HOLD OFF ON K7S5A PRO! PLEASE READ!!!!

DaiLun · February 17th, 2003, 02:18 AM

Before you all go out and buy K7S5A Pros, you might want to wander over to the ECS knowledge base and see how many people are having problems with this board.
Most of the problems reported over there have to do with the stability of the board trying to run 133 MHz CPU and DRAM speed.

My story?

New board today. Athlon 1400, known good, been running for a year. Put 1 128MB PC133 SDRAM (known good) in. The board never even posted at 133/133 until I added a second module in. So far so good? NOT!! Windows started barfing and crashing all over the place until I dropped the speed back to 100/100.
After trying 8 KNOWN GOOD MODULES of various sizes, I went out and bought BRAND NEW DDR RAM. Did it fix the problem? Heck no! It's still choking and heaving all over the place. Oh, it's rock solid at 100/100 but that's not what I bought it for.

OK, I’m done ranting. I’m a little P.O.ed about wasting a day fighting with this and ending up with a crippled system. I did E-mail ECS but from the looks of their OWN message forum, they haven’t acknowledged that this is a problem or offered a fix.

I believe that I did all of my DD since I have been building systems since 1980. IMHO, from what I’ve seen, this is NOT a good product. Great potential, but far from perfect I though I was unlucky and got a bad one, but it seems that I am far from alone.

Thanks for the electronic space. Take care all. Comments welcome.

thronka · February 17th, 2003, 02:22 AM

You said you put in SDRAM? Oh my... you might of damaged the ram socket. I assume this board is DDR only?

ck42866 · February 17th, 2003, 02:27 AM

im assuming that it is like the non pro version where it takes either sdram or ddram.

DaiLun · February 17th, 2003, 02:33 AM

It takes both SDRAM or DDR (but not simultaneously.

Thanks for the sanity check but as I said, I've been doing this for over 20 years now.

I am re-reading the threads and it appears that this may be a core voltage problem for which I may need to DOWNGRADE the BIOS.

Stay tuned.

Peter M · February 17th, 2003, 05:07 AM

>might of damaged

might HAVE damaged, dammit. That's a conditional statement in past tense, thank you.

VERT · February 17th, 2003, 05:23 AM

I got one of these boards the other with 128mb PC133 sdram, I havent had it running yet as I am still waiting for my Duron 1200 to arrive to put in it. Will let you know how it goes - hopefully should be here tomorrow.

VERT · February 17th, 2003, 05:38 AM

DaiLun, can you please post the link that mentions all these problems

JayMan · February 17th, 2003, 06:36 AM

What power supply are you running?

I remember when the non-pro's came out, alot of people had troubles with stability. It seemed that the boards were pretty sensitive to power supplies & wanted a good clean source to run stable.

JayMan

Dokeman · February 17th, 2003, 07:25 AM

if you gave 20 years experience, then you should have known not to buy an ECS board to start with....

JayMan · February 17th, 2003, 07:36 AM

lol how'd i know that was comming....

yeh ok, The ECS boards can be a bit of a pain sometimes, but then many people also have no problems at all with them. Look at surreal, she's got ALL her pc's running ECS stuff & doesn't seem to have any problems.

And for a budget build, i personally don't think you will match the ECS's features with any other board at the same price point.

JayMan