Its Pants!!! (Elitegroup K7S5A Pro)

Name: Galloway

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Product:	Elitegroup K7S5A Pro
Date:	28/02/05 (2989 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap

Disadvantages: Design Issues

The ECS K7S5A Pro offers itself as a slight advance on the older K7S5A. But only slightly.

The board itself is compact for a full ATX design so there should not be any problems fitting it in a case. The Darl Purple colour of the board looks quite nice.

The board has 5 PCI slots and 1 AGP 4x graphics slot. It takes a Socket A AMD processor up to an XP2600 with 266mhz FSB. As this chip is no longer availiable a XP2400 should be considered the max.
Slots are included for both SDR 168pin and DDR 184pin ram. Two slots for each type providing for a max of 1GB ram. Only one type of ram can be used at once. Two IDE controllers enabling 4 ATA devices and floppy controller as well as 6 USB connections are on the board.
The backpanel contains the usual ports with 4 USB 2.0 but loses the gameport.

The USB 2.0 only comes with Windows XP/2000 drivers and disables the first PCI slot when installed for some reason. This information is contained in the manual in brief and is without doubt a design issue.
No video onboard but an AC97 compliant sound chip from C-Media is included. Motherboard chipset provided by SIS.

This board was difficult to set up initially, requiring the bios to be reconfigured away from the default to get the system to run stable. Network cards also presented a problem, stopping the system from booting. I did however get it running smoothly with a Netgear card, but once it had been removed and re-installed this also stopped the system booting.
The BIOS ( American Megatrends ) also became a problem after a year or so, regulary forgetting its settings and constantly having to be manually reset. Yes, the battery had been replaced and checked.
The drivers also failed to install properly using the auto install program supplied. But they installed fine when done manually.

Summary:

A cheap board taking two types of memory making the upgrade path easier on the pocket, but seriously flawed in a number of ways making it difficult to recommend at any price.

Summary: Cheap, but design flaws mean better availiable at price point.

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