Meanwhile, it was a different story here. The PCChips M830/K7S5A was a very common board and the bane of every technician's existence. They were unstable, slow and lacked correct support for anything better than the Athlon 1400 which it could not provide with adequate power anyway, regardless of what PSU was used. The AGP slots were similar and failed to run larger GPUs well, they also had serious problems in Windows 98SE which every gamer was using at the time because XP ran like shit by comparison. I have never seen one capable of running an Athlon 2600 regardless of what BIOS it has installed, they seem to max out around the 2100+ and then they were very unstable. Luckily the boards had short lifespans so we didn't see them for too long. I can't speak for the V5 because nobody in their right mind ever used one. I have two K7S5A boards and I never use either of them because they simply do not work in the real world, their only possible use back then would be as a cheap Duron box, but as I myself ran a Duron 750 in one for a time and it still died in a very short space of time which is why I ended up with an MSI KT3 Ultra2... Which was better, and lets face it, if you are getting beaten by MSI you are doing something wrong.
In general, I actually like ECS when they make their own boards, but this re-badged PCChips one was not very goodl
Still, Germany is the country that liked the FIC 486-VIP, so you guys obviously have different opinions on these matters. There are also at least 5 versions of the K7S5A board that I know to exist so perhaps we only had access to a specific revision which wasn't very good - I have only ever seen V1.1 boards outside of photos anyway. Perhaps later revisions were better. Even here, though, there were small groups of people who swore by the board... People I hated because idiots would pay them to build a machine, the machine wouldn't work so the owner would end up bringing it to me to "fix" and then throw a fit when I told them "Your motherboard simply sucks ass, I will have to replace that if you want to get rid of the instability." as if it was my fault.
As for the KT266, the only board I have used for an extended amount of time with these was a Soltek. It wasn't bad and it did what it was supposed to do, but that's all I can really say for it. Never had notable issues with any of the KT266 boards I worked on for anyone either. I'd say the ASUS board was probably one of the better Athlon boards from that time, then, simply because it still works and the KT266 was a decent platform.
