DFI any good?

[Linda91]

I may buy a DFI AK-74 EC board w/duron 850 for $140. Are the DFI boards any good? I have never heard of these boards before.

[Beemer]

Hi Linda. I would go to review sites such as http://www.anandtech.com use the search feature with DFI AK-74 EC as the search criteria and motherboards as the category. Everyone likes anandtech!

Cheers!

[ragtop]

You can do a search for some reviews, but from the ones I've seen, they make a decent inexpensive board - pretty much OEM quality. Probably OK if you want to build a basic, inexpensive system, but don't expect a lot of fancy features or overclocking ability.

[radman3d2]

Linda,

Even though I have a DFI MB (K6BV3+/66) and I do like it, I believe there are better MBs out there for the Duron. You cannot do enough research and reading reviews before putting your money down on a new MB.

[muno]

I had a DFI mobo when I was using AMD K6-2, the mobo was nice but the support DFI provided was non-existant. I couldn't even get their internet site work. Anyway, I had tremendous problems with my TNT card on that mobo. I learned that TNT2 don't work on socket7 but it was a bare tnt. A mobo problem, a chipset problem, don't know =)
Oh, and the mobo fried when I flashed the bios =)
-M

[Austin Stevens]

I've got a DFI AK75-EC with an AMD 1.2 GHZ processor. The motherboard is ok, but I'd recommend the AK72 It support DDR RAM or SDRAM. Also the sound isn't embeded into the motherboard.

[kingsway]

I have a DFI board in my K6-2 500 system, and it does fine. I couldn't get the bios to see that I had a 20GB Maxtor, and tech support didn't know how to help. Turned out that I had to download Maxtor's hard drive tools and run them against the hard drive, and then everything was hunky dory. But tech support really did try to be helpful. It was available via email only.

Since you're looking at spending $140, let me throw you an idea. I just picked up a combo from www.micropro.com (http://www.micropro.com) this afternoon you might want to check out: ECS K7S5A with an Athlon (not Duron) 900 MHz TBird and a CoolerMaster fan/heatsink for $129, including a 1 yr warranty. I found it in Pricewatch, and you have to reference them in the comments section when you order.

I'm not that familiar with ECS (aka Amptron, PCChips, and who knows what else), but I've seen some really good reviews on this particular board lately. Micro Pro was selling this combo for just $5 more than they were asking for a K7S5A/900 MHz Duron setup. Couldn't pass it up.

Did I muddy the waters a little?

[bill1971]

Here's some more to muddy up the water. I've
been running an OEM DFI board w/ a PIII 500
Slot 1 for close to two years now,w/TNT2
graphics board, and it's been rock solid.

For someone who is not going to update/flash
the BIOS, and otherwise do a lot of tweaking,it should do fine. www.newegg.com (http://www.newegg.com)
is selling a DFI w/AMD760 chipset and DDR RAM slots for $100+.
Bought a couple of Epox boards based on favorable reviews referencing features / stability,also.
Make sure you get a board w/hardware monitoring so you'll get a warning when
these already hot chips start to push.
Also make certain you have at least a 250watt power supply,300watt even better,if
you plan on installing several devices,as the AMD chips are power hungry.
I think for $140,I'd look at a 1 GHz(266)
Athlon($73 + $10 ship'g)and ECS K7S5A mobo
($65 + $5 ship'g). 256MB DDR RAM ($36 + free
shipping until 8/31 at www.crucial.com), (http://www.crucial.com),) 40 GB IBM HDD,($107 + $8? ship).
Hope this helps,and doesn't confuse.


[This message has been edited by bill1971 (edited 08-30-2001).]

[kingsway]

Linda, I've just been looking through some of these other boards and it looks like a lot of people are experiencing problems with ECS tech support. If tech support is something on your checklist, you might not want to look at ECS as an option. Then again, there seems to be a bunch of people here that can help out, too...

Most reviewers don't mention tech support, and I have to admit that's where I did a lot of my research (reviews). Live and learn.

I'm not gonna panic until I start getting beep codes.

[Peter M]

DFI is worse than ECS regarding tech support, and also veeery quick in abandoning board designs. Just look at how old the latest BIOS for the AK74 series is ... they didn't even bother doing an update for the dreaded 686B bandwidth problem.

Go ECS, their online support may be slow, but at least they put out BIOS updates for a while. And since I've been using both the DFI and ECS KT133(A) boards, I must say the ECS is technically superior too. (Been forced to use the DFI once for its ISA slot. It's okay, running stable and such, but it was much more difficult to get to that state than the ECS boards that essentially are plug-n-go.)

And the low low price and excellent performance of the DDR-or-SDRAM board ECS K7S5A makes talking about SDRAM-only boards completely pointless, in my opinion.

regards, Peter