Elite Group ECS K7S5A Review

Overall Rating

To-date (01-02-2009) this second-hand Socket-A mobo has been almost faultless in fairly heavy personal/small business use - despite lots of add-ons + only running an 1100 MHz AMD Morgan with SDRAM (not DDR) RAM.

That it would have be more even more effective with only DDR 200/266 slots + USB-2 as standard. Also, that trying to set-up the additional front-end/front case USB connections has always been/remains a 'virtual nightmare' which can (worst scenario) FRY the mobo .... unless the installer has a PHd in K7S5A, plus suitable back-up and insurance - despite what the ANORAKS might have you believe!

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!