Doug H
I'll be there
Boy, I never knew how good I had it till it was gone. I am so sick of fighting with my system words don't begin to explain.
Comp was getting a little dusty and I had a memory upgrade that had been lying around for a few months so I decided to get down to it. Poof, fried my motherboard in a single moment of stupidity. Don't ask, just suffice it to say I'm a moron.
Anyhow I managed to rescue an old board with a bad kb comtroller by using a usb adaptor. It didn't want to give my Tbird enough juice (it's got hacked up bridges) so in went the old Duron 600.
Instant pop and click hell. Don't know how I got away with it running a kt133a/1ghz tbird for so long, but the old kt133 was useless. After going through the usual painfull steps that I'm sure many via chipset owners are familiar with, I came to the solution, buy a new board.
So the only board that supports SDRAM I could find at the local shops was the ecs k7s5a. On my first trip to the store the guy said "they used to be PCChips" and I was already out the door. Research showed it was fast with great memory latency, I couldn't find anything else for my SDRAM and $90 CAN wasn't that big a risk compared to $500 for a shiny new ddr system, so I picked it up.
The board runs great in windows. I've detected the odd click and pop running at 384 buffer setting (audiophile 2496) so I upped it to 512. It's better but I'm not completely popless. Since I'm probably going to break down and get a 1700+ or more, I'm hoping it's just that the duron is a little too weak to hassle through all the xp services and feed the delta consistently.
Anyone using this board and care to share a few tips like...
Anyone found the best PCI slot?
Setting the PCI IDE bus master option in the bios?
Is there a "secret weapon" bios setting somewhere?
pci nic versus the built in lan?
What I know
-needs IDE driver install for dma
-wants a high output and HQ psu (I've heard 370+ but I'm hoping my 350 enermax cuts it)
-I think the bios defaults to AGP 4x which could spell trouble for some grfx cards if not reset
-For some reason it didsn't like my reset connector and wouldn't boot with it connected. I haven't tried hooking it up again, so I may have had it connected wrong.
btw, I love the layout of the board. the inside of my case has never been so sparse and the cpu socket lines up well with my zalmon "flower heatsink" fan bracket.
edit:
Just discovered I had a sample blending problem, so I may be popless. I'm so friggen paranoid, what a nightmare. I"m going to hear pops and clicks in my sleep.
Comp was getting a little dusty and I had a memory upgrade that had been lying around for a few months so I decided to get down to it. Poof, fried my motherboard in a single moment of stupidity. Don't ask, just suffice it to say I'm a moron.
Anyhow I managed to rescue an old board with a bad kb comtroller by using a usb adaptor. It didn't want to give my Tbird enough juice (it's got hacked up bridges) so in went the old Duron 600.
Instant pop and click hell. Don't know how I got away with it running a kt133a/1ghz tbird for so long, but the old kt133 was useless. After going through the usual painfull steps that I'm sure many via chipset owners are familiar with, I came to the solution, buy a new board.
So the only board that supports SDRAM I could find at the local shops was the ecs k7s5a. On my first trip to the store the guy said "they used to be PCChips" and I was already out the door. Research showed it was fast with great memory latency, I couldn't find anything else for my SDRAM and $90 CAN wasn't that big a risk compared to $500 for a shiny new ddr system, so I picked it up.
The board runs great in windows. I've detected the odd click and pop running at 384 buffer setting (audiophile 2496) so I upped it to 512. It's better but I'm not completely popless. Since I'm probably going to break down and get a 1700+ or more, I'm hoping it's just that the duron is a little too weak to hassle through all the xp services and feed the delta consistently.
Anyone using this board and care to share a few tips like...
Anyone found the best PCI slot?
Setting the PCI IDE bus master option in the bios?
Is there a "secret weapon" bios setting somewhere?
pci nic versus the built in lan?
What I know
-needs IDE driver install for dma
-wants a high output and HQ psu (I've heard 370+ but I'm hoping my 350 enermax cuts it)
-I think the bios defaults to AGP 4x which could spell trouble for some grfx cards if not reset
-For some reason it didsn't like my reset connector and wouldn't boot with it connected. I haven't tried hooking it up again, so I may have had it connected wrong.
btw, I love the layout of the board. the inside of my case has never been so sparse and the cpu socket lines up well with my zalmon "flower heatsink" fan bracket.
edit:
Just discovered I had a sample blending problem, so I may be popless. I'm so friggen paranoid, what a nightmare. I"m going to hear pops and clicks in my sleep.
Last edited:
Quality issue on ECS's part yes, but not a psu problem.