Elite Group ECS K7S5A Review

Good Points
cheap, generally pretty stable

Bad Points
the chance of having a less reliable board...

General Comments
My brother in law wanted ca 2 years ago a budget system. After some search I found this Elite Group ECS K7S5A motherboard. In combination with a Duron 1 GHz and 512 DDR RAM it was a nice solution. certainly as it was pretended to be Athlon XP upgradable for the future (XP's at that time were new and very expensive.

With this combination we did have some intial stability problems. The combination of 100 MHz/100 MHz (CPU/RAM) was the most stable one and my brother in law was satisfied with it.

Last week we upgraded to an Athlon XP 2400+ after flashing the bios (checked first with the Duron).

The flashing went very OK (missing a backup option). The options of the new bios (k7s5a020809.exe) have increased significnatly and the first impressions that the Duron was now very stable.

After the flashing the installetion of the Athlon XP 2400+ went extremely easy. The system run in one time OK as it should do and looks so far very stable running on 133MHz/133MHz so getting the good values for this XP CPU.

After all: it was a cheap board and the upgrade did not cost too much as we already had the DDR memory.

For his sitution my brother in law can work again for a pretty long time with his PC.