Forget $99,$89, How about $79 for ECS K7S5a & 1gig duron Combo $6 shipping (DEAD NOW)

[oaaltone]

<< Is this a retail or OEM CPU? >>

On my invoices it says: AMD D1000 Duron Socket A Boxed Processor Outpost # AMD D1000 Duron Socket A Boxed Processor

 

[solo]

The only thing that scares me away from this is Outpost's screwy warranty policy. I still don't understand it...

 

[denhunter]

You folks who have gotten this board to run do a disservice to newbies who think this is a great deal. For every anecdotal story of this board working great, there are twenty about having to replace virtually every component in a system. READ THE TECH FORUMS BEFORE YOU BUY FOLKS!!! There is a reason they are giving them away at this price.

 

[gimpyd00]

Anyone know if this is a Morgan or Spitfire core Duron 1ghz? I've used this board with a Duron 800 and I love it. Possibly the most trouble free machine I've ever setup. Anyway, just wondering if we'll get the new Duron cores or if these are still the older ones. Thanks.

-gimp

 

[Snipa]

I thought all the 1 GHZ Durons and higher were Morgan cores. But I could be wrong????

 

[RBC]

I have two of these boards out of the five machines I have at home. One with a XP 1700 with some of that CC DDR and one of the 950 Duron combos from Outpost.com. Both went together flawlessly, both are rock solid. The comment on the PS is relevant, I couldn't get one to boot with a Antec 303 (only 14 amps at 3.3v+) but when I switched it out with a Enhance 350 from Newegg everything went smooth from there on out. According to ECS's tech support (who were amazingly quick in responding for a mobo manufacturer) you need a PS rated for at least 20 amps at 3.3v for this board.

 

[Thump553]

denhunter, you vastly overstate the situation. I understand there are plenty of people out there who had trouble building systems with this board, for one reason or another (primary causes are inadequate power supplies or crappy memory) but it is a huge, huge seller and many, many people had no problems whatsever (other than the LED connector thing mentioned above, which is a minor fix). I'm a nontechnical hobbist who built four systems using this board from Sept '01 to Jan '02 with no significant problems on any. All are still running fine. The last system was one of these outpost packages, and yes it was a retail Duron (heat sink, fan & three year warranty).

Yes, read up on this-or any other motherboard-beofre buying it. BUt unless you are an overclocker (which I feel is a foolish abuse of equipment, esp. since cpus and motherboards cost so low these days) this combo is a superb buy.

 

[xDrAGoNx]

<< The only thing that scares me away from this is Outpost's screwy warranty policy. I still don't understand it... >>


Yah, Outpost's warranty service is a little strange, but it works nonetheless.

It consists of u calling them for a Return Authorization # (or u can e-mail them) then send them the goods complete with all materials included.

Then the strange part. When you are obtaining your RA# you have to accept a "temporary" new order for the replacement. Which means you basically are ordering a new one. When they get your return package they are suppose to give credit back for the replacement order.

 

[solo]

Of course the tech forums are going to be full of people having issues with their MB, that's the whole idea behind the forum. Most people, including myself, who never have problems with their MB don't bother to post "It's working great!" in the tech forum.

The point being, denhunter, I think you've got it backwards, for every story of this board having problems there are twenty (most likely a higher percentage than that, I'm just echoing your argument in reverse) people who have zero issues and are running this board fine.

 

[lungster]

Ok, here's my "it works great" post for this mobo. One thing I highly recommend is for buyers of this mobo to check out the ECS web page and download the latest drivers. I had to install updates to the network, agp and sound drivers to get things stable. Once done, the system has been rock solid with my 1.4Ghz t-bird. For $79, it's hard to beat.

 

[tydas]

If you tell someone "hey go look at the forums and you will see what a crappy mb this is" you are really off base...You could say the same thing about every mb...the only reason people go to the forums is because they have problems...

And if you say that "hey pricewatch has this combo cheaper" than you are a braver man than me to give some of those flimsy companies your money...to me its not worth saving 5 bucks with some no-name vendor...

for around $87 shipped you cannot beat this upgrade, you probally could keep most of your old components as long as your psu and vid card are up to snuff...

 

[HKS]

<< The $79 price doesn't sound that great. There are 8 places on pricewatch.com selling the MB for $50 or less and 3 places selling the 1GHz Duron for $35. So you can get this combo for $85 plus shipping. With this Outpost deal you save $6 and some shipping. Although this is a good deal, it doesn't really seem that hot. Sorry. >>



Sorry for you guy... because I doubt you can get a RETAIL motherboard and a RETAIL chip with 3yr. warranty + fan for 50 + 35 = 85...

Prove me wrong and I'll recant.

 

[adlep]

Bump for a good deal
Lame on you who are complaining....

 

[tedinde1]

I have a small computer business. And have used this board in over 50 computer's i've sold. No problems. And stable. Let's not talk about the VIA chipset boards, kt133,kt266a, that everyone loves.

This board is cheap, stable. And Guess what It is a retail Board and BOXED CPU with heatsink and 3year warranty.

I have one of the 950 combo's i kept. OC"d it using 133/133 on the duron. and it's puring along at 1267mhz. for 2 months now. I just built one for a friend with the 1 gig combo. Pencil tricked the cpu to 1.85 volts. put an alpha cooler on it and it's running at 1333mhz for the last week.

I've used the overclockers bios on this board that gives you above 133.137/143/146/150/166. No problems. With XP processors. Most of the xp's will do the 146 but not 150. thats mostly because of the locked multiplier though.

Yeah they are a littlle slower than the 266a boards. But they make up for it with out crashing. and less than half the price.

 

[Lattiz]

Just wanted your opinion guys:

I currently have a p3 oc'ed to 933mhz, would this still be a good deal for me? Or should I just wait for XPs to drop a little more?

 

[wyvrn]

I would wait. You are going for a relatively minor upgrade to Duron 1Ghz from that pentium. But I bet you could sell your PIII mobo/cpu here for more than the Duron board costs, and get paid to upgrade

 

[TechDreamer]

I would stick with the PIII at 933 for now.

 

[tedinde1]

You will get about 10 to 15% boost upgrading the p3. And i am sure you can sell your combo for more than this. Hell you can buy it. Sell the chip on ebay for $50-55 Buy a 1700XP for $90.

and depending on what you sell your's for which should be around $125 maybe more. Im not doing the math. But when you get done. Your twice as fast.

If you dont mind the work do it. But then thats me. I dont think my computer has ever had the side cover on. haha

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

Does anyone know how much shipping to Canada would be?

 

[Zclyh3]

I'm not saying it's a crappy MB in terms of performance, but many people has gotten problems just installing the damn MB itself. And ECS's RMA team does so fricking long to get a replacement board. I'm just going to ignore this company period. I'll just stick to Epox, Asus, Abit and other VIA chipsets other than ECS.

 

[busmaster11]

Okay - the end-all to this.

This is a good board. It's cheap, solid, and reliable with some good features, like PC100/133/DDR compatibility. But its not very clean cut. If you know what you're doing, chances are you'll be fine. My personal conviction is anything thats not using a VIA or ALI chipset is decent.

Newbies should not get this board. If you do, you may not know how to get it working, and you'll come here and
b!tch about how the board sucks.

I've built three machines with this board, and have only had one real problem. There were random unexplained crashes on it using sdram after I used DDR on it for a while. Went back to DDR on it and its running rock solid. A BIOS flash should clear that up.

 

[FPSguy]

Now that wasn't very nice of Outpost. That cost me $85.23, and now I have to part out the Celeron 1.0 GHz system I was building.

 

[BobF]

I built my very first PC with a $89 K7S5A/950 MHz Duron combo that I picked up from Fry's back in December. The system runs great and it was a great bargain but I do have some cautions.

Before buying this board, I spent months reading various forums including the Sharky Extreme forums, the amdmb.com ECS forum, the Tom's Hardware forum and the OCWorkbench ECS forum.

Based on the posts that I've seen the K7S5A can exhibit some problems such as "data corruption", lost CMOS, unrecognized RAM and odd startup problems. The actual frequency of these problems is hard to get a handle on since many of those posting on these forums are there in the first place because they ran into a problem. This good point was mentioned in a post above.

But the problems can not *all* be attributed to "newbie" builders or those with inadequate power supplies. I've seen very experienced builders systematically replace component after component, including top notch 400 Watt power supplies that have narrowed their problems down to the K7S5A.

Whether such extreme problems occur in 1 out of 100 boards or 1 out of 10,000 boards is hard to say. Certainly the K7S5A is a big seller and that alone is a factor in all of the problem reports.

But, whatever the odds, a K7S5A, like any complicated piece of electronics, is subject to odd behavior.

For that reason, I recommend that people buy their K7S5A from a local retailer with a decent return policy. I would recommend this even if you have to pay a few dollars more. I bought my board from a local Fry's for this very reason.

If mail order is still your best option I would recommend a seller like newegg. Outpost would also be a good option if their return policies are OK. (Weren't they once telling folks to deal directly with ECS for K7S5A returns?)

Also, the K7S5A can produce a crackling sound problem when paired with a PCI based graphics card. I found this out after I had bought a PCI Voodoo3 2000 for my setup. Some have cured this with a BIOS change and others by swapping PCI slots but some have found no solution. So buy an AGP graphics card to avoid this potential problem.

Finally, here's an excellent new K7S5A website to add to the others mentioned above:

K7S5A Problem Fix Guide

And here are the related forums:

K7S5A Problem Fix Guide Forums

Check out the "Problems with the K7S5A" sub forum for discussions of common problems.

Finally, I don't mean to knock the K7S5A. For myself and many others this board works great and is an incredible bargain. It's just that people should be aware that problems are possible.

Bob

 

[pigseye2]

Great advice BobF,
Only problem I have is the local PC shop here sells the motherboard alone for $99.

To me, spending $79 and getting a 1G Duron is worth the risk.

If you can get a pretty good deal locally, that's the way to go.

I got the Duron 950Mhz version at the $89 price and it's running great at 1.2G.

Pigseye

 

[Jhill]

This board runs good for me. My neighbor has one of these boards with a duron and ddr ram. If he runs the duron at 100 and memory at 133 he gets stability problems. But if he drops the memory down to 100 and runs them both at 100/100 the board is fine. Thats the only problem we've had.