What's with ECS K7S5A ?

[user0209]

First I bought one from an unknown vendor at a outdoor gathering. The mobo lost cmos setting from the first day. On-board lan is impossible to work though I've tried just about everything I know.

Then one day, it died marking a life span of 3 weeks!
Fine, blamed it on the bad psu, a generic one also bought at the same place.

I then order an AMD-recommended 350w psu, another ECS K7S5A from Fry's (a well-known electronic store).

This one ran for 2 weeks then the cmos loss problem again. Oh yeah, the onboard lan is nowhere to be found!

Did I mention my first ECS K7S5A rendered an athlon xp17000 hotter than a baked potato and burnt it one day? Well, it could be amd fault for making the chip so. I'll never know. Now I'm holding my breath for the second ECS K7S5A and a xp1800. And because of the heat generated from these craps, the freaking Volcano 7 runs louder than a cheap russian tank. Who's to blame for my frequent heachache?

[BipolarBill]

You are - partially. Never Browse for drivers. Always use the CD Setup to install drivers and run it until it stops - 3 reboots.

Whick revisions are these boards? Look down by the last PCI slot.

[user0209]

Bill,
the second one I bought last August is revision 3.1. It has sticker xp by cpu slot. The Bios is dated july/2001

[user0209]

woowhoo, new bios just released.
Me go dl it now

[BipolarBill]

Just be sure to use the driver CD. Avoid any updates! That's a sure way to get lost with the K7S5A.

[ukulele]

Originally posted by BipolarBill
Just be sure to use the driver CD. Avoid any updates! That's a sure way to get lost with the K7S5A.

Ditto that. As for loosing cmos try cleaning the battery. It worked for me.

[stix_kua]

and to think, i was going to buy this board in about a month...:(

[BipolarBill]

My only beef with these boards is the way the CMOS seems to clear itself occasionally. Otherwise, I love them.

I have a feeling that people who turn off their PCs with a power strip are the ones losing the CMOS data. The PC should be powered at all times.

[chuckiechan]

The K7S5A is a good O/C board with an aftermarket bios, but it does have issues.

I run a 300w Antec PS with two hdds no sweat. I run at a FSB of 143/143 for 1500 Hz on a Athlon 1600. I had the problem of not recognizing IDE devices when I only had the one IBM DMA 66 hard drive. This has been replaced by a pair of Maxtors. I am not sure if the issue is the HDD or my change from Win 98 to Win 2000, but my "no cold boot issue is gone"

The lost CMOS problem is a ECS problem that is sporadic to only a few unlucky people and they deny that they have a problem. However, look at how may BIOS updates have come out...!

Set up your on-board lan with the setup disk, but besure you have the most recent BIOS, noting that some have lan enabled and some don't. The now bios's are enabled by default. If you have a sound card, disable the on-board in bios. Disable SMART, Disable Quick Boot.

Bear in mind that Fry's (My favorite store!) was selling these for $120.00 with a XP 2100, so a sloppy bios program is the downside here, compounded by the fact that they can't fix it!

Hope this helps...

[stix_kua]

Originally posted by BipolarBill
My only beef with these boards is the way the CMOS seems to clear itself occasionally. Otherwise, I love them.

I have a feeling that people who turn off their PCs with a power strip are the ones losing the CMOS data. The PC should be powered at all times.

whoa whoa whoa whao whoa...wait a sec...put on the brakes...should the CMOS battery be taking care of keeping the CMOS alive... i mean, i thought that was the purpose of CMOS batteries.

what happens then when you transport the PC.

I can't seem to understand why you guys have that many PSU problems, I have set up two HDD along with two case fans, an internal firewire card that required power, a CD-rom drive and a CD-RW drive all on a 230Watt AT PSU.

[$1500-P4 gamer]

Originally posted by stix_kua


whoa whoa whoa whao whoa...wait a sec...put on the brakes...should the CMOS battery be taking care of keeping the CMOS alive... i mean, i thought that was the purpose of CMOS batteries.

what happens then when you transport the PC.

I can't seem to understand why you guys have that many PSU problems, I have set up two HDD along with two case fans, an internal firewire card that required power, a CD-rom drive and a CD-RW drive all on a 230Watt AT PSU.

Its the 3.3volt rail man. Try using a power hungry G3 and higher end video card plus lots of sdr or ddr mem once. Now your in trouble with that wimpy psu trust me! If not she'll smoke sooner or later and take the psu/cpu and mobo maybe ram and everything else. You have been warned. And its not a jokeing matter either.;) :t

[j_hottes]

yeah i keep my system up and running 24/7 had it for about 2 years now. $50 bucks man !!!! im gonna run it till it blows up. i was thinking of pulling my 256m ddr and just getting 1 gig of sdram cheap to see what that would be like. have any of your guys tried to use the onboard sound yet? i tired to get one running for my friend who tends to not use sound cards. what a jerk ... talk about hard ..... ... ill probably get the sound working and it will sound like RBI baseball

[dwood]

I also have a k7s5a 2hard drives 2cdrom a g4ti4200 ,7200 rpm fan also on a 230 watt psu no problems at all.

[ukulele]

I have owned the same board made by PC chips (M830MRL) since June. I think it is one of the most reliable boards I have ever owned. The on board sound is as good as any other sound card I have owned and I can't count them all. I did have some trouble with cmos resetting but figured out it was the battery making a poor contact. Perhaps the alloy used in the battery holder is the cause. It happened a few times at random times then got worse untill it suddenly would not hold at all. I pulled the battery to test it when I noticed a dark spot where the center contact touched the battery. I cleaned that off, bent the contact up a little to increase the spring tension and haven't had a problem since then. I have not found any hardware that does not work with the board and use it to test other hardware all the time. I'll keep it as long as it keeps working. I got the board, a nice case and cheapo 450 watt power supply new on Ebay for $60 plus shipping. I bought it because cases are expensive in Hawaii and I had no plan to keep the MB. It came already mounted so I fired it up and decided that everything worked just fine. I have never updated the drivers or bios. Maybe I am just lucky but I have owned or repaired many others that were supposed to be quality boards and quite a few of them had issues I could never track down. I do not, however, over clock computers anymore. The few that I did never seemed to work as stable even after going back to stock speeds.

[angelopatrick]

i have the PC Chips variant the M830LMR which is basically an ECS k7s5a w onboard lan. it ran fine with a duron 1.1ghz w/1gb pc2100 ddr sdram. though some of the problems stated here are true, especially the CMOS issue which is due to the poor contact of the battery to the board everything is working fine the LAN is great so as the AMR modem and sound no probs at all even with a cheap 375W PS, just follow the cd instructions for the drivers and you'll never get lost. i say this board offers asus like and other high end mobo at this category and with performance at a fraction of the cost. currently ran for 7days straight w/o any probs under winxp pro(no reboots). THIS BOARD ROCKS!!!

I ABSOLUTELY RECOMMEND THIS BOARD!

system specs:
PCChips M830LMR Rev 3.1
AMD Duron 1.1GHz
2x512MB Nanya PC2100 DDR SDRAM
4 IDE RAID Controlled hard drives
CDRW (ide)
DVD(ide)
ZIP 100(ide)
Leadtek GF4 Ti4600 128MB DVI
RAID Card
TV Tuner
internal firewire board
6 auxilliary fans

[OpK Chowdy]

woah. where were you when we asked about duron gamers? :D

[Mr Miyagi]

Yep. VERY ocasionally mine will loose its CMOS settings. (About once in two months) I still love this board. Rock solid. I do wish they would put more FSB adjustments in by default tho. I'm running Cheeop BIOS and 147MHz FSB. Some would make you think that PC Chips and ECS are ****, but I have had the best luck with them.

[omega31]

One time my CMOS got lost. I also had a dead K7S5A. But the other K7S5A boards I've had ran perfectly fine, so it was just one dud, which happens occasionally for any motherboard, especially with the volume of these K7S5A/M830LMR boards out.

[Johnny Fist]

Originally posted by j_hottes
yeah i keep my system up and running 24/7 had it for about 2 years now. $50 bucks man !!!! im gonna run it till it blows up. i was thinking of pulling my 256m ddr and just getting 1 gig of sdram cheap to see what that would be like. have any of your guys tried to use the onboard sound yet? i tired to get one running for my friend who tends to not use sound cards. what a jerk ... talk about hard ..... ... ill probably get the sound working and it will sound like RBI baseball

I've built two rigs with this board, one for me and one for my sister. The one I built for myself had no problems whatsoever, but the one I built for my sister was a royal SOB as fas as getting a driver for the onboard sound. Until, that is, I allowed Window's Update to find me a new driver for it. You gotta love XP.