Anyone have anything bad to say about ECS mobo's???

[ranalli]

I've always been an Asus/Abit guy and never had any problems with those brands. Has anyone ever used or had any problems with ECS brand motherboards?? Their AMD models in particular???

Thanks in advance,

Ranalli

 

[foofoo]

hi,
this will be flame bait for sure....
anyway, my personal experience with the ecs k7s5a has been nothing but bad. in my case, the 4 that have passed through my hands (and the more that have passed through my friends hands) have all had stability problems at 133 fsb. i built a duron system for my dad with a 100 fsb and that works very well with no problems but i just cant get them stable at 133 fsb. and yes, extensive trying with bios updates, phat power supplies, and all the tricks that i could get from here and ocworkbench.com
seems as if other people can have no problems with this board.
i dont have experience with other ecs motherboards.
good luck

 

[OulOat]

Some boards they built are crap, but other boards are awesome. Unlike the previous posters experience, my k7s5a totally rocks. I have put the board through hell and it still runs stable and smooth. For example, when installing a new HSF, I stabbed the mobo 3 times! And I set one of the capacitors on fire (yes, flames shot out) by plugging in the front USB cable wrong. Yes, the front USB doesn't work anymore, but everything else runs fine and dandy. So I would recommend ECS for certain mobos, definitely since their mobos are sooo cheap.

 

[optimistic]

My expierence with ECS motherboards were good. Stables & fast. Even with generic memory.

ECS K7VZA (KT133A) more stable than Abit KT7A (KT133A)
ECS K7SEM (SIS730S) both stable, but ECS runs faster than MSI MS-6340M (KM133a)

 

[ai42]

anyway, my personal experience with the ecs k7s5a has been nothing but bad. in my case, the 4 that have passed through my hands (and the more that have passed through my friends hands) have all had stability problems at 133 fsb. i built a duron system for my dad with a 100 fsb and that works very well with no problems but i just cant get them stable at 133 fsb. and yes, extensive trying with bios updates, phat power supplies, and all the tricks that i could get from here and ocworkbench.com

Sounds like bad RAM, had a friend with a K7S5A and he couldn't get 133fsb stable. Swapped the RAM and runs perfect.

My experience is pretty good I've had 3 K7S5As I've built for friends/family computers and they work out very nice.

 

[PlatinumGold]

I used to be an ardent defender of the ECS mb, I had a K7s5a, all went well. well kind of.

first i was pulling my video card out of once and the back end of the agp slot broke off. fortunately it was just plastic casing so no damage was done to any of the electronics and i even put the video card back in and ran it w/o incident for 1.5 years BUT it shouldn't have snapped of soo easily.

second, the USB slots on the back wore out w/ almost no usage. i never really used them the 1 year or so, then i got a printer w/ only a usb connection so i plugged in the usb and no connection. the slots in the back had stretched open soo much that it was no longer making good contact.

so finally i replaced it w/ an asus a7n8x, much better board.

oh and finally, the ecs onboard audio sucked.

 

[Rainsford]

I like my K7S5A. It is a great board, the only problem I have ever had with it was trying to use a cheap, generic power supply. But it has been great so far, I like it better than any previous board I've had, and I've had Asus, Abit and Iwill boards. Asus is good, but a good motherboard for $55 (my K7S5A) is nothing to laugh at.

 

[MrLondon]

Make sure your power supply is of good quality and take the heatsink off the chipset.
Apply the 'silver paste' to the heatsink and reinsert it to the chipset.

That'll solve 99% of the problems.

That happened to me where I couldn't go up to 133 because the 5v and 3.3v was weak.
Also, the glue on the heatsink was very, very poor, which caused it to get very hot (stupid ECS) and the 'silver paste' will cure that.

 

[Athlon4all]

I have used lets see, 5, Amptron/PC Chips/ECS mobo's, and I have not had any major problems with any of them. The ones I've used are the Amptron PM8600 (I think) Socket 7, PC Chips M779MR (SiS 630S, Socket 370), ECS K7VMA (VIA KM133, Socket A), K7S5A, and P5SJ-B (SiS Int. Video chipset, Socket 7 66fsb). I have had no problems with any of them

I will comment on the problems with K7S5A that you absolutely must have a good powersupply, especially when using high powered cpu's like Athlon XP 1600+ and up. You can get away with a poor ps on say a Duron 1.0 but if you're running a high-speed CPU, u must have a top quality 300W ps from Antec, Sparkle, Enermax, or Enlight.

 

[Macro2]

It's simple.
The ECS K7S5A and what came after has changed the perception of ECS from iffy to a quality player. Never has there been an effect like this in the motherboard industry. Motherboards over all dropped 30 bucks in price to the white box market. Asus was so creamed they had to come out with AS$ rock. Outfits like Abit and Shuttle now use ECS fabs.
Good thing is that you really don't have to pay over $100 for a good motherboard. Yeah, Asus still tries to get it but they had to deliver AS$ock to stay in the game.

Mac

 

[Brian48]

I have one and my brother has one. Both has been running fast and stable for over a year now. I especially like the on-board NIC.

 

[ranalli]

Thank-you for the replies fellas!!

 

[chilled]

well u get wat u pay for -> a decent mobo for a awesome price

i own ECS K7VZA (KT133) and K7AMA (Ali Magik). Both function as advertised and work well as per the design. No problems and stable.

if i had $$$$ (or actually £££) to spare then i woud get the best, but until then ECS is fine for me

 

[hdeck]

i have had 1 problem with my k7s5a. besides not being able to overclock it (unless you get unofficial BIOS), i've attempted to flash the BIOS once and for whatever reason the flash went bad and i am out $20 for a new BIOS chip.

 

[CraigRT]

I've done 1 K7S5A.. it's picky and hard to get running smoothly.. total pain in the ass to setup. and 6 months later it blows up and claims the CPU too.

nothing else in the machine was harmed.

I would never use ECS, although I do know vendors and stores that use a ton of their boards, with very little problems.. me however... baaaaad.

 

[earthman]

I use the K7S5A and have for a long time. The only problem was trying to use an unofficial BIOS, made it unstable. Using the official BIOS it works great, runs 24-7.

 

[John]

I have built dozens of systems using the K7S5a, and for the most part they are trouble-free. However, as of late I seem to have a few of them with the "bios reset" problem. Even when you flash to a newer bios, and/or change the battery, the cmos will reset itself on occasion.

Other than that I have had great success with the K7S5A.

 

[ncage]

Here is a post i made about the ecs board some time back. No matter what anyone tells you the ecs boards are flakey. Their QC seems to be on the low side. If you get luck and get one of thier good boards then you will have no problems but there is good chance you will get a flakey board anyways here is my last post:

Ok i will tell you my experience with the k75sa. When it was first released and all the postive reviews were out there for it. I got all excited and bought two. Four more people at work bought 1 mb a piece. Ok the first one i bought was great. It was one of the most stable boards i have ever owned. The second one i bought sucked. It would lock up all the time and gave me all kinds of problems (thats the one i used for my domain server). I have very little hardware on my domain server (1 hard drive, 1 cdrom, no sound). That is basically it. I was running windows 2000 advanced server. One day i was curious and swapped out the first k75sa i bought (the one that had been very stable). I put it in my domain server to see how stable it would be. Well, that fixed the problem. From that point on the domain server never crashed. Just if your curiuos, both the mb's were running the same bios version (latest one i could flash at the time). I bought the motherboards about 2 weeks apart. I forgot where i got the good one but the bad one was bought from newegg( i in no way blame newegg for it). The guys at work also had mixed results. Two motherboards were really stable and two sucked. ecs sucks when it comes to Quality control. Some of the k75sa's were really good and some really sucked. You just had to be lucky to get a good one. I don't know if they still have the same problems but it has kind of scared me when considering on buying any more ecs boards. I have always been happy with my tried and true (abit) . Oh btw i was using an athlon 1.4 in both machines.

Ncage

 

[DT4K]

I had numerous minor problems with my k7s5a and finally returned it and got an Epox 8kha+. Definitely worth the extra money.
With the ECS board, about half the time when I booted, the onboard lan would not function properly. After about a month, the lan stopped working all together. I would get occasional reboots for no apparent reason. The onboard audio didn't function properly about 1 out of every 4 times I booted. There were a couple of other minor irritations but I don't remember what they were. This was with an Enlight 300w psu and Crucial PC2100 RAM.
After replacing the board with the 8kha+, all problems dissappeared. The Epox was rock solid and had zero problems. About 3 months later, I broke my Epox with a screwdriver. I replaced it with an Abit Kr7a-raid. This board has also been trouble free.

So, some have had good luck with ECS boards, but many have not. If you look around, you will see a huge number of posts talking about what pieces of crap ECS boards are.

Maybe it is just very picky about the PSU, etc. but it shouldn't be.
I will never again buy an ECS board. To me, it is worth the extra money to go with a good quality mobo manufacturer and avoid the possible frustrations of ECS boards. Spend the extra and get an Asus, Abit, or Epox.

 

[tart666]

Just check out the 80,000 posts/ year about ECS problems on ocworkbench. Seriously, Asus has the same volume, but only gets 5,000 problems posts.

personally, I had three ECS boards die on me.

One with FSB unable to run at 133MHz (common problem)
Other with the corrupted bios due to the bad battery and rusted battery contacts (common problem)
The third just randomly dying

Not to mention the atrocious "no warranty" policy. Seriously, the customer does not get any warranty rights. Only the distributer. As far as end-consumers go, the only support is lawsuit threats to keep the problem posts off the messageboards.

 

[GoodRevrnd]

I think part of the problems with the K7S5A is the board revision they're using. I've used at least 6 of these boards. rev1.3 has been completely flawless, 1.2 only has very very very minor problems (random instability, occasional graphic glitches that were fixed w/ a new board of same kind), and i only used one revision befor that and it was kind of ho-hum. The other thing to keep in mind with this board is to use a good power supply, and make sure you use the latest bios. I can't even recall how many horrendous bugs have been fixed through the many bios revisions but they seem to have everything ironed out now.

That being said, when someone says to me "I need a computer and I want to go on the intarweb," this is the board i get. SiS735 is stable, and for $50 you can't beat a board that performs well, is stable, and gives you LAN & Audio.

When you get people's opinions on ECS it's really important to know what boards they are talking about and when they used them because they are fairly inconsistent. Some rock, some are PCChips nightmares.

 

[Woodchuck2000]

I've had nothing but success with the K7S5A.

 

[igowerf]

My K7S5a system is amazingly stable. Two of my friends have gotten K7S5a's as cheap upgrades too and they haven't had any problems either.

 

[0roo0roo]

current ecs from frys unstable randomly. can't neven install windows half the ntime. upgraded to antec 350watt, still same problem. back to frys i go

friends ecs didn't boot, returned got another one and it worked fine, go figure.

 

[Adul]

2 dead ecs mb right here :\