Mobo shorted out and now looking for a new one... any suggestions?

[ShortDahRi]

My motherboard after a year or so of service has shorted out on me. Not quite sure how my ECS K7S5A shorted out to the point where the solder of a small chip heated up and fell off but in any case i need a new mobo. I don't want to spend a fortune. Somewhere in the area of the K7S5A pricing which is about 50-60 bucks at most. I will be using my old chip which is a AMD Athlon 1.4 GHz and 256 MB PC2100 DDR Ram. Any suggestions? Thanks guys.

[Terminator]

Sorry about your ECS K7S5A..mine still runs fine....if you don't want another ECS then the MSI 745 Ultra costs only £45+vat here in the UK.

http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/mainboard/mbd/pro_mbd_detail.php?UID=13&MODEL=MS-6561

for specs.

might be worth a look

Personally I'd spend a bit more and get a higher spec board that will take higher speed CPU's , especially the new KX400 boards that support DDR400 Ram (if you can find this memory..lol) It will accomodate your present cpu and memory and will be able to upgrade in the future.


T

:t

[Beeblequix]

I just replaced my now *hozed* A7V266-E *weep* with an Asus A7N266-C. It uses the nforce 415D chipset. This board has less 'features' than my 'old' board, but supposedly when using two dimms it rocks because of its twin-bank memory controller (4.2GB/s bandwidth). So far my new comp is running under par, but that should change as soon as I have my newer drivers and patches. I still miss my old board. This board is cool in that the PCI frequency is LOCKED, meaning I won't have instabilities related to PCI cards while overclocking.:)

As far as ECS goes, you'll have fanboys out there touting them, but quite frankly I would not go near one, specifically the K7S5A. It's really not a surprize yours died. Did you ever even have the memory & fsb running at 133/133? If you did you were *lucky*, for many folks have to run the fsb/memory at 100/100. But I'm sure you've already heard the problems from that board.

chau,
ßeeßle Qµix

[BigBlue66]

Another choice might be the MSI K7T266 Pro2 board. It supports TBirds and XPs and DDR SDRAM.

I'm using one in the wife's system. It's stable and fast and easy to set up.