Which of These Older Motherboards is Better?

[Kobe008]

I currently have the following two motherboards with links to their specs.

ECS K7S5A - http://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/ecs/k7s5aguide/ABOUT%20THE%20K7S5A%20BOARD.htm

ASUS A7A266 - http://www.paulduncan.org/files/a7a266-104.pdf

My main question is about the FSB speed. The ECS says it supports 200 or 266 FSB. The Asus says 266 but if you look in the specs it only says 133. I will be putting an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ processor on the board that supports 266 FSB so i'd like to use whichever motherboard is faster. Any thoughts from the experts?

 

[FlyGuy]

I didn't read the articles, but:


http://www.tomshardware.com/2001/09/24/a_lost_chance/index.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/2001/05/09/a_real_nail/index.html

 

[scoyle]

Both of those boards run support the same "max" FSB. I'm not going to read through all of the component features, but if you do, you'll find a board with a feature set that works for your needs.

Personally, just on the brand name, I would recommend the ASUS board. Even so, they probably perform similarly.

 

[CRAFTSMAN_69]

Well I have used both of these board a long long time ago, but I do remember the good and the bad of both boards. The asus board was hands down faster at a cost of stability. After swapping ram and troubleshooting it I found I was not the only one with these problems. I had to underclock it to make it stable. I built many sytems with the ECS K7s5a board and depending on which version you have of the board, it too had its quirks. These boards were stable and only had issues with the onboard sound on the pro versions where it would cease to work for no reason. The board had little to no bois features to tweak but they were low dollar boards that performed well. Also about the FSB thing they are both 266 FSB boards, the 133 is the single channel freq. And depending on the bios versions f the boards you may have to flash the bios with an older processor in it fisrt to get the board to boot with the XP2400 . The XP2400 was a Palimino C if I remember correctly and was the last of the 266FSB chips and was made well after these boards were manufactured.

 

[mdd1963]

I'd instead look for an NF2 board, or a Via KT400a/600 series board...

The former might be 1-2% faster, but both chipsets and driver sets were quite mature, and boards are well equipped with sound, LAN, and some with RAID, etc...