For some reason I also found it hard to hunt down good s478 boards. Right now A64 boards (both s754 and s939) seem to be much more available here in The Netherlands, so I got a couple of those instead

The problem here is that it becomes to almost impossible to hunt down s478 boards at all.However,I once found a bunch of mobos.No 478 though.Here's what I remember they are:
-Chaintech,S462,microATX,2x SDRAM,2 PCI and 1 AGP
-some oem LGA775 DDR400 mobo with a weird heatsink and no fan,SiS chipset based
-ECS AM2 board
-Soltek (I think) S370 mobo with a heatsink that was the size of a brick
-Soltek SL-75FRN2L-RL (which I bought and didn't work)
and that's all I remember was the most good.A mobo without anything was 5 bucks,while a mobo with CPU (and maybe RAM too)was 10 bucks.
Other than that,I could spot another 3 motherboards,even if seller's price was weird.
-OEM Pentium 3 socket 370 mobo
-ASUS P4SD (plain P4SD,no -LA,still was HP OEM though)
-ECS K7S6A (which I listed in the original post)
Why the prices were weird?The board with the CPU and HSF was 10 bucks,while I think the rest were 15 bucks.
I had to dry the K7S6A with a hair dryer,as in the day I got it it was raining.I need to solder a new CMOS battery holder though,as I removed it from the mobo without knowing that there was nothing wrong with it.However,it still works.
Do you know a program that can partition and NTFS quick format a HDD?

PcBytes wrote:

Do you know a program that can partition and NTFS quick format a HDD?

Usually things like missing chipset HSF's mean there could be something wrong with the board.

For partitioning and quickformatting I just use XP or 7 😜

7 won't boot until there's a valid MBR.I'll try XP though.
Also,the chipset heatsink is there on the board.It doesn't use any fan.

When it comes to S478 and A I only like using the best boards when available as well the best coolers. Good luck with the next build, a great board is essential to building a good build.

I don't have any problem with the K7S6A.
So far,just the CD booting has a problem in which only certain discs boot (mostly those which have a boot menu,like Windows 98 SE,LastXP v17 and Linux distros that have a GRUB boot menu)but I got around that by using PLOP Manager,which is based on Linux.Not annoying at all,I like boot managers.

Alright,installed Windows 7 Lite on this system on the 10GB HDD.I really have to say,it's pretty fast,much like my Sempron 3400+,which also runs the same light version of Windows 7.
Also,I read somewhere here on the forums that stock Intel coolers for Socket 370 are loud.Is that true?

Tetrium wrote:

For some reason I also found it hard to hunt down good s478 boards. Right now A64 boards (both s754 and s939) seem to be much more available here in The Netherlands, so I got a couple of those instead

Not only socket 478 boards, tualatin boards as well, and some older S462 boards are very hard to get here. That why my Socket A is maybe looked over doing..

Robin4 wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

For some reason I also found it hard to hunt down good s478 boards. Right now A64 boards (both s754 and s939) seem to be much more available here in The Netherlands, so I got a couple of those instead

Not only socket 478 boards, tualatin boards as well, and some older S462 boards are very hard to get here. That why my Socket A is maybe looked over doing..

I agree. While s478 boards are sold here and there, the problem is that they are either very limited (like s478 SDRAM boards with only support for 400MHz FSB P4's or boards that support 533MHz FSB and only have 2 DIMM slots) or they ask too much money for it. Lately Tualatin boards I haven't seen for sale locally in The Netherlands at all!
Socket A you can still find, but the really fast Socket A boards were never very available anyway. It's usually the slower VIA boards I see over here and enough of them have bad caps or have bad quality pictures taken so you can't really tell if the board has bad caps or not.
Super Socket 7? Also very hard to come by here these days.

Agreed.Here,from where I get my boards,Socket 7/Super Socket 7 is long extinct.Very very very rarely one or 2 appear.Generally Socket 370 are a bit more popular,along with Socket A.S478,it's pretty rare too,as I haven't been able to find one recently,and generally most of what S478 boards I got didn't work or were slow.

EDIT:Damn,it seems that my K7S6A is suffering of the lost CMOS problem (which happens on ECS boards).Oh well,I can deal with that using modbin6 to edit the BIOS with my normal settings then flashing it.