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Question Weird old-timers question.

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Elite Member
Folks, in the late 90's there was a motherboard manufacturer that specialized in the AMD chips of that era and seemed to specialize in Micro-ATX full-feature motherboards, just out of curiosity I was wondering if anyone remembered who the manufacturer was? They were lower end MoBo's and most folks looked down their nose at them but they worked.
 
I can take a guess and say PC chips. However, the company that owns PC Chips also owned about 10 other small companies making OEM boards.

Names like ECS, PC Chips, Amptron, etc are all part of a larger company.
 
Iron Woode said:
I can take a guess and say PC chips. However, the company that owns PC Chips also owned about 10 other small companies making OEM boards.

Names like ECS, PC Chips, Amptron, etc are all part of a larger company.
Click to expand...
I came across a list someone posted about in 2011, and it's amazing to look back and see how many there once were: https://www.overclockers.com/forums...2-What-happened-to-all-the-motherboard-brands

My favorites back then were Epox and Iwill. The ones I disliked the most were Abit (I know, I know, everyone besides me loved them) and Soyo.
 
K7S5A or whatever that board was? Is that the one that you are remembering? I think that was ECS (EliteGroup), which was or became a division of the conglomerate that owned PC Chips.

Edit: Man, I miss Abit. They had some darn fine P35 mobos (IP35E, IP35 Pro). Well, cold-boot bugs excepted, I guess. 😛
 
I used to do the bios hacks on the cheap Fry's K7S5As.

One of my MOST favorite things is just how good AMD's modern chipsets are. Once Intel diverged in the 90s, AMD (as well as Cyrix/VIA/IBM x86 stuff) was relegated to some truly ehhhh stuff. Don't get me wrong, it usually worked outside of some strange incompatibilities here and there, it's just that the quality really varied quite a lot. SiS, VIA, ALi, just usually somewhat underwhelming, and often the one kind of annoying thing despite how good many of the K6 and especially Athlon and beyond actually were as CPUs. Poor plug n play, 4 in 1s, slow IDE performance, often abominable sound ICs, and it was usually the best plan to wait for th second
 
Variant of a board to release. Eg; KT133 to KT133a, KT266 to KT266a, etc.

All the way up to the 990FX, the chipsets were (with a handful of notable exceptions here and there) often just .. bleh. I spent a LOT on the dang 990 Sabertooth, but its USB and SATA performance was just not great.

Somehow even the 300 series with Ryzen was fully excellent right out of the gate, and I'm thankful for it.
 
OP, did you get the boards at Fry's? Then probably ECS. If Newegg or something online, then it may have been PC Chips, or one of the true white box variants that came from Taiwan during that era (usually a clone of a branded Abit or Asus, but without a silkscreened brand or model sticker).
 
Arkaign said:
Variant of a board to release. Eg; KT133 to KT133a, KT266 to KT266a, etc.

All the way up to the 990FX, the chipsets were (with a handful of notable exceptions here and there) often just .. bleh. I spent a LOT on the dang 990 Sabertooth, but its USB and SATA performance was just not great.

Somehow even the 300 series with Ryzen was fully excellent right out of the gate, and I'm thankful for it.
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MSI KT333 board was the best socket A board ever.
 
UsandThem said:
The ones I disliked the most were Abit (I know, I know, everyone besides me loved them) and Soyo.
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Honestly Soyo was just another one of those also rans. They had a couple of models they were first out the door with like the Apollo 133 chipset (got that before the 133A). But nothing really to like or dislike.

Abit man I had several friends with them and honestly my Celeron 366A @550 was probably most comfortable on the BM6. But the farther you got from their BX chipset based boards the weirder they acted, Abit took a lot of liberties to get them to be the "best" overclocking boards and they didn't seem stable unless their were on that knife's edge of their limits. Hell had a friend on a KT7E and 9 months after he installed a to the boards credit a beta bios, it just started trashing harddrives. But yeah not a fan and the BM6 was the only one I had (though I dreamed of getting a BP6 for the longest).
 
thesmokingman said:
I miss those days of the BP6 terrorizing the more expensive chips.
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LOL... I was too poor back then to afford the pentium pro version of the dual cpu, so i went the BP6 route.

ahhh memories...
LOL its also one of the things Anand himself reviewed back in the days.

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are you thinking of something like the PC Chips M598 with SiS 530 and k6-II?
it sure was extremely popular down here at the time

but it was also AT with ATX compatibility
 
I thought Biostar was the best of the cheap tier. ECS was ok as a freebie package board. PC Chips was a true stinker.
 
Aopen seemed to have the white box market. I remember looking at price lists at the store when I was having one built and Aopen had a lot of other components as well. I loved DFI, had a few Gigabyte boards around Athlon time frame. Soyo was so so, but 440BX motherboards were rock solid - at least the ones I used were.
 
UsandThem said:
I came across a list someone posted about in 2011, and it's amazing to look back and see how many there once were: https://www.overclockers.com/forums...2-What-happened-to-all-the-motherboard-brands

My favorites back then were Epox and Iwill. The ones I disliked the most were Abit (I know, I know, everyone besides me loved them) and Soyo.
Click to expand...
i had an albatron. pretty sure i had an epox. maybe a jetway as well. fry's (rip) chip/board deals made getting a new board for each VIA athlon chipset upgrade pretty cheap.
 
FIC (which was part of the Formosa/VIA group) and Tyan had a bit of a run for a while in the 90s and early 2000s with decent Super Socket 7 and Socket A boards. In fact, one of Anandtech's earliest motherboard articles was the FIC VA-503+ (Apollo MVP3).
 
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