A Real Performer on the Cheap
Written: Oct 09 '02 (Updated Oct 27 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Cheap, quick performer, PC133 and DDR266 RAM, full featured
Cons: Unstable at times (undetermined), Inconsistant problems with different users
The Bottom Line: Spotty, but a goody.
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| nad_masters's Full Review: EliteGroup K7S5A Motherboard |
UPDATE!!! Oct 27, 2002 - Please read after review.
Prelude
A friend of mine builds PCs for many people. As I was by at his house, I can't help but notice that the number of empty ECS Elitegroup motherboard boxes kept growing. Curious, I asked why such a cheap (associated with unstable) motherboards? "Wouldn't those people keep bothering you with lockups and crashes?" After all, the people he builds them for doesn't know a flip chip to a potatoe chip.
He explained that they have been working great for him without any troubles. All I was able to mutter was "huh uh".
1 Month Ago
Alright... I have an Asus P2B-LS (440BX chipset) motherboard with a Celeron 900 (if you read my other reviews about this combo... a very sweet upgrade). It's the only one in the house were we can play WarCraft 3 without any complaints. My brother's PC (which I look at it as my 2nd PC) have an Abit mobo with a PIII-500 and a 3rd guest PC (for friends who drop by) running an OEM HP mobo (Asus P2B-VE) running a PII-450. This isn't going to work at all.
Two options came to mind: do the sweet minor upgrade on both PCs (370 pin to Slot 1 converter /w Celeron 900 or 1 GHz), or get a mobo/CPU combo for myself, move my Celeron over to my bro's PC, and let my freind suffer with the slowest PC in my stable.
Gee... guess which one did I choose? :) Hey, before you feel bad for my friend, just remember that he only comes and plays once in a while (so the PC really does nothing until he comes by), and I am the one paying for his fun. Either way, they cost about the same (2x Celeron 900s would cost be around $100, not including slockets, which are now VERY difficult to find - and the ones on eBay will not work as they do not have the core voltage selector). Newegg.com was having a sale on OEM Athlon XP 1600 for $55 and the cheapest mobo that will match it was (you guessed it) the ECS K7S5A mobo for $54. And with free shipping (yes, Newegg rules), it would cost almost as much as getting the two Celerons.
4 Weeks Ago
In less than a week after it was ordered, it came to my doorstep. Upon opening the boring brown box that was full of packing peanuts, I see the now-famous green ECS box along with a white, non-descript box. Opening the white box reveils the OEM Althon XP 1600 . Oh, did I mention I ordered the Thermaltake Volcano 5? Well, I did... and it was there. It wasn't the most exciting thing to find. Heck, even the white non-descript box was more exciting. :) (Well, I knew it was the CPU... it had to be!).
One of the reasons I loved the ECS is not just because it was the cheapest listed on Newegg, but also (coincidently) it accepts PC133 memory, which is great! I didn't have to buy more memory! (See benchmark below).
Upon putting it together, there were no problems at all. First time it booted with a single beep, detected all the drives, and saw my 1600 CPU (which really is a 1.4 GHz CPU) as 1.1 GHz. I kinda figured it was using the wrong FSB, but would have thought the mobo would have auto-detected the CPU. It did not.
After getting into the BIOS, I was a bit stunned... I was so used to looking at Award BIOSes (both the Asus and Abit mobos I had were Award), the American Megatrend look just had me. I haven't seen this interface for the longest time! (Since the Pentium days!)
Features
Since I considered it to be a minor and upgrade (one which I plan to last me a year, maybe a year and a half), I really didn't do any research on it (as long as it had what I wanted). I did a few quicky searches through Tom's Hardware Guide to find that they loved the mobo, too. I was looking at any complaints reviews had with the SiS 735 chipset. None. I was glad to hear. In fact, they even praised it. ECS shows no shame in quoting the review on the box, which reads "This motherboard provides much better value than any AMD760, ALiMaGik or KT266 board can offer".
That last part struck a cord... better value than a KT266? They didnt say "KT266A", but that almost fooled me. :) Either way, the VIA chipsets (the maker of the KT series) are reguarded as the best performing and best featured Athlon chipset. In fact, the KT266A are the Intel 440BXes of the AMD world. They are an old chipset that is not yet obsolete, and still the fastest going (until the KT333 and KT400 catches up with CL2 memory).
Newegg.com shows pictures they take themselves of the products they sell. And what they say about pictures are true! More than words will every say, at one glance I already knew what I was getting into. With 5 PCI slots, 1 4x AGP, a nice blue IDE connector (indicating ATA100), DDR and SDR memory slots, AC97 sound and a LAN connector, I knew it was very full-featured.
The BIOS also allow access to some of the more advance settings such as memory timing. Sweet! However, in the CPU area, it was a very simple "100/100, 133/100, 133/133" setting. First is the FSB, the second is the memory speed. As you can see, no overclocking potential here unless you buy a CPU that uses a 100 MHz FSB. Even then, without any incremental steps to 133, if your 100 MHz CPU doesn't work at 133, you're out of luck.
Performance
The built-in sound is as like any other. The motherboard includes USB and sound pins to allow porting those features to the front of the case (if your case supports it). Mine does, and it worked as advertised. The C-Media sound isn't the best, but it could have fooled me. It does, however, use CPU cycles, but nonetheless, insignificant for a cheap system. Thankfully, I have a SB Live! card, and both cooperate without a hitch. I kept the C-Media sound because of the front ports. I am currently running Windows 2000, and it allows easy switching between different cards (preferred sound device), as do all Windows since 95. I always use my Live!, but for those moments where headphones are required, I just switch soundcards on the fly.
Benchmarks with the 1600 was graceful, showing no signs of being significantly slower than other chipsets. With SiSoft Sandra 2002 Pro at hand, the PC built benchmarked at 3841 MIPS Drystone ALU, and 1923 MFLOPS Wheatstone FPU. Noth bad considering that Sandra's base numbers for a 1600 was 3872 MIPS and 1940 MFLOPS. Not a huge difference.
In the Multimedia test, Integer aEMMX/aSSE came in at 7542 it/s and Floating Point aSSE at 8823 it/s. Base numbers were 7644 it/s and 8913 it/s respecitvely. Not bad for a SiS chipset, which used to be considered as a cheap low-performaning chipset maker (and compatibility problems to boot).
The best part is the memory benchmark, which really seperates the losers from the winners. And it does not disapoint! With Crucial CL2 PC133 memory (256 MB), the test came back with 970 MB/s! This is compareable to VIA's own KT133 running the same spec memory at 989 MB/s! Also, you must realize that this is close to the theoretical 1 GB/s limit for PC133 memory. :) Very nice...
Curious about what I was missing without DDR memory, I shoved some in (one kind of memory at a time, please!). With that, the numbers jump to 1756 MB/sec! The base numbers for the same chipset (SiS 735) for Sandra was pretty much the same, at 1757 MB/s. How does it compare to the KT266A? How does 1925 MB/s do ya? The KT266A was definately faster, but will most likely be unnoticable for practical use. However, compared to the KT266 (non-A version, as this is what Tom's Hardware compared with) the non-A version did 1550 MB/s according to Sandra's base numbers. The SiS 735 chipset beats out the KT266!
The ATA100 interface is also no poser. Although a bit hard to hit the 100 MB/s theoretical limit, HD Tach pegged it bursting at 69.3 MB/s with a Maxtor 6L060J3 hard drive (ATA133 60 GB). This is definately over the ATA66 (which should be actually less than 66 MB/s), but definately lower than what would expect for an ATA100 interface. I would expect somewhere from 80 to 90 MB/s. I only reported the burst speed, as this test the interface itself, and not the drive. Incidently, the chipset requires 10.3% of the CPU in Windows 2000 to benchmark the drive, which is quite a bit. The numbers from a SIIG PC133 PCI controller (which I installed on the mobo) raped the onboard controller with 78.2 MB/s and a CPU utilization of 11.7%. This goes to show that the SiS 735 may not be bus-mastering the PCI bus efficiently, as on the Asus P2B-LS 440BX chipset, it was around 3 to 5% using the same SIIG PC133 PCI controller.
2 Weeks Ago
Okay, so I'm jumping around time, so what? It was about this time when I had my first problem. The motherboard POSTed and came up with a bad checksum of the CMOS. Daunted, I check the battery. It was still good. But just to be safe, I replaced it with a known GOOD battery. No problems since.
1.5 Weeks Ago
Same problem. What is this!? I found out that one of my friend's "customer" (which is also a friend of mine) had the same problem (although he blamed me for it 'cause "[I] was the last one to use it". Dang newbie!). Checksum bad, time and date gone.
1 Week Ago
Arg! My PC locked up in Windows 2000 while surfing the net! Rebooted, and it will always hang on the Windows 2000 boot screen (you know, the one with the logo).
I totally anhailated the HD with the OS, and reinstalled everything... a fresh start (but then again, it was fresh to begin with... just installed it when I got the mobo!) Guess what? Blue screen of death.
I opened up the case, and checked everything. I pushed on the cards, and they confirmed that everything was tight and snug. IDE cables did not find their way loose. The CPU was sitting tight and pretty. With nothing changed, I was sure the PC was toasted, but I decided to try once more (for my own sanity sakes).
Boom! Windows was installed!
3 days ago
Windows 2000 rebooted itself without a warning. POST gets done, and Windows just hang at the logo...again. Of course, as what I did last time, I opened up the case, push on the cards (again, all was snug!?), and turned the PC on. Windows was fine. Guess what? I reinstalled the OS for nothing! At least I know what to do now, but the real deal is this: I shouldn't have to.
I chalk it up to a bad mobo, but I figure I will only be using it for a year or two, and it isn't worth the trouble returning it (esp since it is now too late to return).
Present
I am on ePinions, writing this up on the same PC I just built, with nary a problem (for now). But you must judge if this is a good buy for yourself. Most people do not have any problems with ECS. However, I just did, and I sure hope mine is an isolated incident (although the incident with my friend seems awfully similar with the CMOS thing...).
There is a 3rd known PC with this mobo, and it is at the same friend's house with those empty ECS boxes. He is using for himself (WarCraft 3 fans we are!), and he reports no such problems. However, the only thing he does say is that during WarCraft 3, the sound from the built-in AC97 is choppy. Neither my newbie friend or I have such problem.
This is why I beileve ECS mobos (no matter how much press it gets) is still very spotty on quality, relaibility, and consistancy. Maybe Tom's Hardware have a K7S5A that ECS representatives picked out, while the consumers have to dig thru the bin.
Despite my problems, I do believe this motherboard have potential in being the best in performance and price. Can't argue with 55 bucks, and if all works well, it's a great mobo to create systems with that you will be selling to clients. Just be prepared, however, to replace them if your confidence gets shattered.
UPDATE: There is a forum dedicated to this value performer at http://pub65.ezboard.com/bk7s5amotherboardforum
Also, per their findings, the lock ups and random reboots are contributed to the chipset overheating. Appearently, the north and southbridge chipset are integrated in one chip on the SiS 735 chipset, causing a significant amount of heat. Also, to compound things worse, ECS used double-sided tape to mount the orange heatsink. The fix is easy: remove the heatsink, clean both the chipset and heatsink of the poor icky tape, and use a REAL thermal paste. To secure the heatsink, use either Krazy Glue (which sounds tacky, but it works), or Lucite (sp?). I believe Lucite is the kind of glue used for RC cars hobbiest for gluing the rubber tires onto the plastic wheels/rims.
As for the lost-info CMOS issue, the site have fixes for that either. You will need a 470 ohm resistor and good steady hands to solder it onto the board.
With this in mind, do I still think it is a motherboard worth using for mass producing PCs? Sure! Resistors are cheap in bulk, and well as heatsink compound (and Krazy Glue). Not too much work for about 10 PCs. But if you are doing high volume production, this may be an issue.
Also, on this site, it shows K7S5A owners how to overclock. YES, that is correct: you can overclock (although moderately) with this motherboard! You can either use a hacked BIOS (thanks, HoneyX) that have the extra CPU/FSB settings, or a utility called CHFSB to change your current BIOS's "reserved" settings (which doesn't show up on the BIOS setup, but it exists).
I was sucessful in getting a 138/138, causing my 1.4 GHz CPU to run at 1.45 GHz (halfway between an XP 1600 and a 1700 ).
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 53.99
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