Item: Elite Group ECS K7S5A
Rating: 2.5

haycac's review of Elite Group ECS K7S5A

“I've run this Elite Group board for some time. The...”

★★★☆☆

written by haycac on 23/07/2004

Good Points
Low cost, ease of setup, features per pound, SDR/DDR support, nippy.

Bad Points
Flaky. There are some good ones out there, but bad ones too. Can go down for no apparent reason.

General Comments
I've run this Elite Group board for some time. The current model operates in my tertiary machine, powering a 1.8GHz Duron and 512MB PC2100 Corsair RAM (CAS 2.5). This board has proven to be OK, but no more than that. I have had the board fail for no apparant reason (at the time it was running an Athlon 1800+). The processor was fine, indeed as were all the components, and an 850MHz Duron brought it back to life (the Athlon I gave to my Father incidently, who needed an upgrade). I have also encountered the board twice before. A friend of mine bought one, as did his brother. When they came to upgrade their processors, the board died and would not power up again under any circumstances. The second time this happened, I was present and can confirm that nothing was done to cause the board to fail (aside from the upgrade. Just now, when endeavouring to upgrade the machine from a 1.3GHz to a 1.8GHz Duron, the machine refused to boot up, until the BIOS was reset and the old processor reinstalled. After booting it with that, I then reinstated the 1.8, which it took gracefully. When it works, it's a pretty good board. I've been stubborn and seen it through, but I can't say it's hassle free. Especially if you upgrade with any frequency.

Value For Money
Ease of Set Up
Over 1 Year

Time Motherboard Owned

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Bay155's Response to 163371_haycac's Review

Written on: 15/09/2004

Hello,
 
 I noticed you had two different processor families. The Duron is operating at 100 MHZ and the Athlon is 133 MHZ. You may have to enter the bios and reset the clock on the CPU before system boot.
 
 1)Upon power on, enter the bios by pressing ESC.
 2)Go to the CPU configuration and set the system bus frequency at 133 Mhz. Your memory for this system should also be able to tolerate 133 Mhz.
 3)Set both and save.
 4)Boot to OS.
 
 See if this helps.

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