Elite Group ECS K7S5A

Heavy personal/small business use for any motherboard/any price use tends to run most Socket-A (and other, more recent) mobos into the proverbial scrapheap - though the - several -K7S5As still keeps performing! That said, have to admit that whilst it is used with graphics + pix, have NEVER run games applications. For that, we use the National Lottery ..........

So, apologies to those who don't like 'caps' .... but if memory servers, this acutely dates back to the 'daze' of TELEX, when copious use of caps meant LOUD BELLS CLANGING at the receiving end! Can say that, because I used to be a journalist, wot clearly remembers the 'non-joys' of TELEX - especially writing-n-feeding paper tapes for international business use.

Likewise, those Admin 'nerds' who subsequently viewed e-mail use as an updated version of M-EMOS ........ wot woz also NOT to be abused for corporate comms. Here, we aren't 'computer nerds' - but at least we also have experience of I.P Sharp's APL in the pre-Internet 'daze' ..... and can remember when something the size/computing power of the now-humble ECS K7S5A used to (seemingly) fill something like an entire Portacabin .... and a 500Mb Hdd was LOTS of money!

So, back-to-the-future ...... and the ECS K7S5A mobo in 2009? Potentially remains THE SAFE/RELIABLE Mobo for personal + small-business users - only doubt if ECS wants to say this .... for obviously negative sales/marketing reasons! And yet, in the midst of a global recession .... maybe this is THE time to re-launch the K7S5A (and supportive/up-dated CPUs) as being the RECESSION-PROOF RETRO-ALTERNATIVE ...... with ECS making money on updates, and the likes of AMD/etc flooding the Marketplace with cheap, up-dated CPUs.

Or, we could all file for bankruptcy .... and continue to support 'gaming fanatics' who only want to have ever-faster and technologically advanced hardware/software ..... whose R+D can only ever be funded by outrageous prices, and 'impressionable children' who likewise grow-out of shoes-n-clothes, faster than the sell-by-date ....... on manky bread!

Bought it as a used one in 2007 with Duron 900 and 256MB of SDRAM. Now it's running an Athlon XP 2400+ and 1GB of DDR400 with no problems. Huge compatibility, starting from supporting 2 memory types, to having a universal AGP slot that will fit any card. Chipset is rather colder than expected. Has onboard LAN. Could have had USB 2.0 and maybe a better onboard audio.

I have been running the Elite Group ECS K7S5A board since 2002, 3 years now. I had a problem with it showing drives that did not exist until up flashed the Bios with and upgrade and no there is no problem, exept the Ultra ata thing. A few months after purchase I had to buy a new battery. And twice in the passed year it said

The Elite Group ECS K7S5A is truly great I had no problems with it.

I was surprise what it could do.

I built this Elite Group ECS K7S5A system a year ago....AMD 2.1, WD 40 gig, G-Force 4 128, CD-RW etc..... running Win 98SE. I have never had a second of trouble with it. I put it together, put it on the desk and it has run non-stop an average of 18 hours a day. Have DSL, never a glitch, does EVERYTHING asked of it. I am buying another one today to replace my Jetway V266-B in my other system which is running XP Pro. I have and will recommend that others buy and use this mainboard.

Elite Group ECS K7S5A; I am not here to slam the thing I didn't pay a dime for the whole system. A friend had built it and when it worked it was smokin'. The GeForce3 Ti200 was the video card that he had in it along with 512mb of RAM and an 80Gig HD. I need some ideas. Oh yeah the reason that he gave it to me was he didn't have time to play EverQuest anymore.

I agree with all that I have read from other owners of these Elite Group ECS K7S5A motherboards. Once burnt, never again!

Built this computer over three years ago, Elite Group ECS K7S5A, 256MB DDR ram, Western Digital HD, Nvidia Gforce 2 graphics.

This setup ran well for for me for a year and then I ran into some promblems, it started with installing and running programs, then errors while burning disks, finally boot up. At first I thought maybe a new malicious worm, so a reformate was in order, but it was met with little success.

After discussion with more adept computer friends, things were pointing in the direction of the HD or mainboard.

Not wanting to believe that only after a year of use my mainboard was fried, I forced the rusty gears in my head to start turning. Then the room got brighter as if a lightbulb had been turned on! Above what some poeple would call a block of dense iron wood ;)

I noticed that the more I rebooted the worst(or sooner) the errors became. This was most noticable during a reinstall of my operating system from Win 98 to ME back to 98, Windows 98 is a smaller OS and has fewer reboots during install compared to WIN ME. I also noticed that if the machine sat for a day or so it was less problematic (A battery due to it's chemical make up will gain a small amount of voltage if allowed to rest).

This lead to the conclusion that something was either heating up a circuit in the mainboard expanding a hairline crack or draining something like a BATTERY! So I had two choices to take 1)several pieces of papertowel sandwiched between the back of the mainboard and the case (to slightly stress the board to reconnect a hairline crack) to see if this made a difference in performance, if so a NEW mainboard would be in order. Or 2) replace the BIOS battery.

I decided on the latter, I ran down to my local electronics store bought a battery and put it in. All problems were solved and it's still running good two years later.

Elite Group ECS K7S5A - Built 3 systems with AMD 2400XP and 2000XP and the ECS K7S5A Pro Motherboards. One is using 768 MB SDram and 2 using 512 MB DDR. Loaded them with Win XP Pro. The systems do not like certain graphic cards. The driver caused instability and system lock. I had two older (2 yrs old) graphics cards (These were older high end gaming cards, one had 64 MB and another had 128 MB.) that refused to work on these systems without causing crashes and system lock. One stable system was using a new Nvidia MX400 with 64 MB and was stable as heck. Ran a battery of tests and remained stable. ...and they played my games with great graphics. I contacted Microsoft on-line only to confirm the driver is causing memory conficts. I contacted company "A" and could not get resolution. Rather than fight the driver software, I switched all the systems to Nvidia MX400 cards w/64 MB at $29.00 each and all the systems are stable. Previously, I was a great fan of company "A". Recently their drivers are causing issues even on my "I" based systems when the drivers were updated.

It is because of the stablity issues that arose during my system builds that I have setup my boot to be very conservative.

1) No fast boot. Always perform a system memory check. At times I have by bypassed this option with no ill effects after changing the graphics card.

2) I locked the system to operate at 133MHZ CPU and 133 MHZ Memory.

3) I have configured the bios for components in my system optimized.

4) I locked my bios so it cannot be updated or accessed from the outside.

There have been no problems with stability. This includes one system I have configured for my 2 yr old and 4 yr old daughters.

It's Paper_Sack again, giving my 3rd cent. My AGP card is fried. Not sure if this is related to the mainboard, say a voltage problem, but I have never had an AGP card fail. (LeadTek Winfast Ti 32mb ddr) PCI card I scrounged up works fine and board is still super stable.

I run my box as a server and have 2wk uptimes. Reset manually, still havent had a crash.

As for the manual, if you can't understand it, again buy a gateway or a dell. It's definitly sufficient Cord047. Your comment made me laugh.

I won't buy an ECS next time, I am not certain of their quality and am no longer in the bargin component market. I have built 3 systems for friends or family since then w/ ECS boards. No problems to report.