That first board is an ECS K7S5A. Kill it with fire.

I had one of those when it was new and it was garbage. Once I could afford a nicer board I replaced it. Had all sorts of quirks and stability issues, and many others were in the same boat.

Looks like someone was disguising crap by putting lousy boards in boxes of nicer motherboards. The bottom board appears to have dead capacitors on it.

Maybe a wonderful case of someone who put broken stuff into storage instead of garbage, forgot it was broken, dug it out as special gift 10 years later!!!!

The bottom board looks like an ASUS nForce 2 something...

Half-Saint wrote:

The bottom board looks like an ASUS nForce 2 something...

Yup it's an ASUS A7N8X.

Deja vu 😀
Re: They came bearing gifts

They look like trouble to me.

I pushed the abort button on them. They were free. Win some you lose some.

DonutKing wrote:

That first board is an ECS K7S5A. Kill it with fire.

I had one of those when it was new and it was garbage. Once I could afford a nicer board I replaced it. Had all sorts of quirks and stability issues, and many others were in the same boat.

A friend of mine had 1 as new and it worked without any problems,not sure what revision of the mb he had,i also remeber the sis 735 chipset receiving praises for having good performance and options for less money.

Nahkri wrote:

A friend of mine had 1 as new and it worked without any problems,not sure what revision of the mb he had,i also remeber the sis 735 chipset receiving praises for having good performance and options for less money.

People (and reviewers) fixated on the single chip chipset design and its magical internal buses (MuTIOL!!!) having advantages over other chipsets. 735 did have a very short time of competitiveness but KT266A came and was faster and cheap too. The ECS K7S5A board itself was definitely a troublesome product with QA issues. You could get a good one but even those probably didn't last.

Yes, I read many reviews and it seemed to be a total crapshoot as to whether youd get a good one or not. Some suggested ECS had atat least two factories and the good ones all came from one of those. I tkok a gamble and lost.
I only wanted this board because I had SDRAM but couldnt afford DDR, ajd wanted to upgrade from my Pentium 2 to an Athlon XP and buy DDR in the future. In hindsight I should have been more patient and saved a little longer.

In any case its a cheap board with a high failure rate, and the VIA DDR chipsets outperformed the sis 735. Theres no reason to bother with this board any more.

There was another dual SDRAM / DDR board, the Asus A7A266 using an Acer Labs chipset but it was supposed to be a little slower. I think that would have been a better choice.

DonutKing wrote:

There was another dual SDRAM / DDR board, the Asus A7A266 using an Acer Labs chipset but it was supposed to be a little slower. I think that would have been a better choice.

I've used the IWILL XP333-R, which uses the ALi Magik 1. It was perfectly functional and reliable, but again it isn't as fast as even KT266A.

Now that I think of it, wasn't there also an ASRock board that had dual SDRAM/DDR?

Just did a quick google and it turns out there was , http://www.asrock.com/mb/SiS/G%20PRO/
But its for pentium 4 Socket 478, and we all know what a dog the P4 was with SDRAM...

swaaye wrote:

People (and reviewers) fixated on the single chip chipset design and its magical internal buses (MuTIOL!!!) having advantages over other chipsets. 735 did have a very short time of competitiveness but KT266A came and was faster and cheap too. The ECS K7S5A board itself was definitely a troublesome product with QA issues. You could get a good one but even those probably didn't last.

Yes, mutiol did magic in real world multitasking usage, unfortunately benchmarks do not reveal that. Separation of IDE also makes overclocking safer. 266A was only marginally faster in specific tests and the boards were nowhere near the price of K7S5A. I am still having one after a decade, it was my prime computer for several years and provided me with much modding entertainment, There were several revisions, it was selling hot for few years after all, but I don't think the quality issues are tied to particular revision, rather individual boards. So I would say to OP give it a try.

I have one K7S5A in storage, which worked fine after I received if from the previous owner. It came with a single 512MB SDRAM stick. With my dislike for VIA chipsets, the SiS just be more desirable then the VIA KT400. But I doubt it would best a VIA KT600. What to do with socket A?, or socket 478 for that matter?, It is currently the cheapest hardware around.

Come to think of it, my only socket 478 Pentium 4 board is also SiS based (SiS 645 chipset).