I have built several lowend machines in the past for various people based on these boards and have had no issues with them.

ECS products are fine if you never really want to overclock.

My previous motherboard was ECS based on Via KM400 and it has some troubles like ACPI malfunction.

Elitegroup boards usually are optimized for just one thing: Low price. When they come out, they are significantly cheaper than most of the competition, but you can't expect long life or expensive gimmicks. If you want to build a budget system with basic features and adaequate performance that is going to be replaced two years later, Elitegroup boards are not a bad choice.

But for building a retrogaming box, I would get something different. Socket 7 boards are so cheap nowadays you can easily get the best boards of that era for practically nothing.

I looked at a few pictures and schematics of the TS54PAIO, it has quite a strange layout: The PCI/ISA slot count is good, but that's about it on the positive side. The board seems to be quite big (looks like full-length AT), plenty of space is wasted with cache RAM sockets (which were already out of date in Socket7 days, and probably cause stability problems if the cache is installed there). The CPU socket is blocking many of the slots, the voltage regulator has a big heatsink sticking out of the board (indicates a rather simple design, and the heatsink might be in the way). The I/O and IDE connectors are cramped into little space, and last but not least there is a Dallas clock chip with an integrated battery that may be flat by now.

Enough reasons why this board has never been used 😉

stay away from their 486 and Pentium boards. Fake cache chips.

Fun site to read:
http://www.redhill.net.au/ib.html

Wow -- great site! Thanks for the link, swaaye -- I'm now looking elsewhere -- the ECS board doesn't look like a good idea now... There are plenty of good options on red hill, though -- thanks again!

Yeah Redhill is fun to read for sure. 😀