Just picked up for free a pc with one of these motherboards in, and a quick Google showed me that there are some custom roms available for it, but what are other peoples thoughts about this motherboard?
Phil made a review about the mainboard. Have you seen yet?
ECS Elitegroup K7S5A Pro Socket A Motherboard Review - First Boot in 15 years
[ MS6168/PII-350/YMF754/98SE ]
[ 775i65G/E5500/9800Pro/Vortex2/ME ]
Looks like a decent board for a test system. I have a similar board from ASrock, but with VIA chipset.
Best CPU is an Athlon XP 2600+ Thorton. These are a bit expensive, but the 2400+ can be bought for cheap. That's what I'm using. With that much horsepower it's a really fast SDR tester.
Plus it also has Universal AGP, so you can use it to test Voodoo cards and old Matrox/S3/ATI cards. So you don't have to risk valuable boards.
There's a very high probability that the capacitors will need to be replaced.
"A lot of times when you first start out on a project you think, This is never going to be finished. But then it is, and you think, Wow, it wasn't even worth it." - Jack Handey
I've seen the vid but not got round to fully watched it yet.
There are a couple bulging caps, but I haven't checked out the values yet. I have stock of a few different caps, so if I have them it'll be a little project for a rainy day. But it does boot so I nice little rig for my two voodoo 2 cards.
browny1978 wrote on 2022-11-18, 20:00:I have stock of a few different caps, so if I have them it'll be a little project for a rainy day.
Are you aware that the caps on mainboards (and graphics cards, and PC power supplies) are required to be (ultra) low ESR caps? The cheapest general purpose caps won't be a sufficient replacement for bulging caps. If your caps in stock are capacitors recommended on sites like the badcaps forum, they are good enough.
Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-11-18, 00:14:There's a very high probability that the capacitors will need to be replaced.
Agreed. My board has bulging caps which I need to replace at some point (currently in storage).
mkarcher wrote on 2022-11-18, 21:09:browny1978 wrote on 2022-11-18, 20:00:I have stock of a few different caps, so if I have them it'll be a little project for a rainy day.
Are you aware that the caps on mainboards (and graphics cards, and PC power supplies) are required to be (ultra) low ESR caps? The cheapest general purpose caps won't be a sufficient replacement for bulging caps. If your caps in stock are capacitors recommended on sites like the badcaps forum, they are good enough.
Yes, I've repaired about a dozen motherboards over the last couple of years, and have always rounded up when buying caps, so have a few extra.
One thing it's missing is SATA though..
