Elitegroup K7SEM Motherboard

Pros: Low cost, stable, good documentation and driver disk.
Cons: None.

The board is a small, micro-ATX which has only two PCI and one AGP slots. It fits however in a standard ATX case, with the connectors and ports going through the standard holes. Video, sound, LAN are all onboard, although the onboard devices can be...

Pros: Cheap! Fast Low-end MB
Cons: Only 2 PCI slots & 1 AGP. Possible BIOS issues.

I just bought the K7SEM from Pricewatch.com. As soon as I got all the parts I put it all together. At first I was very excited about my new 1.2 Ghz monster. When I put everything in it's place and installed all the drivers included on the disk, I noticed...

Pros: Onboard Video and Audio Additional Utilities and Software packages like PC-CILLIN, Gamut & more.
Cons: Are You Kidding?...NONE!!!

No Sound on your motherboard - K7SEM?

Boy. Folks..This is the part where a Computer Builder comes around and tries to install something him/herself w/o reading the instructions. Either that, or the person was sold a motherboard w/o the...

I have boughten two K7SEM"s From IBUSOL, THEY ARE THE BEST Board Ever. I have had great luck with my 1.2 and 1.3 durons. They where right priced, and i have complete systems for under 500 bucks. What a great motherboard. Would recomend any ram higher than 256 in them though. Just bought a K7S5A, we are gonna she how that goes. Love the integrated SIS, and the NIC card. AWESOME BOARD. ANDY

I think the above reviewer has a bad power supply or something - never had a problem with these and using more than one device on the usb ports or any other problem worth noting.

You get what you buy here. Bought it used, has a 1Ghz duron, but can furtunatly say i haven't had the major problems that you commonly see on the net(other than the 7018 sound problems, update to XP home they go away). It come from the factory with gremlings onboard but get them off, disable the 730 onboard card drop in a radion or gforce it may have potential. A good entry level system.

Purchased the board (01/2003) as a 2nd PC in the house. The USB pin config. for the additional header isn't mapped out and requires a visit to ECS's web page. I had no problem with on-board features except the LAN. The in-house LAN I have connected to a 100mb port on a router for my DSL. However, the on-board LAN couldn't connect at that speed. After 6 hours of frustration I set the LAN port to 10mb and the connection works fine. (Tried different cables and a 2nd router so I ruled out the obvious first.) Up and running for a full week now. Love the board but like all home builds it takes time and you must enjoy the hobby of building it yourself. (Duron 1.3, 256 RAM)

The board that 'Howie' refers is a special edition board It's a Duron 850 running at 893Mhz, it is NOT a 1.2Ghz system, the processor cannot be removed or changed. With this chip on the Bios get's a little confused and does a similar calculation as it would for an Athlon E.G 1533 x 1.2ish = 1800XP. Hence when you system boots it displays either 1200XP or Pro 1200, a lot of dealers are selling them as 1200's they are not and they cannot be upgraded. Having said that it's a fine business board, and when you consider the board and chip cost less that an Athlon 1.7 chip, it's not that painful to discard the board chip if you need to upgrade.

overall im happy with the board. Didn't have any problems installing windows 98SE as a few people have i see. Its great to have for a lower end system that you dont want or can upgrade to use DDR. Bigger heat sinks like a volcano 7 are hard to put on due to the lack of room next to the socket.

Well - what a great little board! As the only board I have ever installed myself it was easy to do - and light on the wallet. Came with an on-board Duron 1200 for £59. Driver installation took me a few attempts, but all is working well now. One quibble - the chip seems to run at 893 Mhz,and I can't find Bios settings to change this (unlike the K7S5A bios on my other machine).

Very Easy to install and configure. Drivers are avaliable and ECS has posted all Bios upgrade on there Web site. This fix's alot of the issues people are having. Using Onboard 4xAGP slot with nVidia MX440 4x and works fine. using onboard 10/100 and 56k AMR modem both work great. The 10/100 is working at 100 BaseT.

My own web crawler started life based on this board-Win98,950Duron & a wheezy used 4 or 6 gig HDD. Later upgraded to a T-Bird 1.2Gig,WinXP and a WD 30 Gig HDD.Tossed in a GeForce 2 as well. In it's present state carefull shoping let me produce a reasonably good machine for under $300 sans the microsoft tax.If you want to build an OK machine on the cheap you can't beat this with a stick. If you are into serious performance tweaks this is not for you.Be advised the driver install is tedious & the on screen prompts vague.Has been reliable & solid for the past year and a half.

The motherboard Locks up While tring to load any of the operating systems like win98,me,xp. I also tried using the flash utility and I was able to load windows me. Then I tried to load windows xp and it would just lock up again. I don't know if it just gets hot that it does this.

I have tried multiple operating systems and the MOBO locks up randomly. I have tried multiple Athlon processors and have the same problem with all of them. But then again, you get what you pay for. I do not recommend this board at all.

This MOBO has many problems, First, the onboard USB can not support more than one device connected and requires adding a PCI USB Card. Second, the motherboard does not work well with athlon processors, it works better with Duron. Third, Voltage regulation on the motherboard is unstable and causes system to freeze randomly. Don't Buy it!

For an entry level motherboard it's hard to find one with these features at this price. I run this board with an Athlon XP processor 512 MB ram and I have 64 MB ram being utilized for the onboard video. This board is used by a number of resellers in my area as well as a number of online retailers. My first experience with this board was from Accessmicro.com They completed the whole MOBO processor, fan, ram and 2 yr warr. at a great price. I've made 4 other orders since. To bad the first reviewer had such a bad experience.

i bought mine that came with the processor. freezes so regularly i cannot even get windows 98 to set up! terrible board. Even fried 2 of my Kingston RAM! Elitegroup is definitely OUT from any of my future upgrades. Nightmare! :(

With everything built in, You pop in a duron 1 GHZ and wham your rolling for under $130 bucks. although the drivers are a little complicated, some are wrong while others work fine. Support is still recent and updates are frequent, when I'll upgrade I'll consider Elitegroup again.

the board has been working perfectly...i haven't had any problems...got a nvidia 16mb geforce card on it...performs great...no heat ups....had windows 98, ME, and xp pro on it with no probs....i have been working with ecs boards for a long time so i know what drivers they use...so its a easier for me to install the correct drivers...