K7-S5A. State Of The Art Several Months Late! (K7-S5A Motherboard Socket A)

Member Name: Nibelung

Product:	K7-S5A Motherboard Socket A
Date:	04/03/03 (1319 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well presented mobo , Useful built in facilities, Good bundle price at the moment

Disadvantages: First one was DOA, Siting of processor gave me fitting problems

It's never long in my house before the words "replace" or "upgrade" get a quick mention, usually by me, and most frequently on the subject of computing.

The sensible "deep pockets and short arms" part of me holds back from keeping my PC's at state-of-the-art levels, although I like to try to keep up. Therefore, it comes to no surprise to me at least, that I'm writing about this motherboard several months after the main core of opinions already posted.

For those of you familiar with my recent opinions, you may remember that I've just networked a pair of PCs, my "main" one, which has an AMD 800khz processor and the other arrival into the Nibelung household, which is merely a second-hand Pentium II 350. As you can see, neither of these is "this year's model" in its first flush of youth, but since most of what I do, revolves around using MS Office and I don't play computer games, who cares? They've both got plenty of RAM and disk space anyway.

Then my neighbour, who helped me with the initial set up of my network suggested that a really good way of putting up the strongest of firewalls would be to have a third PC of "any old" vintage capable of running, say Windows 98. This would be placed "upstream" of my existing network, in between my modem and my LAN router/switch, thereby obviating the need for a firewall on each machine. It could also be left running as a printer server.

So the thought process started. I'd tried in vain to get a decrepit PC from various sources, schools that were throwing them out etc, but they all turned out to be 486s! Then I thought, if I were to "cascade" my existing PCs, the Pentium 350 could be the firewall gateway, the existing best PC could become PC no.2 and.........oh yes, you've spotted the flaw in the argument too!

The "Sunday Best" PC didn't appear to exist by
my reckoning, and that's when I got to thinking about a wholesale upgrade. Now I haven't actually bought a WHOLE PC for about 12 years, preferring to upgrade bit by bit, as I go. I shudder to think how much this has cost me, but at least it's been gradual. I had a case, video card, and the various drives (or at least I knew where the donor machine was). All I needed was a new motherboard, processor and some RAM.

That's where Maplin (www.maplin.co.uk also a growing string of High St. stores) came into the equation, with their Spring Sale in full swing.

For £120 including postage, they were offering not only the Elitegroup K7S5a motherboard, but also an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ processor and heat-sink/cooling fan too. At their prices, this constituted a £102 saving. More realistically, bearing in mind that Maplin may NOT be the cheapest place to source components, this appears to be more like a £50 saving compared to other specialist PC retailers, but still not to be sniffed at. The motherboard has been around for at least a year now, so I'm probably buying old technology here, but to be honest I don't care. The last time I bought a motherboard claiming to be "future-proof", it turned out to be a pack of lies. Just when the world of PCs seemed to be veering in favour of CPUs in "slots", I bought one to suit, only to find months later, that "square sockets" were back in fashion.

Anyway, this kit would do for me - a considerable upgrade on my existing 800khz machine without breaking the bank. I'll leave the XP 3000+ users to get on with it for now, maybe in two years time I'll climb onto that particular bandwagon.

K7S5a SPECIFICATION

I won't give you a blow-by-blow account of largely meaningless facts and figures but I'll just pick out the interesting bits (well, I thought they were anyway!)

This motherboard has a good deal of inbuilt functionality, wh
ich in the past would have meant adding extra cards. For instance, it has built-in sound, so non-purists have no need to put a sound card in. However, you can turn it off, and use your own, which will be my choice as I have a superior Soundblaster card, and many of those enjoying their DVD movies with 5.1 channel sound will want to do the same.

Also built-in is a network card, which is useful if only it means that I can displace my existing one and fit it to my firewall gateway, where I will now only need to buy one more card rather than two.

It is capable of taking either the older SDRAM chips (x2) or the newer DDR (also x2), which is also useful as it enables me to get the machine going on ordinary SDRAM whilst saving up the pennies for 512 Mbytes of DDR memory. The concensus of opinion seems to be that you should use well-known branded RAM, preferably DDR type.

Although you can set the processor's details in the AMI-sourced BIOS manually, and no doubt, the "over-clocking brigade" would want to, the chip can also be auto-detected on power-up. Apart from connecting jumpers to the front panel of your case, reset, power and associated LEDs, there's only really one jumper setting you need to check, and that's to clear the existing CMOS settings by disconnecting the back-up battery briefly.

The two rear-mounted Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports also have repeated pins for wiring to the front of a suitably fitted case, but beware you don't exceed the USB's power supply capabilities, these are not extra ports, just parallels of those at the back. This can be an issue with items that draw power from the USB port, like the "Canoscan" range of scanners - my Epson has a separate mains adapter.

You get 5 PCI expansion slots and one AGP x4 slot for advanced graphics adapters. There's also a connector known as a modem riser for a newer kind of internal modem. Note: anyone with "legacy&q
uot; ISA cards had better find replacements for them or ask yourself how badly you want them, since there's not one ISA slot.

INSTALLATION

Now I've built many PCs over the years, and my favoured method is to install the motherboard (hereafter 'mobo'), CPU and some memory along with a
video card and test it there and then to make sure I hadn't bent sent a "DOA" - dead on arrival. It's very annoying of you get all the way down the road of adding drives etc to find there's a fundamental fault with the basic items.

This is precisely what happened to my first delivery from Maplin. The mobo was receiving power, because the on-off switch worked and the CPU cooling fan was spinning, but of the CPU, not a peep - it didn't even get warm, neither was there any kind of output to the video card.

A call to the Maplin Technical Support, who incidentally rang me back just when they said they would, confirmed that

a) I sounded like someone who'd tried everything already (alternative power supplies, other known-to-be-working video cards etc) and,
b) It was not possible to state which bit of kit was faulty, except of course the fan which was OK!

Therefore, they agreed to take back the mobo and CPU under their free-returns policy.

Second time around, all went OK, although I did find myself in the unique position of having to take an angle-grinder to my PC case, which is the first time ever that I've had to do anything so drastic. Combining heavy engineering with electronics gives me a funny feeling "in my water" that no good can come of it. Let me explain. My PC case is constructed so that the mobo can be fitted to a metal plate, whilst still out of the PC on the worktop. This plate includes the rear panel of the PC so as to allow expansion cards to be included in this pre-build process. It's therefore quite easy to bench-test a new PC before going
to the trouble of putting it all together. It was only when I came to slide it all into the case on its rack, that I discovered the flaw in the process. The CPU and its enormous cooling fan wouldn't slide through the gap at the back of the case - a cross bar was in the way, hence the need for the angle grinder.

Once overcome, another problem reared its head. The CPU and fan stood so tall that they barely missed the wall of the power unit, leaving the fan one third hidden by metal work. In a server situation, with the CPU running 24/7, under-cooling could be a cause for concern, but for my domenstic use, I've decided not to worry too much - I can always set the temperature sensors to err on the cautious side within the BIOS settings. Any unexplained shutdowns could then be traced to insufficient cooling, which I'll tackle if it occurs, possible fixes including buying a lower profile heat sink, and since this is a vertical tower system, remounting the existing fan on the SIDE of the heat-sink, where it is destined to become the TOP once in place!

This mobo is actually a pleasure to work with in most respects, being uncluttered, and even quite attractive if you like that sort of thing. I just wish that they could have sited the CPU somewhere else that's all.

Another small logistics problem then presented itself to me. I like to keep my drives in sliding caddies, so that I can have more than one D:drive for back-up purposes, and so that I can occasionally have a dabble with Linux on a separate drive. These caddies fit in full-size 51/4 " drive bays, extending somewhat further backwards than would a CD-ROM drive. These then foul the memory slots, making it impossible to put RAM in, but I got round this by making my caddy-holders my uppermost drive bays - unfortunately, this is means some interesting contortions with an extra length IDE cable.

I realise that none of this, apart from being DOA, is the fault of the
motherboard, but these are the kinds of things you can come up against, usually just after the friend who goaded you into doing this has gone to Canada for 5 weeks.

CONCLUSION

Upgrading your PC with a newer mobo and processor needn't be too expensive, especially if you don't follow the herd into getting the fastest of everything as it comes on the market. After all, it'll only be "entry level" stuff in 6 months time!

Be prepared to take the occasional hit to your confidence, like it not working first time. Take a systematic approach to construction - don't bung it all in the box, connect it all up, and expect it all to work first time. Work your way up from a bare bones system, checking for function at each stage.

Now that it's working, my main PC is way faster than it used to be, and I'm now able to take full advantage of the faster hard drives I'd bought in advance.

On the face of it, Maplin's price of £120 sounds pretty good from where I'm sitting.

Summary: