Elite ECS K7S5A PRO Review

Overall Rating

Too numerous to list, but see below for most revelant.

Too numerous to name them all of the problems with the ECS K7S5A PRO motherboard but by far the worst has to be the bios. I bought 2 brand new, still in the shrink-wrapped boxes, identical K7S5A PRO's and after meticulously installing into my case, I immediately start having problems. 1st thing, instead of detecting my cdrom, it gives me the ol' *^%$$#^**&$#@ rubbish, which will sometimes happen if the cdrom's screwed up the firmware. I change units 5 times with known working ones with same result. Suspecting a bad secondary, I install as slave on primary, and Bingo, it reads cd's just fine, but for some reason it is still showing the %#@#%&^*& after detecting on post. I flash bios to newest version, and I'll be damned if it didn't corrupt my bios to the point of no boot and no chance of recovery since it would not even detect floppy. So I switch bios chips with other board just like I have done countless other times, and it corrupts this chip with out even one decent boot to the floppy. I suspect the majority of the problems in this board are not in any way related to software, rom, but are truly engineering problems inherant in this model. I snagged new bios chip, installed into OTHER new board thinking it was a problem with just the one board, but guess what? This sucker works perfectly up to re-booting 1st time after OS install, and pops up saying the board battery is failing, so I put the meter to it and it's fully charged. It does the ol' checksum error where it is supposed to reset back to defaults, and re-booting pops up with the EXACT same problems as the 1st board. I tried the same menuver as Salem Cat, and with the exception that windows ran fine, but I had NO secondary IDE except for it detecting cdroms and any other IDE device as ()&^%$#@#$$%&! I have to say I have seen motherbards have their problems, and I don't even think most ECS board have any of these problems, but I do have a problem with them not even having a support choice other than faq and send them an e-mail. If you try to follow their support instructions, then you pick from a list the MB type, in this case K7, and then it has you pick your MB model, and gee, the K7S5A of ANY VERSION is not listed. The closest it comes is K7ASA which is NOT the same board. My recommendation to anyone thinking of a purchase from ECS Group should do their homework and check out Google or other search engines to see if the model in question has a history of problems, then grab your wallet and run.