TJM4FUN
05-31-2002, 03:36 AM
Figured I pass this along. Just upgraded a friends old k6 2-300 pc.
He got bit by the games bug and "needed more power Scotty!!"
He had already upgraded his vid card from some no name pci to an mx2 400 aopen, and added a 20 gig drive, and 2 128meg memory sticks, so he wanted to try to preserve his existing investment where possible.
He got the ecs k7s5a with an xp1700 with hsf for 140$ from accessmicro,
and a enermax400w for 40$ form a local shop sale.
The ecs mobo is not for the overclocker, but has some potentially nice features for a budget upgrade:
1. mobo alone is around 54$
2. has 2 dimm and 2 sdram slots, so old memory can be reused to defer expenses.
3. on board sound, useful since the old soundcard was isa.
4. on board 10/100 ethernet adapter
5. supports ata 100 on both ide ports.
has a header to add 2 more usb ports, in the front if you can carve the case.
I guided him thru the physical install, we powered on to default bios settings with no io cards in and lan disabled, and win98 came up! only problem we had was the miniport driver for the sis chipset was unreadabl;e on the cdrom. after getting one from the sis site, all the drivers installed from the cd fine.
We turned on all the features, he added hi 4 port usb card back from the other machine, and all is fine.
Went back to bios and set cpu to 133 and mem to 133, now it is reporting the xp1700 properly and seems to be running very nicely. Temp from mbm5 is 40-41c idle and 44 after running a few
demos on the games.
So in spite of all the problems I saw posted on some other forums, seems like a decent board to me, and he is happy as a clam!
There are some tweaks for the bios to enable tweaking the fsb, but he isn;t interested in oc'ing, he wants stable. Next step when a few$$ presents itself is to go from 256m dimms to a single 512 ddr module, then if all his usb devices are supported, I get to experiment with installin xp on the machine! (better his than mine!) hehe
:dev:
He got bit by the games bug and "needed more power Scotty!!"
He had already upgraded his vid card from some no name pci to an mx2 400 aopen, and added a 20 gig drive, and 2 128meg memory sticks, so he wanted to try to preserve his existing investment where possible.
He got the ecs k7s5a with an xp1700 with hsf for 140$ from accessmicro,
and a enermax400w for 40$ form a local shop sale.
The ecs mobo is not for the overclocker, but has some potentially nice features for a budget upgrade:
1. mobo alone is around 54$
2. has 2 dimm and 2 sdram slots, so old memory can be reused to defer expenses.
3. on board sound, useful since the old soundcard was isa.
4. on board 10/100 ethernet adapter
5. supports ata 100 on both ide ports.
has a header to add 2 more usb ports, in the front if you can carve the case.
I guided him thru the physical install, we powered on to default bios settings with no io cards in and lan disabled, and win98 came up! only problem we had was the miniport driver for the sis chipset was unreadabl;e on the cdrom. after getting one from the sis site, all the drivers installed from the cd fine.
We turned on all the features, he added hi 4 port usb card back from the other machine, and all is fine.
Went back to bios and set cpu to 133 and mem to 133, now it is reporting the xp1700 properly and seems to be running very nicely. Temp from mbm5 is 40-41c idle and 44 after running a few
demos on the games.
So in spite of all the problems I saw posted on some other forums, seems like a decent board to me, and he is happy as a clam!
There are some tweaks for the bios to enable tweaking the fsb, but he isn;t interested in oc'ing, he wants stable. Next step when a few$$ presents itself is to go from 256m dimms to a single 512 ddr module, then if all his usb devices are supported, I get to experiment with installin xp on the machine! (better his than mine!) hehe
:dev: