Worst Motherboard in the World Award

[Indiana]

Originally posted by Pace

Anyone here bought a PCChips for themselves? /me slaps anyone who says yes
P.

Well there are quite many that bought a PCChips motherboard...
Didn't you know the ECS SIS735 K7S5A board is just a relabled PCChips board?

[Nuno]

Didn't you know the ECS SIS735 K7S5A board is just a relabled PCChips board?

Actually is more the other way. Why do you think PCChips K7S5A clone was probably the most troubless board PCChips ever had?

This "quality" issue is not as much plain and simple as many of you are lead to believe. I do know about ECS relation with PCChips, actually it´s true PCChips owns ECS, but manufacturing is independent. PCChips does have a word to say on managing the business, but it´s not directly related with the technology and QC over ECS. So I´ve heard.

Anyway, this ECS is more trouble-free than any Asus I´ve tried (2 of them) or Abit. Of course, if you´re expecting voltage tweaking or 1Mhz FSB increments, it´s not there. THAT´S what most of the times is perceived as quality.

Here, most reselers sell PCChips, Matsonic, ECS, Jetway and many other "budget" boards, and guess what? They still are selling them and building systems with them. The OEM doesn´t care if it can give you 2.9 volts on your DDR, they care how much failure rate they have. There are too many stoping selling Abit because of that - these boards have incredible failure rates! By what I´ve told ECS failure rate is about the same as Asus, i.e. very good.

On the good old days I´ve had a Matsonic TXPro, can you imagine? And guess what, it was a fine board for my P200MMX, never had any trouble with it, it actually run stable on a 75Mhz or 83Mhz FSB, and IT´S STILL WORKING fine on my friend´s house (I sold it) after all these years! Much more than I can say for a Abit BX6 and a Asus A7V, that died after a year of use.

[Dr Mordrid]

What kills me about PC-Chips owning ECS is that the latter makes so much better a product than PC-Chips does.

Go figure....

Dr. Mordrid

[xortam]

... you mean like Creative and 3DLabs?!

[Wombat]

No, not like that. Creative just hasn't had time to **** 3DLabs up yet. Give them time, I'm sure they will.

[dave m]

Hmmm, ECS K7S5A,
reasonable reviews for the new SIS chipset. So my wife got one, put in a hercules kyro ll and could get no hardware acceleration, at all.
It took me a while to figure out that, while the BIOS has AGP 4X configured as a default, you still have to install the AGP card support drivers yourself off of the rather ambiguous CD that gets thrown in with motherboards these days. Go figure...

Dave

[az]

Yeah, the older CD revisions for the K7S5A were horrible... the newer ones (and the newer manuals, and BIOSes) are quite good though.. unfortunately, I, too, got the old ones Couldn't figure out how to install the onboard sound, so I bought a new sound card, since my old ESS Solo-1 based wouldn't work at all

Oh, and both ECS and SIS seem to just LOVE freaky colors

AZ

[KvHagedorn]

Originally posted by Wombat
No, not like that. Creative just hasn't had time to **** 3DLabs up yet. Give them time, I'm sure they will.

Actually, they pretty much left Ensoniq alone (at least til they shitcanned them.. the bastards). Never had an ounce of trouble with Ensoniq cards/drivers even after Creative bought them.

[Wombat]

How about Aureal?

[lindberg]

Have you ever heard of the crap Asus K7V? Only bios that is working properly is a beta-bois, the so-called AGP 4x you can only dream of, being able to tweak the FSB to 150MHz in theory and in the bios doesn't help when no one have magaged to keep it stable over 117 (!) MHz in sofware mode. You can on the other hand clock with jumpers and perhaps even get a 133 MHz FSB, but the your PCI will run @ 44MHz (33MHz std). Which reminds me of that there is possible to choose 133:33 or 133:44 in the bios, but does it work? Naaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

I will never, ever ever ever buy Asus again.

[Nuno]

About ECS instalation CD, well, I really never used it. XP recognises the chipset right away and has very good drivers for it. I only updated the AGP driver.

I had a KyroII too and it worked fine with XP AGP drivers, but you had to set on the bios AGP to 2X - not specific for this motherboard. Aparently, being a AGP 2X card, it caused several problems on some motherboards if you enabled AGP4X in the bios, despite the fallback should be automatic.

[Drizzt]

Uhmmm....PCChips motherboard...this bring up memories.

We used those motherboard to assemble our gambling machine for casino's. Usually we assembled 50 PCs a month, with two of them having the motherboard somehow broken.

Not "about two of them". Ever were 2 motherboards broken every month. That was not a problem, simply resend them back and have two new.

After all, I must admit those were good Mobo.