k7s5a network problems

[Bill Agreste]

After reading the messages herein regarding this board, I have purchased two of them, and a third one was sent by the dealer as a replacement for one. In all cases, the boards worked fine except for the network connections... The internal SIS network card is absolutely **** and after three days of trying to get it to work I have given up. Fortunately, Outpost.com agreed to take back the boards and let me buy something else. Unfortunately, the boards will not accept any of my accessory nic cards (3 com, netgear, or Dlink) without having severe problems such as boot and cd rom errors, but I can get to the network with them. Anyhow, Unless someone here can enlighten me, these boards go back in a few days. Has anyone made them work on a network yet?

[cableguy69]

Got all three of mine working. I went to the SIS (http://www.sis.com/support/driver/630lan.htm) and downloaded all the drivers from there. They work better than the ones from ECS and better than the ones that came with the board. Oh, if you're having probs with the on-board sound, download those drivers from SIS also. ;)

[Peter M]

The integrated SiS network card works fine, low latency, zero PCI bus load. What else do you ask for?

If you have three other NICs you can't get to work either, I'd say the problem is ENTIRELY elsewhere ...

regards, Peter

[Rocketmech]

Yep ,never a issue here too... what kind of problems are you having?

[robbiefest]

In Australia we don't get the onboard network adaptors so haven't seen this problem. Have read though that this board will not work with Netgear cards, and I can confirm this. After trying for some time to get my netgear card to operate I found a review that covered this issue.

I've now installed an Intel card I had lying around and it works fine.

Good luck.

[Bill Agreste]

In response to all three previous replies, I did try the SIS drivers, but I'll try it again.

Maybe it is possible that there has been a crop of defective mb's, I don't know. THe other network cards I've tried work fine and connect to the network, but the motherboard design just doesn't like any optional network cards... The Netgear card works the best, first time, every time, but there are then boot problems and the CD is rarely found.

I have installed, reinstalled, switched operating systems, and have done everything to get the network to work. It's only on this machine... The SIS internal network feature seems to be operational by every check I can make on it except that it won't communicate on the network. In working with this problem, this is the only MB I have had the problem with. Our systems include some old and very new mb's from a variety of vendors and they all work fine.. but this ECS motherboard is a different animal completely. I'm happy that you could make yours work, but there's no such luck over here.

Bill

[Peter M]

Bill, I got proof of the opposite. More than one. My own home box runs BOTH the onboard SiS 900 and a PCI Realtek (for LAN and DSL respectively) in Linux, and just yesterday I had hands on another K7S5A that had some DEC 21143 PCI NIC in. Works equally well, W2K here.

regards, Peter