I used K7S5A in the past. It was stable, compatible with lots of RAMs, video cards and sound cards I mated it with, but not a champion in overclocking.

This particular board has a 12V connector for the CPU VRM at least, so you do not need to worry about a particularly high load on 5V. FX 5900 also has a Molex connector, it should pull most power from the 12V rail.
I recommended the Seasonic S12II-520 in another thread, it's ok if you're looking for a new one.

ECS boards range from mediocre to amazing, depending on platform / model. From the "amazing" category, I have to mention ECS KV2 Extreme - it's a Socket 939 board based on the VIA K8T800PRO/VT8237 chipset. It overclocks like an nforce board, with locked AGP and PCI multipliers (66 and 33MHz respectively), it's very stable, it will run any ram I put in it and it's very fast. Not to mention features.

lazibayer wrote:

I used K7S5A in the past. It was stable, compatible with lots of RAMs, video cards and sound cards I mated it with, but not a champion in overclocking.

I used ECS boards in the early to mid 2000s and found them and reliable... but the K7S5A (which is ingrained in my mind) I remember being horrible. My dad bought it so he could use his old PC133 RAM. It was unreliable, flaky and the caps bulged and leaked within a year or so...

I remember seeing piles of them returned at our local computer store.

They are hit and miss, I've got 2 socket A ECS boards that are rock solid stable, a K7VTA3 V 8.0 and a KT600-A, but I've also seen ECS boards that where so unstable they'd crash in the bios if you tried turning off the serial port.

My first build used an ECS K7SEM with a 1GHz Duron. One of the lower-end ECS boards of the time, but I never really had any issues with it. It was a budget build that was already quite obsolete the very second I finished it, but it worked well for its purpose. Its sudden death was a result of user stupidity on my part and not really a result of any inherent cheapness or poor quality...although it could be theorized a higher-end board MIGHT have been able to survive the little stunt I had tried to pull, but this is not something I'd be willing to test. :p

Beyond that, all I have to go on is past general consensus that ECS tends to be lower-midrange. Basically, just an improved version of PC Chips (same company IIRC).

You'll want to watch out for bad caps, of course. ANY motherboard brand from that era is susceptible to them, not just cheap ones.

wasn't impressed with their recentish offerings, but have a P3 board that's not bad at all.

elod wrote:

This particular board has a 12V connector for the CPU VRM at least, so you do not need to worry about a particularly high load on 5V. FX 5900 also has a Molex connector, it should pull most power from the 12V rail.
I recommended the Seasonic S12II-520 in another thread, it's ok if you're looking for a new one.

Yep it does have the 12v connector, im a idiot 🤣

To my understanding are all socket A boards not capable of more then 2GB of RAM?

I used to have a K7S5A and a 761GX-M754 V1.0. The K7S5A only turned on (e.g. POSTed) when it wanted to, but worked fine when it did. The 761GX had some weird problem with its storage controller: any HDD I tried, connected to any IDE or SATA port, would inexplicably be capped at around ~30MB/s sustained read/write, regardless of BIOS or DMA settings.

I have a KAM1-I ITX board that works perfectly, but that's a much newer product.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

elod wrote:

This particular board has a 12V connector for the CPU VRM at least, so you do not need to worry about a particularly high load on 5V. FX 5900 also has a Molex connector, it should pull most power from the 12V rail.
I recommended the Seasonic S12II-520 in another thread, it's ok if you're looking for a new one.

Yep it does have the 12v connector, im a idiot 🤣

To my understanding are all socket A boards not capable of more then 2GB of RAM?

They might. But one thing to keep in mind with sA boards (and many other boards in fact) is that more modules may result in lower memory bus frequency (iirc it had to do with the total number of memory banks).