TR Forums

I just built my first new system in about 3 years, so I thought I'd make a quick post on how it went. I bought the ECS along with an Athlon XP 1600+ and a radeon 8500. I like the price and features of the motherboard, the drivers seem to be good and it has been stable running XP for a couple weeks. I do have a couple gripes about it, though, that I didn't notice in any of the searches I did online:
The audio headers for the on-board AC97 are directly under where the AGP card goes, I almost had to remove the video card to plug the cd-audio cable in.
There's only one fan header, and it is near the end of the board that is towards the front of the case. This made it impossible to plug in both of the rear-mounted case fans on my Chenming 601ae (same as antec SX1030), and pretty difficult to plug just one in.

-Steve

I have built 4 machines with the ecs board and I have not had any problems out of them. stable as a rock.

I have built 20 systems with that MB, including my own, and i have only run into one problem. If you use onboard sound and a pci videocard the sound quality is crap when running any 3D processes

I just bought that board and have yet to install it. is there a way to disable the in board sound?

I'm glad you mentioned this mobo, I think that this is going to be the one that I use to build my system. A friend of mine said that ECS mobo's are junk, but all the reviews that I have read so far look good enough for me.

Have fun,

Todd

Here's a warning:

ECS Mobo's may look good and act nice for a while, then develop problems later. I'm not going to make a broad generalization, but I just got word from my wife that her K7S5A has developed the dreaded "Loses CMOS settings" problem that affects a lot of these boards. Hit the forums at OCworkbench.com to see what I'm talking about. This board has only been installed for about 2 months. Everything WAS fine. Everything DID run great. Now this. I have to imagine that this is going to be a PITA to fix...