For those of you following the thread last week about the new SIS735 chipset and the Elite K7S5A motherboard, I have received my motherboard, and installed Mandrake 8.0 on it, and can share the following results. The K7S5A seems well constructed, but only 1 IDE cable is supplied. Two negative worth watching out for. Firstly, if the CMOS gets corrupted you must move a strap to clear the CMOS and leave it in this position for 10 minutes. Initially I found I had to do this several times until I realised that the PCMCIA adapter card I had fitted really did not like being in either of the two lower PCI slots. Once I moved the PCMCIA adapter to a different slot, the Bios was rock solid. Second, I had read that the latest Bios was an improvement, but the manual instructs you to use the wrong BIOS flash utility. (The CD has 3 different utilities on it) Elite's web site tells you the correct utility to use. The Bios does not permit you to change the clock multiplier, or the front side bus speed, (other than the basic 100MHz/133MHz) so the board is not oreinted for hardcore overclockers. On the other hand the board is VERY fast without any overclocking. I have fitted it with a 1.2G 266MHz fsb Athlon , 256M Crucial PC2100 DDR memory and Abit Siluro Geforce II MX video card . It is rock solid with no instability at all. I am not equipped to compare it with other motherboards, but if we take the word of the major review sites like Toms Hardware, Anandtech, or AMDmb, then it is right at the top of Athlon motherboard performance, at the lowest price of any comparable board. How about Linux performance? Mandrake 8.0 installed smoothly with no issues at all. It correctly installed drivers for the IDE controllers, the PCI bus, the AGP bus, and the USB. Linux would not recognise the integrated AC97 sound system, which was no surprise. The SIS site implies that the SIS735 has the same sound system as the SIS730, but when I checked the Linux drivers for the 730, I found that Sis had posted the wrong driver on their web site. They had put the link in for the LAN driver instead of the audio driver, so I have been unable to try it out. The RedHat hardware compatibility site suggests that an Intel i810 audio driver 'might' work with any AC97 sound system, but I have not tried it. So we can wait for an eventual Sis driver, or else install a separate sound card. Harddrake reported two devices which it did not recognise. I assume these were associated with the sound system since everything else works perfectly. I installed the nvidia OpenGL drivers, and OpenGL works perfectly. (As determined by tuxracer) So now I have a beautifully fast shiny new Linux computer. The only problem remaining for me is the Buffalo/Melco wireless LAN card which I cannot get to work under either Linux, or Windows ME (but it does work under Windows 98) (I cannot imagine what possessed me to buy a copy of Windows ME. It is 'terrible') This card is a right pig to install as I know from experience, and I am sure it has nothing to do with the K7S5A. Melco are promising Linux drivers for it 'some time this year'. In conclusion if anyone is tempted by the K7S5A all I can say is, I am very happy with it, but of course DYOR Derek
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