elevate
New member
1 - No. You may have to reinstall your OS though, but probably not.
2 - Your old vid card should work fine.
2 - Your old vid card should work fine.
db51
New member
As elevate said, you don't have to reformat the whole drive, but for stability's sake, I would at least reinstall the OS.
If your OS and data are on different partitions, just format the OS partition and reinstall. If they are on the same partition, backup ALL your important data (which you should always be doing anyway) and then format the whole drive.
Or better yet, buy a new 7200rpm harddrive and start from scratch (and use your current one as a backup).
L
lavoz
New member
SIS K7S5A! I've had one with a 1.33 Athlon with no problems at all. As far as the NIC...that can be turned off. PLus, with this board, you are given the choice of memory you can use; SDRAM, or DDR. I've got 768 megs of SDRAM, with no issues what so ever!
getuhgrip
Bring Back Transfat!
FWIW I've been using an Abit KT7E with a 1000mhz Athalon since July with no problems thus far. It was a cheap $200 upgrade and has worked fine. I was using PC100 until I bought the C-Port which insists on being used with PC133.
good luck.
good luck.
C
czar of bizarre
New member
i have the important stuff backed up on another partition and cd rom. the problem is locating the windows 98se disk. i talked to a guy on the phone today and said i would not need to reformat. however i will take the advice of the people here. he said just plug everything up and i should be all set......that sounds fishy......
i will need a new tower (it comes with a 300watt power supply) $24
new ram (my pc100 will not work but i can use my 133) 512 mb $100
new mother board combo (old one sucks) $120
shipping $44
it was a duron @ 1 ghz. however i am going to keep shopping around. i think i can get more bang for my buck.
some guy at a computer shop told me it would be $600 to upgrade :s im glad im not using his services.
czar
i will need a new tower (it comes with a 300watt power supply) $24
new ram (my pc100 will not work but i can use my 133) 512 mb $100
new mother board combo (old one sucks) $120
shipping $44
it was a duron @ 1 ghz. however i am going to keep shopping around. i think i can get more bang for my buck.
some guy at a computer shop told me it would be $600 to upgrade :s im glad im not using his services.
czar
R
RWhite
Well-known member
Czar - if you are using Win 98se you most definately do NOT need to reformat, nor should you need to reinstall the OS. I support a bunch of PCs where I work and l maintain a library of "ghost" software images for various situations and hardware configurations. When a PC becomes unstable, or gets damaged by a virus (or idiot user) we reapply one of these images to a machine. Unless the source machine EXACTLY matches the destination, this is in effect doing the same thing you will be - you boot up a machine configured for one motherboard and it has a different one instead. I've done this many, many times and its not difficult at all.
But you WILL need to find that Windows 98 CD, you will almost certainly need it. I also recomend that you copy the Win98 directory that's on the Win98 CD to your C: drive and leave that there - it's very handy to have all the cab files right there, and not have to dig arround for the CD. I also suggest that that any drivers for the new motherboard (like 4in1 if its a VIA chipset) be copied to the C: drive BEFORE you swap board. I keep a libary of common drivers in a directory called DRIVERS (duh) which stays on all my PCs, again so I don have to hunt to CDs. This is especially true of the video driver. Remember that drivers you download from the web are usually compressed, you will want to decompress them into a folder, otherwise Windows wont be able to do anything with them. Some drivers (ATI video for example) will come as .EXE files and will insist that you run their own install rather the usual method.
When you are ready and do swap the board, the first time you boot up Win 98 will do a mild "freak out" and find all new motherboard resources, IDE controller, etc. After each new item found it will request to reboot. You can do this if you want, but you might spend an hour rebooting. The two times you really should reboot are after it finds the trio of IDE Controller / Primary IDE / Secondary IDE. You CD drive will not work prior to this (another reason to have the drivers on C: drive). Then after that reboot it may find a few more items; wait until it finds the last item and goes into the standard Win 98 screen before doing a second and (hopefully) final reboot.
Once finished go into Control Panel / System / Device manager and look for any errors (red or yellow marks). You should not see any motherboard devices from your old board, if so you may have to manually remove them. But this is rare, like I said I've done a lot of ghosting and board swapping and it is nearly always a fairly easy process under Win98.
Of course all this goes out the Window with XP, which will require re-activation with a motherboard swap. And board swapping with NT4 is a bitch because there is no plug-n-play, and you will have to figure out on your own which drivers to replace.
Lavoz - glad to hear you like your board, because I bought one yesterday and will be installing it tonight. I'm going to run some benchmarks on my PIII933 first, then swap to the Athlon 1.4 and run them again.
But you WILL need to find that Windows 98 CD, you will almost certainly need it. I also recomend that you copy the Win98 directory that's on the Win98 CD to your C: drive and leave that there - it's very handy to have all the cab files right there, and not have to dig arround for the CD. I also suggest that that any drivers for the new motherboard (like 4in1 if its a VIA chipset) be copied to the C: drive BEFORE you swap board. I keep a libary of common drivers in a directory called DRIVERS (duh) which stays on all my PCs, again so I don have to hunt to CDs. This is especially true of the video driver. Remember that drivers you download from the web are usually compressed, you will want to decompress them into a folder, otherwise Windows wont be able to do anything with them. Some drivers (ATI video for example) will come as .EXE files and will insist that you run their own install rather the usual method.
When you are ready and do swap the board, the first time you boot up Win 98 will do a mild "freak out" and find all new motherboard resources, IDE controller, etc. After each new item found it will request to reboot. You can do this if you want, but you might spend an hour rebooting. The two times you really should reboot are after it finds the trio of IDE Controller / Primary IDE / Secondary IDE. You CD drive will not work prior to this (another reason to have the drivers on C: drive). Then after that reboot it may find a few more items; wait until it finds the last item and goes into the standard Win 98 screen before doing a second and (hopefully) final reboot.
Once finished go into Control Panel / System / Device manager and look for any errors (red or yellow marks). You should not see any motherboard devices from your old board, if so you may have to manually remove them. But this is rare, like I said I've done a lot of ghosting and board swapping and it is nearly always a fairly easy process under Win98.
Of course all this goes out the Window with XP, which will require re-activation with a motherboard swap. And board swapping with NT4 is a bitch because there is no plug-n-play, and you will have to figure out on your own which drivers to replace.
Lavoz - glad to hear you like your board, because I bought one yesterday and will be installing it tonight. I'm going to run some benchmarks on my PIII933 first, then swap to the Athlon 1.4 and run them again.
R
RWhite
Well-known member
The Ugly, gory end....
Well, I will probably post this in detail as a new thread. However I'll just say here in short that I bought the ECS motherboard, and it is a big, barking, DOG. Bad enough I wasted 30+ hours over the weekend trying to get two different boards to work. Then it added injury to insult by killing my hard drive - now THAT was fun. Finished up at 4:30am Monday putting my original P3 mobo back in.
I'll post all the amusing details in a new thread, meanwhile I would strongly caution anyone from trying this motherboard, despite all the great press it has received (which was what attracted me to it in the first place).
Well, I will probably post this in detail as a new thread. However I'll just say here in short that I bought the ECS motherboard, and it is a big, barking, DOG. Bad enough I wasted 30+ hours over the weekend trying to get two different boards to work. Then it added injury to insult by killing my hard drive - now THAT was fun. Finished up at 4:30am Monday putting my original P3 mobo back in.
I'll post all the amusing details in a new thread, meanwhile I would strongly caution anyone from trying this motherboard, despite all the great press it has received (which was what attracted me to it in the first place).
db51
New member
Great press??? Where??
I try to get reviews from real users on BBS's rather then magazines paid by advertising money....
On BBS's the ECS board using the sis 735 chipset (that's the one you have, isn't it?) has been reported as a mobo with a lot of issues...Which is why I went for an nforce board, which works great!
elevate
New member
I've been screaming "Gigabyte GA-7DXR+" for a while now, and it's still hard to find a negative comment on it. Might that have something to do with the lack of a VIA northbridge? Course, it doesn't support SDRAM. Gigabyte makes the GA-7IXE4, which supports SDRAM, but I think it uses an older AMD chipset and I can't find many reviews of it.
R
RWhite
Well-known member
As per the link earlier in the thread, the ECS board got a very good write up on TomsHardware.com, which I have found to be a very reliable source for information in the past. The motherboard box even has a sticker on it boasting about that review. And the board did post very good benchmarks (except for disk, see below), when it wasn't crashing.
Hell I might as well finish up my thoughts here....
The short version is this: I bought the ECS, installed it with my original Win98 install still on the drive. Brought it up the first time, Windows 98 did the initial freak-out as I expected, finding new hardware. Once that was finished I started testing, and found out quickly that starting ANY game (i.e. any Direct X call) caused the system to yak. Also, ALL my drives now had DMA disabled and would not let me turn it back on. Did mucho trouble shooting, no luck. Finally called the tech at the store where I bought it, he said you MUST install the OS clean when using this motherboard. I think, hmmm that's odd, but OK, I want to go to XP anyway.
So I install XP clean, and I get exactly the same crap as with Win 98. DMA access disabled, no way to re-enable it. Start any game causes the computer to crash. And a new effect, every time XP boot it sends a big CLUNK noise out of my hard drive. After much troubleshooting, I had finally decided that this particular mother HAD to be defective when my hard drive makes its very last clunk – it’s dead, Jim.
So I return mobo, get another one (same model) and pick up a new hard drive. No more drive clunking, but basically the same effects – disabled DMA, horribly slow disk access, games go down faster than a cheap whore. In particular this brand mobo seems to have a real grudge against my ATI All-In-Wonder video card. However switching to another video card was no great improvement.
In the end, I HAD to get a working XP going – I’m taking the damn MCP test in a week, and I need it. So at 3:30 am I finished re-installing my old ASUS PIII mobo and installing XP fresh on it. Drives work, video works, games work. The second ECS motherboard goes back to the store.
Any of you folks are there who hate VIA, take note of this – their 4in1 driver software is one of the easiest driver installs in XP, and I’ve NEVER had an audio problem of the sort others have reported. Getting my old VIA-equipped PIII setup under XP was a piece of cake compare to my 72 hours of ECS hell.
Moral(s) of the story –
1) Good press doesn’t always mean good reality.
2) Sometimes all the tech experience in the world isn’t good enough to make something work right
3) In the right context, “Athlon Motherboard” and “Windows XP” can count as swear words.
4) When doing any sort of an upgrade like this, back up often. I was constantly making Ghost backups of my system to a D: drive while I worked. This make it quick and easy to restore to a clean install and effectively troubleshoot. Otherwise my weekend of hell could well have been a week of hell.
So now I’m back to my PIII, and it looks like upgrading is put off indefinitely.
P.S. Elevate - I did look at a Gigabyte 7VTE motherboard when I returned the second ECS board. unfortunately they only had one left, and it looked like it had been played with by dogs. Plus I'm really out of time right now, I need a stable XP box for at least the next week, I'm trying to put the whole mess out of my mind for now.
Hell I might as well finish up my thoughts here....
The short version is this: I bought the ECS, installed it with my original Win98 install still on the drive. Brought it up the first time, Windows 98 did the initial freak-out as I expected, finding new hardware. Once that was finished I started testing, and found out quickly that starting ANY game (i.e. any Direct X call) caused the system to yak. Also, ALL my drives now had DMA disabled and would not let me turn it back on. Did mucho trouble shooting, no luck. Finally called the tech at the store where I bought it, he said you MUST install the OS clean when using this motherboard. I think, hmmm that's odd, but OK, I want to go to XP anyway.
So I install XP clean, and I get exactly the same crap as with Win 98. DMA access disabled, no way to re-enable it. Start any game causes the computer to crash. And a new effect, every time XP boot it sends a big CLUNK noise out of my hard drive. After much troubleshooting, I had finally decided that this particular mother HAD to be defective when my hard drive makes its very last clunk – it’s dead, Jim.
So I return mobo, get another one (same model) and pick up a new hard drive. No more drive clunking, but basically the same effects – disabled DMA, horribly slow disk access, games go down faster than a cheap whore. In particular this brand mobo seems to have a real grudge against my ATI All-In-Wonder video card. However switching to another video card was no great improvement.
In the end, I HAD to get a working XP going – I’m taking the damn MCP test in a week, and I need it. So at 3:30 am I finished re-installing my old ASUS PIII mobo and installing XP fresh on it. Drives work, video works, games work. The second ECS motherboard goes back to the store.
Any of you folks are there who hate VIA, take note of this – their 4in1 driver software is one of the easiest driver installs in XP, and I’ve NEVER had an audio problem of the sort others have reported. Getting my old VIA-equipped PIII setup under XP was a piece of cake compare to my 72 hours of ECS hell.
Moral(s) of the story –
1) Good press doesn’t always mean good reality.
2) Sometimes all the tech experience in the world isn’t good enough to make something work right
3) In the right context, “Athlon Motherboard” and “Windows XP” can count as swear words.
4) When doing any sort of an upgrade like this, back up often. I was constantly making Ghost backups of my system to a D: drive while I worked. This make it quick and easy to restore to a clean install and effectively troubleshoot. Otherwise my weekend of hell could well have been a week of hell.
So now I’m back to my PIII, and it looks like upgrading is put off indefinitely.
P.S. Elevate - I did look at a Gigabyte 7VTE motherboard when I returned the second ECS board. unfortunately they only had one left, and it looked like it had been played with by dogs. Plus I'm really out of time right now, I need a stable XP box for at least the next week, I'm trying to put the whole mess out of my mind for now.
E
Emeric
New member
Sorry to hear you had such trouble Rwhite.
My experience last week with the ECS K7S5A was much better.
Now, I haven't tested it recording yet, but mixing is a dream on this thing now. I can hit it with way more plug-ins than on my previous PIII 800. CPU meter would be pinned and machine locked ifI tried some of the mixes like this on a PIII.
I don't know why you ran into those problems, I suppose it's possible you got two bad boards in a row.
I did flash the BIOS on mine to the newest and installed 98 (triple boot) from scratch (I always do when swapping motherboards - the OS, not necessarily flashing).
As I said, I haven't yet tried recording with it, so I will reserve final judgement till later in the week. But so far I'm very impressed.
I've run some games on it, did not experience those problems either. Metal of Honour in particuliar. DMA enabled fine to. Very strange. Oh well, sure you will find something that works.
The rest of my system specs:
AMD XP1800 Retail CPU
Powercolour 64MB Geforce 2 MX400
256MB RDRAM
Lucent 56K modem
Delta 1010
300W Enermax supply
20GB 5400 RPM for the OS drive
1 X 40GB, 2 X 20GB Maxtors for audio data
I'll post a summary of results later in the week, I'm not through testing yet. For all I know, it might lock up like hell when I hit *Record*, but I'm doubting it (crosses fingers).
Oh yeah, one problem I did encounter is I couldn't get it running properly in W2K. I'd get major pop/crackle on playback. No big deal though to me, W2K hasn't been that great for me lately anyway.
My experience last week with the ECS K7S5A was much better.
Now, I haven't tested it recording yet, but mixing is a dream on this thing now. I can hit it with way more plug-ins than on my previous PIII 800. CPU meter would be pinned and machine locked ifI tried some of the mixes like this on a PIII.
I don't know why you ran into those problems, I suppose it's possible you got two bad boards in a row.
I did flash the BIOS on mine to the newest and installed 98 (triple boot) from scratch (I always do when swapping motherboards - the OS, not necessarily flashing).
As I said, I haven't yet tried recording with it, so I will reserve final judgement till later in the week. But so far I'm very impressed.
I've run some games on it, did not experience those problems either. Metal of Honour in particuliar. DMA enabled fine to. Very strange. Oh well, sure you will find something that works.
The rest of my system specs:
AMD XP1800 Retail CPU
Powercolour 64MB Geforce 2 MX400
256MB RDRAM
Lucent 56K modem
Delta 1010
300W Enermax supply
20GB 5400 RPM for the OS drive
1 X 40GB, 2 X 20GB Maxtors for audio data
I'll post a summary of results later in the week, I'm not through testing yet. For all I know, it might lock up like hell when I hit *Record*, but I'm doubting it (crosses fingers).
Oh yeah, one problem I did encounter is I couldn't get it running properly in W2K. I'd get major pop/crackle on playback. No big deal though to me, W2K hasn't been that great for me lately anyway.
R
RWhite
Well-known member
Emeric - Well I'm glad it worked out for you. one thing I did NOT try was to do a fresh Win98 install on the board. That might have worked, but I really need to be running XP right now. Although the more I run it the less I think of it - the better application reliability seems to be more than cancelled out by it's incredible instability with device drivers. I found out that with my PIII board, even after having it set up & working fine, that simply moving my 3COM network card from one slot to another was enough to crash XP on boot-up. Then the only fix was to restore from a previous backup and add all my device drivers back in again. I guess Microsoft wants XP to be its "closed box" operating system.
I did try flashing the BIOS on the first motherboard. I usually view BIOS upgrades as a "last resort" sot of thing, which was certainly true in this case. No effect. One thing I did NOT try was downloading a chipset patch from SiS, which I found after I had given up in disgust. I would not try it if your board is working, but should you ever feel the need you can find it here -
http://www.sis.com/support/driver/utility.htm
I did try flashing the BIOS on the first motherboard. I usually view BIOS upgrades as a "last resort" sot of thing, which was certainly true in this case. No effect. One thing I did NOT try was downloading a chipset patch from SiS, which I found after I had given up in disgust. I would not try it if your board is working, but should you ever feel the need you can find it here -
http://www.sis.com/support/driver/utility.htm
Queue
Active member
Hey guys,
Sorry I was in a cave during your times of trouble, but I'll post this here in case anyone else is looking at this board.
I've now built 3 systems with this board, only one for recording (my own). I've sucessfully set it up using 98SE, Me, and XP. You need to go to OCWorkbench.com where there is an amazing amount of info on this board.
(Go to their ECS forum), where you'll find a number of FAQs, including the priceless "Install FAQ".
I have NEVER cracked the seal on the MOBO CD.
There is a small utility (DMA98.exe for Win9x) and (SISIDE.exe for 2K/XP) that YOU MUST RUN TO GET DMA TO WORK!!!! )
Just for kicks I benchmarked my harddrive before/after running this utility, using Sandra, scores went from ~5000 to >20,000!!!
Queue
Sorry I was in a cave during your times of trouble, but I'll post this here in case anyone else is looking at this board.
I've now built 3 systems with this board, only one for recording (my own). I've sucessfully set it up using 98SE, Me, and XP. You need to go to OCWorkbench.com where there is an amazing amount of info on this board.
(Go to their ECS forum), where you'll find a number of FAQs, including the priceless "Install FAQ".
I have NEVER cracked the seal on the MOBO CD.
There is a small utility (DMA98.exe for Win9x) and (SISIDE.exe for 2K/XP) that YOU MUST RUN TO GET DMA TO WORK!!!! )
Just for kicks I benchmarked my harddrive before/after running this utility, using Sandra, scores went from ~5000 to >20,000!!!
Queue
J
jdechant
New member
hey queue...
I am running K7S5A board with XP and am running in Ultra DMA mode 5 (Ultra ATA100) at both the bios on startup and inside windows.
I didn't run that SISIDE utility... in fact windows XP installs the correct drivers and then you just have to change the properties of the controller to DMA if enabled, restart and it is then set to whatever mode your drive and cable can handle.
I looked at the SISIDE utility and it is dated 1998... I don't see how it could possibly be for 2000/XP. Also in the list of boards that it was made for, the SIS735 chipset is not one of the boards...
I am running K7S5A board with XP and am running in Ultra DMA mode 5 (Ultra ATA100) at both the bios on startup and inside windows.
I didn't run that SISIDE utility... in fact windows XP installs the correct drivers and then you just have to change the properties of the controller to DMA if enabled, restart and it is then set to whatever mode your drive and cable can handle.
I looked at the SISIDE utility and it is dated 1998... I don't see how it could possibly be for 2000/XP. Also in the list of boards that it was made for, the SIS735 chipset is not one of the boards...
Queue
Active member
truly odd, perhaps I was using an old bios?
When I installed XP, DMA was enabled (checked) but the numbers sucked, so I ran SISIDE, and now I rock!!!
Have you run any benchmarks?
Queue
When I installed XP, DMA was enabled (checked) but the numbers sucked, so I ran SISIDE, and now I rock!!!
Have you run any benchmarks?
Queue
R
RWhite
Well-known member
Ah, a blast from the past. Boy the bile rises up in my throat just re-reading this.
That DMA utility would have been interesting to try. Of course it would have been nice if ECS had PUT IT ON THEIR OWN F$#&ING WEBSITE!!!! As it was I was never even presented with an option to enable DMA, all those setting disappeared, and boy I looked.
As you may have seen in another post, I wound up with a MSI motherboard, with the exact 133a chipset I was trying to avoid all along, which was why I went with the ECS board originally. Said MSI/133a combo has the defective Southbridge chip which means all disk access is incredibly slow, so the board got shuffled into a game box. I'm back to my PIII system, and the reason I'm up now at 2:10am is I just conquored my latest XP software stupidity - check out the post "Cant record to any SB Card under XP". The fun never stops!
That DMA utility would have been interesting to try. Of course it would have been nice if ECS had PUT IT ON THEIR OWN F$#&ING WEBSITE!!!! As it was I was never even presented with an option to enable DMA, all those setting disappeared, and boy I looked.
As you may have seen in another post, I wound up with a MSI motherboard, with the exact 133a chipset I was trying to avoid all along, which was why I went with the ECS board originally. Said MSI/133a combo has the defective Southbridge chip which means all disk access is incredibly slow, so the board got shuffled into a game box. I'm back to my PIII system, and the reason I'm up now at 2:10am is I just conquored my latest XP software stupidity - check out the post "Cant record to any SB Card under XP". The fun never stops!
S
sonnylarsen
New member
I think we need to make sure to put as much of the blame for audio problems with the via chipset on the card manufacturers as on via. The problem lies in the way the cards drivers handle the PCI bus. As I understand, card like the SBlive dominate the PCI bus and the original drivers for the Via chips were not designed to cope with that (I am paraphrasing from an article I read somewhere in on the web a long time ago, I think there is a similar one sowhere on the viatech website). I had loads of problems with the default windows drivers for the via chipset and ANY driver for the sblive, ms or creative, until I downloaded and installed the newest VIA 4-in-1 drivers. I haven't tried creative's drivers on my sblive yet, but the MS drivers are now performing flawlessly in XP, where before everything I recorded was loaded with pops and clicks.
I think one of the biggest problems in the PC world today is companies trying to load our PC's up with their proprietary bullshit. With the amount of garbage software that creative loads onto your computer with the driver install and of course, highjacking file associations, you would think they believe everyone would want to use only their crap just because they bought their cheap-ass card so they could use soundfonts.
Other companies use hidden little programs that get installed with their software to run all the time in the background, to make sure you are using their stuff, and to report usage stats to the companies, like winamp and realplayer. At least with Winamp you can turn that crap off. With the nasty new "realone" player from realnetworks, they install a little program that ran as a process which constantly continued to hijack my file associations. There is no option anywhere in the install or the program which lets you turn that process off.
I don't so much mind it when a program asks you if you would like it to turn on in the start-up, but when the idiots just assume you would want it there, well, that starts to piss me off. These companies are dying for us to use their players, because of their ad revenues, but just because they give them to us free, doesn't mean they have the right to take over a system. It's almost like an invasion of privacy. You should not offer us a "free" program when there is clearly a price, albeit a non-monetary one.
enough ranting for one day. I'm gettin all pissed off now.
Later
Sonny
I think one of the biggest problems in the PC world today is companies trying to load our PC's up with their proprietary bullshit. With the amount of garbage software that creative loads onto your computer with the driver install and of course, highjacking file associations, you would think they believe everyone would want to use only their crap just because they bought their cheap-ass card so they could use soundfonts.
Other companies use hidden little programs that get installed with their software to run all the time in the background, to make sure you are using their stuff, and to report usage stats to the companies, like winamp and realplayer. At least with Winamp you can turn that crap off. With the nasty new "realone" player from realnetworks, they install a little program that ran as a process which constantly continued to hijack my file associations. There is no option anywhere in the install or the program which lets you turn that process off.
I don't so much mind it when a program asks you if you would like it to turn on in the start-up, but when the idiots just assume you would want it there, well, that starts to piss me off. These companies are dying for us to use their players, because of their ad revenues, but just because they give them to us free, doesn't mean they have the right to take over a system. It's almost like an invasion of privacy. You should not offer us a "free" program when there is clearly a price, albeit a non-monetary one.
enough ranting for one day. I'm gettin all pissed off now.
Later
Sonny
R
RWhite
Well-known member
Well said!