Elite Group ECS K7S5A Reviews

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Good Points: 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.

Bad Points: 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!

General comments: 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!

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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.

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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

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The Elite Group ECS K7S5A is truly great I had no problems with it.
I was surprise what it could do.

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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.

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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.

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

electro mixer's review has yet to be rated - Be the first!
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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 dir ...

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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 wa ...

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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 m ...

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I have built 3 or 4 of these and have had no problems. The SiS 735 chipset is quite good. I love the fact that you can use DDR or SDRAM (don't mix 'em!). I built one computer for my wife using XP 1700 and two for my grandkids, using Duron 1.0Ghz processors. We have Win2K on one and Win98 or the others. Both OS's work great. I have not put XP on this MB yet. With onboard sound, 2 USB ports on the rear and a NIC, all you need is a decent video card and away you go! Hook up to broadband if yo ...

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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 encou ...

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Elite Group ECS K7S5A - I own a small computer sales/service store. I recently purchased the inventory of another computer store that was going out of business.

Among the items I bought were nine ECS mainboards.
Of those nine boards, eight of them failed. The boards were a mix of K7S5A, K7S5A Pro, and K7VTA3's. The biggest problem was the AGP video cards wouldn't function. Obviously, based on some of the other reviews contained on this site, I wasn't the only person experiencing that pro ...

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I recently purchased a Elite Group ECS K7S5A motherboard and an athlon 2000xp WD 1600 and 512 ddr. The board runs fine until I try and download files. It freezes up and messes up my boot record and leaves me with no choice but to reinstall WinXP. Very weird! I tried different ram, I have tried a different harddrive, a different video card but... no luck! The cable modem works ok, I tried that on another computer. What could it be??
danpayette@yahoo.com

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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.
...

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I have owned my Elite Group ECS K7s5a motherboard for about a year now. I have had no problems with it, it has been very reliable. The SIS735 chipset is the best that I have used in a long time. I recommend this motherboard to any beginning computer junkies.

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Ive used this Elite Group ECS K7s5a motherboard in 6 machines.Was very easy to set up works well with the gforce cards.Ive used sdram and ddr memory without any problems.I put in the athalon chip and the duron chip from 1.4s and up.Very dependable board they have been running for 2 years now.

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I built my first computer,about 2 yrs. ago,and I have been using the k7s5a board all the time,when I first put it together,I was using a 1.3 AMD Duron,and it ran extremely well,no problems,except for the ones that the nut behind the wheel did.Anyway,,I eventually changed the cpu to an AMD Athlon 1800+ Thoroughbred,and I am using 512 mb. of sdram,(which will be changing to ddr soon)and I am using a GeForce 2 mx400 graphics card,,and using xp pro, and for an everyday computer,I think it's awesome, ...

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My son and I bought two Elite Group ECS K7s5a motherboards with Athlon 2400 XP processors a few weeks ago. They work great. I am extremely pleased with mine. We had a little difficulty with one board picking up the Athlon as 1000 Duron and running at only 1.00 GHZ. We're uncertain what the difficulty was but after swithcing CPUs between the two boards in attempt to decide if the K7S5A or the Athlon was to blame, and reinstalling the CPU fan with liberal heat sink compound, both boards run be ...

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There are a lot worse motherboards around and for the £55 i paid about 6 months ago i have no complaints. Read the manuals and go to the forums and u will get it sorted and as for durons , come on u may aswell have got a celeron
If you think this board is bad get a gigabyte you'll be writing more reviews on here for sure.....