" A few people have recommened the ECS K7S5A PRO to me as an inexspensive
Socket A board. Can I please have some more opinions on this board from
people that have used it. "
It all depends what you want to do with it. It's versatile with RAM, as you
can use up to 1GB of SDRAM (PC133) or 1GB of DDR RAM (PC2100). It can take
processors up to the 266FSB AMD Athlon 2600XP+ (which i am using). The AGP
slot runs at 4x AGP, but it will accept 8x AGP cards (running at 4x AGP).
Just don't use a Netgear FA311 network card with it, as I and many others
have had incompatibility problems where it refused to acknowledge the
prescence of the CD / DVD drives. Since I changed the NIC, everything has
run smoothly without any problems.
My spec:
- Tsunami Sagittarius ATX window case & 350W PSU
- ECS K7S5A Pro mainboard (030811 BIOS)
- AMD Athlon 2600XP CPU (266FSB version)
- ThermalTake Volcano 11 Xaser Edition CPU heatsink & fan
- Western Digital Caviar ATA100 80Gb 7200rpm 8MB Cache hard drive
- 1 x 512MB PC2100 DDR RAM
- Inno3D GeForce4 Ti4200 64MB graphics card
- Gamesurround L-8738-6C sound card
- 3Com 3C905B-TX 10/100 network interface card
- Sony 1.44MB Floppy Drive
- LG DVD-ROM GDR-8161B 16x48
- LG CD-RW W8520B 52x24x52
- Round EIDE and FDD cables
- Windows XP Pro SP1
Some of the boards have on-board LAN, but mine didn't. The board also has
on-board sound, but I chose to add a 6-channel sound card with extra
speakers. All in all, it's cheap and cheerful, and it works perfectly with
what I have on it. I'm not over-clocking, but there are some non-standard
BIOS updates that work well.
Motherboard spec:
http://www.ecsusa.com/products/k7s5a_pro.html
Standard driver & BIOS updates:
http://www.ecs.com.tw/download/dw_spec.asp?product_id=269
Non-standard BIOS updates:
http://www.lejabeach.com/Pro/k7s5aProBIOS.html
A good K7S5A forum:
http://pub140.ezboard.com/bk7s5amotherboardforum
Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) usenet newsgroup:
alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.elitegroup
