEM, then you're treated as an OEM - you don't get end user style help, all you get is
drivers and BIOS updates.

I've been using PC-Chips product for a very long time, with no more (and no less) complaints than with other
manufacturer's stuff.

regards, Peter

 

[Quino]

Yes, Amptron used to be a lot more OEM oriented. However, nowadays it is a little more retailish. The boxes are more retail like. They used to be all white and red (ugly) Now they are Purple and gold. I used to work for a reseller/distributor here in town and they used to carry amptron among other brands (ASUS, ABIT, EPOX MSI and so on) that was the high end stuff and they also sold Alton, Amptron, Tomatoe boards (the worst of all in our experience). AZZA and so on for the cheap lower end. Believe it or not the Amptrons, Azzas and Alton used to sell a lot more than the more upscale brands ( ratio of like 10 to 1) But we had a really hig RMA on these products. For every 10 Amptron boards sold 4 or 5 would be back for RMA within 1 or 2 months. Needless to say it was a waste of time and money to keep carring these boards so they stopped selling them. RMAs went down a lot and I had a lot of time to spend at the Anandtechs forums (life was good . Then I quited and started working on my own. I was on charge of the RMAs so I knew the prople at amptron very good I used my personal email for the RMAs (hotmail one) So they kept mailing me about carring the Amtron brand again and that they had improved a lot. Since now I am on my own I decided to give them a try since I have had positive experiences with the ECS boards. That is how I started using Amptron boards again. RMAs are like most motherboards. I would say that from 10 you get 1-2 RMAs which is a big improvement. I am not assuming that my expereince will translate to everybody that buys Amptron boards (you could be the unlucky 1 or 2 bad boards They make good stable boards for the money for a decent and reasonabbly fast system. Yes, you donot get much oc functions but you get a fast chipset (sis 735) A choice to use DDR or SDRAM, A decent NIC somewhat decent Sound and the AMR Modem, all for less than $80 shipped (much less since I buy directly from them Service is good so I cannot ask for much else. I would not recomend them to most Anandtechers (Most want to OC their brand new XP 1500+ to like XP 2000+ and then they do not know why they have so many problems with corrupted registrys, lost data reboots and so on But thy make good boards for somebody looking for a fast stable system without oc. With the money you save you can get a better Video card and get better performance on Games than by oc Well those were my long two cents

 

[jfunk]

I hate PC Chips cause their site runs like it is on a 56K modem or something...whats up with that? It takes like a day and a half to download a 100K file.


j

 

[CAK]

I had always had good luck with ECS boards, never any real problems. The only major problems i had were with the KX133 series(few K7S5A also).....but what board maker didn't.

As for looking at amptrons or PCChips websight, i don't even bother. I use the ECS site and even thier BIOS files since they are updated more often.

 

[WildDreamer]

Heh, I still have an ancient PC-Chips M-326 board with an AMD 386DX stuck on it. The system:

AMD 386DX 40 MHz
8 MB FPM RAM
120 MB Maxtor
1.2 MB 5¼ floppy
Hercules EGA video
12" monochrome monitor

Now if I could only find something to run on it . I did find an updated BIOS for it though..

 

[Jeff7]

Finally got the thing working - mostly. Everything works fine, except for the onboard ethernet and I don't know why. All the diagnostics pass, but it keeps insisting that it isn't connected to the network.
Otherwise, it's fine for a basic system. The onboard video is, yes, CRAP. SiS's specs say D3D compatible; the benchmarks say otherwise.
The BIOS is very nice too; the FSB, multiplier, and voltage can all be changed in BIOS.

 

[WhiteWizard]

I really prefer a BIOSTAR