Hello Steffen
On Wed, 2003-01-08 at 22:06, Steffen Barszus wrote: > On Wednesday 08 January 2003 21:54, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Guy Van Sanden wrote: > > > I have a ECS K7S5A based on the Sis 735 chipset, very good stuff. > > > It's by far the cheapest board arround here in Belgium (costs about half > > > of the second-cheapest). > > > > I have four of these. The rev 3.1 boards have been great except for one > > losing the second IDE controller. The PC Chips 830LR is an identical > > board and may be a few bucks cheaper. > > > > The only downside to this board is the number of SDRAM/DDR slots. It has > > two of each, but they cannot be used simultaneously. It does allow you > > an easy upgrade path since your old SDRAM will work. > > > > > Performance is very good, and stability is excellent. Apart from me, I > > > know 3 other people that own one and they're all happy with it. 2 of > > > them are also running Mandrake 9 like me. > > > > > > The board has LAN onboard, which is very good, it is faster than the > > > Intel 10/100 PCI NIC I had before. If I'm not mistaken the better > > > performance of the onboard NIC is achieved because it doesn't have to go > > > through the PCI bus (I could be wrong here). > > > > It also has onboard sound. One minor problem shows up because it's > > locked to a certain frequency (I forget the particulars). MP3 playback > > is fine, but certain applications that make assumptions about the > > frequency will be chipmunked and high-pitched. Notably, the crossover > > plugin will play Quicktime sounds incorrectly. Trying to rip DivX using > > some encoders will require futzing with the audio encoding rate. Since > > the OP is using a soundcard this is probably a non-issue. > I don't know much about this one, I disabled onboard sound and use my SoundBlaster 128 PCI, which is great. My parents are running the onboard chip, but for much simpeler things, and it's holding up so far. > I know 3 people who run instantly into problems with these board I would never > ever advice an ECS k7s5a. MSI kosts a buck more, but I think it is worth the > money. And the k7s5a is not the cheapest board, I know of one board for 67 > EUR => KT266A chipset DDR/SDRAM and so on. I don't remember the name right > now, but I can ask if needed. I heard of people having trouble with these boards too, I do know that you need a good power-supply. Most 300Watt supplies are not sufficient. I run on a 400Watt model, my parents have 350Watt. It's also crucial to run on a recent BIOS, cause previous versions have had errors. Also, the older revisions were troublesome, while the new revisions don't run well with Thuderbird processors. I know Gigabyte sometimes has cheaper boards, but I haven't seem here in Belgium. Most shops have Asus and Abit, a lot have MSI, but ECS, Gigabyte and Epox are rare. I'm not promoting ECS, but after my nightmare with my expensive Asus, I'm very happy to have it, specially at that price. Kind regards Guy -- Guy Van Sanden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
