ECS K7S5A mobo

[Rottie]

Curious anyone still using ECS K7S5A mobo or give up and upgrade it?

 

[Buz2b]

I have some family members still using theirs that I built for them. None have upgraded. These are the kind of folks that will use them until they quit before upgrading. Was there something more you were curious about?

 

[imported_juanflaiter]

ECS KTS5A is a great motherboard. If it had DDR 333 support it would be like the best Mobo on earth xDD

 

[osage]

I still have a couple Folding@Home..24/7

 

[CplusE]

Does your ECS K7S5A still work smoothly?

 

[osage]

always has, I did have 1 that was flacky.
overall 3 of 4 have been very good for me.

 

[CraigRT]

Originally posted by: CplusE
Does your ECS K7S5A still work smoothly?

I've never seen one break 8 months of usage. I hate that vile garbage hardware, personally.

 

[Rottie]

Originally posted by: Buz2b
I have some family members still using theirs that I built for them. None have upgraded. These are the kind of folks that will use them until they quit before upgrading. Was there something more you were curious about?

Well I have seen there are a lot of new technologies that K7S5A lacks such as SATA, RAID, etc....I was wondering if it is worth to upgrade it or not...my mobo has been gone from Duron 700Mhz, Duron 1.3GHz and now AMD XP 2400+ (upgraded 5 months ago). It was good mobo.

 

[Rottie]

Originally posted by: CplusE
Does your ECS K7S5A still work smoothly?

my mobo has no major problems for last 4 years.

 

[Buz2b]

Originally posted by: CraigRT

Originally posted by: CplusE
Does your ECS K7S5A still work smoothly?

I've never seen one break 8 months of usage. I hate that vile garbage hardware, personally.

Not sure how many you have "seen" but for the record, 4 family members and probably 8 customers later, I've yet to have a failure; dating back to the original release MB and all the way through one K7S5A Pro board. Not one failure to date. Two of those have since upgraded to an nForce board but kept the old system as a backup.

(By Rottie) Well I have seen there are a lot of new technologies that K7S5A lacks such as SATA, RAID, etc....I was wondering if it is worth to upgrade it or not...my mobo has been gone from Duron 700Mhz, Duron 1.3GHz and now AMD XP 2400+ (upgraded 5 months ago). It was good mobo.

This would all depend upon you. If you need, or think you might need SATA or RAID, etc. in the near future, then skip the ECS board and upgrade to something else. However, in my experience the K7S5A is a good, decently reliable board; if that's what you need.
Actually, even the K7S5A Pro version is a bit overshadowed by some of the nForce boards and some of those can be a real bargain. As much as I might like the ECS, you'd probably be better off with something like an nForce2 board for probably a somewhat comparable price and more available options.

EDIT: I would like to add the obvious: If your board is working fine and has all the features you need at this point, why worry? A tired but true saying is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" I know we always want to "upgrade", whether we need it or not. I know that's what the wife accuses me of! LOL! :laugh: So, you should decide if you NEED to upgrade (need SATA, RAID, faster RAM, etc) or do you just WANT to upgrade. BOTH, IMHO are good reasons to upgrade.

 

[amdskip]

My server at home runs on one with a duron 750 and the family computer also uses one with a xp 1700 which gets abused and both work flawlessly.

 

[Peter]

All of those I personally handled are still in their original use, about half a dozen, and from what I've heard (nothing!), there are no complaints from the people I recommended them to either. Most of the early ones got upgraded to more RAM and the maximum CPU (2400+) meanwhile, and all of them are doing just fine. I have yet to see one die.

 

[Mem]

've never seen one break 8 months of usage. I hate that vile garbage hardware, personally.

After my MSI board died in my backup PC a few years ago,I needed a cheap SDRAM compatible board so replaced it with an ECS K7S5A Pro,all I can say it`s still going strong with zero problems and rock solid on stability,not bad for £29.99 board I paid for here in the UK,I got my moneys worth and more .

 

[Rottie]

Originally posted by: Peter
All of those I personally handled are still in their original use, about half a dozen, and from what I've heard (nothing!), there are no complaints from the people I recommended them to either. Most of the early ones got upgraded to more RAM and the maximum CPU (2400+) meanwhile, and all of them are doing just fine. I have yet to see one die.

I forgot K7S5A has memory up to 1GB right?

 

[Rottie]

Originally posted by: Buz2b

Originally posted by: CraigRT

Originally posted by: CplusE
Does your ECS K7S5A still work smoothly?

I've never seen one break 8 months of usage. I hate that vile garbage hardware, personally.

Not sure how many you have "seen" but for the record, 4 family members and probably 8 customers later, I've yet to have a failure; dating back to the original release MB and all the way through one K7S5A Pro board. Not one failure to date. Two of those have since upgraded to an nForce board but kept the old system as a backup.

(By Rottie) Well I have seen there are a lot of new technologies that K7S5A lacks such as SATA, RAID, etc....I was wondering if it is worth to upgrade it or not...my mobo has been gone from Duron 700Mhz, Duron 1.3GHz and now AMD XP 2400+ (upgraded 5 months ago). It was good mobo.

This would all depend upon you. If you need, or think you might need SATA or RAID, etc. in the near future, then skip the ECS board and upgrade to something else. However, in my experience the K7S5A is a good, decently reliable board; if that's what you need.
Actually, even the K7S5A Pro version is a bit overshadowed by some of the nForce boards and some of those can be a real bargain. As much as I might like the ECS, you'd probably be better off with something like an nForce2 board for probably a somewhat comparable price and more available options.

EDIT: I would like to add the obvious: If your board is working fine and has all the features you need at this point, why worry? A tired but true saying is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" I know we always want to "upgrade", whether we need it or not. I know that's what the wife accuses me of! LOL! :laugh: So, you should decide if you NEED to upgrade (need SATA, RAID, faster RAM, etc) or do you just WANT to upgrade. BOTH, IMHO are good reasons to upgrade.

What got me thinking when I was building for my friend he got MSI mobo with hottechnolgy and AMD 64 cpu I feel like he got a better rig than mine. I know k7s5a is no longer made anymore. that is why I posted this.

 

[Rottie]

Originally posted by: amdskip
My server at home runs on one with a duron 750 and the family computer also uses one with a xp 1700 which gets abused and both work flawlessly.

What OS is your server running on?

 

[amdskip]

It's running windows 2k.

 

[Buz2b]

Originally posted by: Rottie

What got me thinking when I was building for my friend he got MSI mobo with hottechnolgy and AMD 64 cpu I feel like he got a better rig than mine. I know k7s5a is no longer made anymore. that is why I posted this.

Well, he DID get a better rig than yours; that's not hard to see. The question would then be, do you want to spend the $$ to keep up with him (if that's really important to you) or start saving and wait for the next generation (probably with the BTX standard) of MB's come out.

 

[Rottie]

Originally posted by: Buz2b

Originally posted by: Rottie

What got me thinking when I was building for my friend he got MSI mobo with hottechnolgy and AMD 64 cpu I feel like he got a better rig than mine. I know k7s5a is no longer made anymore. that is why I posted this.

Well, he DID get a better rig than yours; that's not hard to see. The question would then be, do you want to spend the $$ to keep up with him (if that's really important to you) or start saving and wait for the next generation (probably with the BTX standard) of MB's come out.

Yeah I should start saving some money for next generation mobo. On other forum I posted about if I could add ATI Radeon X800 card to this mobo, they said it is a waste for old mobo. Right now I have Radeon 9200 which is not very bad for some of today new games. Also I do photo and video editing. I heard X800 is dead I am not sure about it.

 

[stover21]

On the topic of this MB, I run a k7s5a with a xp 1600 that i put together some years ago.

I want to get out as much juice as I can from my antiquated 1600 before replacing it so I was gonna consider overclocking it. Now I know this MB completely sucks for OCing, so I was wondering if anyone could suggest a cheap replacement motherboard (probably needs to be a few years old to be able to run with my ddr 2100 RAM). Without really consider anything else, like onboard sound or usb x.0, what would be my possible choices?

Thanks for your input.

 

[Buz2b]

Originally posted by: Rottie

Originally posted by: Buz2b

Originally posted by: Rottie

What got me thinking when I was building for my friend he got MSI mobo with hottechnolgy and AMD 64 cpu I feel like he got a better rig than mine. I know k7s5a is no longer made anymore. that is why I posted this.

Well, he DID get a better rig than yours; that's not hard to see. The question would then be, do you want to spend the $$ to keep up with him (if that's really important to you) or start saving and wait for the next generation (probably with the BTX standard) of MB's come out.

Yeah I should start saving some money for next generation mobo. On other forum I posted about if I could add ATI Radeon X800 card to this mobo, they said it is a waste for old mobo. Right now I have Radeon 9200 which is not very bad for some of today new games. Also I do photo and video editing. I heard X800 is dead I am not sure about it.

Bottom line; stay where you're at. You have a decent video card for the MB you are using and it can run almost anything you want; perhaps not as fast as you want, but OK for now. Getting a better video card would not give you that much boost with what you have right now. Smart thing to do is save the bucks and wait for the next generation of MB's. By that time the current kick-a$$ video cards will already be overshadowed by newer versions. And I'm not talking about a long time here either, so don't worry about that. Most of this will happen in the next 3-6 months IMHO. Not a long time to wait.

 

[Arcanedeath]

I still have 6 systems I built based out of these boards running, they vary from a duron 1ghz w/ 512mb of Sdram to an AXP 1700+ w/ 1 Gig of PC2100 DDR, 4 of the 6 have been working well for 4+ years, 3 of them are office PC's, ones a file server, one is an Email / Web browsing machine, and the last one is a family PC that still gets used as their main rig, w/ the exception of one onboard NIC being intermintant on one of the boards they have been rock solid (I replaced the onboard NIC w/ a PCI Intel Pro 100-S), all of them are using Enermax 350 watt power supplies though so that may have contribuited. I used one as my main rig for around 2.5 years, started w/ a Tbird 1.33 Ghz and went all the way up to a 1700+ OC'd to 1.83Ghz via some pin/wire mods, the others have a 1500+ and 3 1600+'s all palaminos. for the $40-$50 US per board I paid I'd say I'm still getting my monies worth Although I'm using an NForce 2 ultra 400 based system now and if I was building value AXP based systems today I'd prolly use the shuttle Nforce 2 board thats so cheap w/ decent ocing features. But for it's day the K7S5A was the budget board to own, the sis 735 chipset still has great IDE and decent AGP performance and extremly good stability.

 

[Rottie]

Originally posted by: Buz2b

Originally posted by: Rottie

Originally posted by: Buz2b

Originally posted by: Rottie

What got me thinking when I was building for my friend he got MSI mobo with hottechnolgy and AMD 64 cpu I feel like he got a better rig than mine. I know k7s5a is no longer made anymore. that is why I posted this.

Well, he DID get a better rig than yours; that's not hard to see. The question would then be, do you want to spend the $$ to keep up with him (if that's really important to you) or start saving and wait for the next generation (probably with the BTX standard) of MB's come out.

Yeah I should start saving some money for next generation mobo. On other forum I posted about if I could add ATI Radeon X800 card to this mobo, they said it is a waste for old mobo. Right now I have Radeon 9200 which is not very bad for some of today new games. Also I do photo and video editing. I heard X800 is dead I am not sure about it.

Bottom line; stay where you're at. You have a decent video card for the MB you are using and it can run almost anything you want; perhaps not as fast as you want, but OK for now. Getting a better video card would not give you that much boost with what you have right now. Smart thing to do is save the bucks and wait for the next generation of MB's. By that time the current kick-a$$ video cards will already be overshadowed by newer versions. And I'm not talking about a long time here either, so don't worry about that. Most of this will happen in the next 3-6 months IMHO. Not a long time to wait.

I will see what will happen in the future. Thanks for the input tho.

 

[Rottie]

Originally posted by: Arcanedeath
I still have 6 systems I built based out of these boards running, they vary from a duron 1ghz w/ 512mb of Sdram to an AXP 1700+ w/ 1 Gig of PC2100 DDR, 4 of the 6 have been working well for 4+ years, 3 of them are office PC's, ones a file server, one is an Email / Web browsing machine, and the last one is a family PC that still gets used as their main rig, w/ the exception of one onboard NIC being intermintant on one of the boards they have been rock solid (I replaced the onboard NIC w/ a PCI Intel Pro 100-S), all of them are using Enermax 350 watt power supplies though so that may have contribuited. I used one as my main rig for around 2.5 years, started w/ a Tbird 1.33 Ghz and went all the way up to a 1700+ OC'd to 1.83Ghz via some pin/wire mods, the others have a 1500+ and 3 1600+'s all palaminos. for the $40-$50 US per board I paid I'd say I'm still getting my monies worth Although I'm using an NForce 2 ultra 400 based system now and if I was building value AXP based systems today I'd prolly use the shuttle Nforce 2 board thats so cheap w/ decent ocing features. But for it's day the K7S5A was the budget board to own, the sis 735 chipset still has great IDE and decent AGP performance and extremly good stability.

That's good...I have not see mobo at stores anymore I wanted to build for my friend.

 

[ToXiCRaGE]

I thought I would make a new post but this one will do. I have also a K7S5A question.

With the newest drivers (newest BIOS upgrade), what is the max XP speed that the mobo will support?

I am planing to upgrade my old XP 1600 with an XP 2500, 2600, or 2700. The ECS site says that the board will support ALL XP series of cpus - is that true? Anyone trying to put in a XP 3000 to see if it works?

Worse comes to worse (as long as the mobo maxes out on its cpu speed) I am planing to buy a faster cpu (like XP 2800 or so) which will run slower on THIS mobo (eg, capped at 2500+ speed). Is this duable?

Thanks.

PS: I am not sure why are you guys are so pesimistic towards this mobo and say that it will (may) brake after few months of usage. I got my for almost 3 years and it still is going strong! (knock on wood)