A64 mobos for $80

The quality and quality controller of ECS leaves much to be desired.
Occasionally you can find a winner, but they are very hit and miss,
with most boards being more of a miss. FWIW Asrock (Asus' el-cheapo
division) is supposed to have a similar motherboard to the ECS one and
it should sell for a similar price but hopefully with slightly better
quality.

I wouldn't count on it. The low-end Asus motherboards are imho 'POS' too, so I
somehow doubt I'd have much confidence in this Asrock.

"George Macdonald" wrote in message
...
And you think that all that "icky brown stuff" is lurking in his carpets
and furniture and coming out to attack his computer? Wow.

More like whatever was already coated, remained coated.

Yousuf Khan

On Sun, 28 Dec 2003 20:59:44 GMT, Tony Hill
wrote:

with most boards being more of a miss. FWIW Asrock (Asus' el-cheapo
division) is supposed to have a similar motherboard to the ECS one and
it should sell for a similar price but hopefully with slightly better
quality.

What I've heard from some local system builder friends, it ain't much
better :P

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On Sun, 28 Dec 2003 21:45:08 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
wrote:

Been running an ECS K7S5A for going on three years now. Still solid. My
brother has been running on one for almost two years now.

The K7S5A appears to be ECS's best model in recent years I think.

--
L.Angel: I'm looking for web design work.
If you need basic to med complexity webpages at affordable rates, email me
Standard HTML, SHTML, MySQL + PHP or ASP, Javascript.
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But keep in mind you pay extra bandwidth for their bloated code

"The little lost angel" wrote in
message ...
On Sun, 28 Dec 2003 21:45:08 GMT, "Yousuf Khan"
wrote:

Been running an ECS K7S5A for going on three years now. Still solid. My
brother has been running on one for almost two years now.

The K7S5A appears to be ECS's best model in recent years I think.

I think it may have been because of the single-chip SIS chipset. It really
simplified the design of the motherboard considerably enough that even ECS
couldn't screw it up.

Yousuf Khan

Tony Hill wrote in
.com:

FWIW
Asrock (Asus' el-cheapo division) is supposed to have a similar
motherboard to the ECS one and it should sell for a similar
price but hopefully with slightly better quality.

ASROCK makes theyr motherboards in ECS fabricplaces

--
Like ninjas, true hackers are shrouded in secrecy and mystery.
You may never know -- UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE.

On Mon, 29 Dec 2003 15:20:33 -0600, Rob Stow wrote:

Yousuf Khan wrote:

"George Macdonald" wrote in message
...

However, one friend had his for 1.5 years and then all of a sudden one

day

it died (I assume capacitor failure). However, this friend has a bad

history

of unexplained component failures on his systems. He is an ex-smoker at

one

time and I think that has stayed in his carpets and stuff and clog up his
computers.

What, his computers get lung cancer from years old ETS?........ hilarious!

Most of the dangerous chemicals in tobacco smoke are acids
or solvents. The same stuff that etches those yellow stains
onto a smoker's teeth, in other words. Their corrosive or
solvent properties are as bad for your computer as they are
for your lungs.

Etches - BS. Solvent action has nothing to do with it - simple surface
staining which is easily removed from whatever.

If you'd read the post you'd have seen that the guy had stopped smoking and
the suggestion that the deposits which stayed in the carpets were
responsible... apparently since retracted.

When I clean out smokers' computers, not only do those computers
tend to have a lot more dust in them than a non-smoker's computer,
the smokers' dust also usually leaves permanent stains behind.

As well, things that are corrosive are also by nature highly
conductive and easily ionized. All those electrical fields
in your computer encourage ionized (AKA "static charged") smoke
particles to deposit in the worst possible places - so it is
easy to get dust buildups that can cause short circuits. Plus
the smoke dust is typically mixed in with other gunk that makes
it light and fluffy and hence a great thermal insulator.

shrug The dust sticks to the tar which sticks to itself. In the home, if
you do any real cooking at all, there's more gunk from air-borne grease and
water vapor borne contaminants. No, I don't see it as another reason to go
vegan.:-)

The reliability of a smoker's computer usually goes up dramatically
when his office is declared a smoke-free zone. In my experience
CRTs are even more susceptible to tobacco smoke than are computers -
and it is usually a *lot* harder to open up a CRT monitor to clean it
out. Come to think of it, the only majore CRT shorts/fires I've
ever had to deal with came either from liquids spilled into the
monitor or a smoker's office.

Even in the days of smoke-filled offices, though there was undoubtedly more
*apparent* dirt in the computers, I'm not sure it was really any greater in
quantity. It did tend to collect on fan blades and the like but elsewhere
inside the box, I can't say I've ever seen a reliability problem due to
tarry deposits which predated the useful life of the computer or monitor.

Floppy disk drives were particularly prone to R/W-head and other problems
but really... nothing to make a big deal of and as much down to the poor
design of the drives themselves and the PC air system. I've seen more
problems from proximity of a laser printer or Xerox machine though even
there, there seems to be less environmental leakage in recent machines.
Now that *is* very nasty toxic, electrically conductive stuff... which by
its very purpose is designed to bake on to anything it comes into contact
with which gets even mildly warm.

If you have an ink-jet printer which has seen any appreciable use it makes
you wonder what the range and effects of it's pollution amounts to -
everything in it's close environ, including the printer itself, is covered
in ink-jet mist deposits. Ever cleaned out the ink spittoon (HP's own
term) in an HP DeskJet?

It's the only explanation I can find for it. When he used to smoke, I'd
constantly show him how clogged up his computers were with that icky brown
stuff, and that this was what was going into his lungs daily. That visual
demonstration wasn't enough to make him quit, but a heart attack finally
did.


I've got a friend who is a pathologist. He once showed me and
my girlfriend the lungs of a smoker and the lungs of a non-smoker.
I'd seen photographs before, but the impact of seeing those two bodies
side by side was *huge*. I've never smoked, but my girlfriend
quit cold-turkey right then and there. Amazingly enough, the
pathologist was and still is a heavy smoker.

And so endeth today's lesson!:-)

Rgds, George Macdonald

"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??

I had a horrible experience with an ECS board, in fact, the only time
I ever had to RMA a mainboard, and never used one again.

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 20:38:32 GMT, "KMS" wrote:

Yes... I thought that this would be good... and it actually was too good to
be true! Buyers beware!

I did purchase that board couple days ago. Here are my thoughts and
experiences with it:

The retail box did not come with the manual (had to download manual from ecs
web site). Also the driver CD that was supplied with the board was not the
correct one! I had to download the chipset etc. drivers from ecs web site
again...

Second big problem, I do not have an IDE hard disk, but only a SATA disk.
There was no driver floppy disk (needed with windows install) provided.
Also, the ECS nor SIS web sites did not have that driver! I ended up to
search the driver from other manufacturers web sites... and finally found
that from Asrock (ASUS) web site!

OK... at that point I was able to install windows... or so I thought.

During windows2000 install, the computer crashed many times. I had to lower
the speed of my Mushkin PC3500 (216MHz CAS2, 3, 3) ram to 166MHz in the
BIOS. After that I was able to install windows. I also tried another no-name
memory module that runs great with nForce2 board (ABIT NF7-S) at 216MHz
speed with 2,2,2 timings... but no go with the ECS.

Overclocking: The only speed settings that the board booted, were 200, 201,
202 and 203 MHz. I tried almost all the settings all the way to 232 (max. in
the BIOS), but no go. Somewhere around 220 I corrupted the BIOS... and had
to restore that from the bootable floppy. (That is a big plus with that
board that corrupted bios can be restored with bootable floppy disk!)

In the ECS web sites there are links to some newer (revA and revC) BIOSes...
but the actual files have been pulled out. I did find the same bioses
somewhere else, and did try them. They added the cool'n'quiet support, and
also "improve DRAM capability"... the improvement was that the bios disabled
DDR400 (PC3200) setting!!! I ended up to put back the original BIOS.

Finally I get so frustrated that I did go to Fry's and bought the MSI K8T
NEO board... and what a difference! The windows install did go through as
smooth as it could. Also right now I'm running the board at 220MHz FSB and
the memory is running at its rated settings. (Of course the clock speed is
slightly higher than rated...but still runs good!) Everything works very
good!

Tomorrow I'm going to RMA the ECS board back to the vendor. The price was
cheap, about half of the MSI board, but even if the ECS board was free I do
not think I'd use it...

Only consider to use that board if you do not plan to overclock and if you
plan to use PC2700 memory or slower with it... At least until they release a
new BIOS that fixes the problems.



"Yousuf Khan" wrote in
message
t.cable.rogers.com...
754-pin Athlon 64 mobos can be had for as little as $80. Based on SiS 755
chipset. This chipset seems to a little pocket rocket, apparently better
at
i/o than its rivals. Combine with a $200 A64 3000+, and things are getting
affordable. One of first SIS based mobos is the ECS-755. These SIS
chipsets
can allow overclocking of the processor without changing the clock rate of
the PCI or AGP bus; this is similar to Nvidia Nforce 3, but not VIA
K8T800.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mainboa...220083826.html

Wormwood wrote:
I had a horrible experience with an ECS board, in fact, the only time
I ever had to RMA a mainboard, and never used one again.

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 20:38:32 GMT, "KMS" wrote:


It's not so bad after you get over the fact that ECS lied to you and
ignored your emails and tried to cover it up by changing the webpage and
manuals and advertising after they discovered it wouldn't run DDR400.
Ever wonder why there are no 755A2s yet? Maybe they won't run DDR400
either except for a few cherry picked ones sent to reviewers like the
755A was.

I kept my ECS755A. I wasn't going to waste any more time or money due to
ECS. Newegg was great in their handling of my situation.