ECS lack of support, looking for help here please

[tolerable]

Ive now sent two emails to ECS trying to get support on my recent purchase of their board (recent being october of this year) with no response to either. So here I am to pick all of your brains. Lend a hand if you can please.

First of all my system and problem. I own a ECS K7S5A mainboard, EDIT: Antec 350 ps, volcano chip fan, 512 mb pc 133 sdram (256 x2), Athlon 1900+, SBlive Value (bleh), Geforce 2 GTS 32 mb, Windows 98, Directx 8.1. My problem, the system will not run the athlon at 1900 for more then 5 minutes without locking up completely. I have to setup the bios to run the processor at 1200, which btw this bios setup also drops my memory speed to 100.

So running at 1200 as opposed to 1900(1600 mhz) is my problem and as you might have guessed Im not happy.

Another problem, the driver CD that comes with the mainboard is damaged and will not run without errors (tried it on 3 different cd-roms now). Again, asked ECS for help on attaining a new CD... with no response.

Up until a while ago I had the current BIOS and recently a new BIOS was uploaded to their site.

I have attempted to grab a new BIOS from their site, however each time I try to flash the BIOS i get this error in DOS: Error 2 - File does not exsist (and this text is colored red if that means anything).

To say that I am frustrated and unhappy with this purchase goes without saying. Any help at all would so be appreciated.

Thank you

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by tolerable on 12/10/02 01:33 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[o1die]

If Ecs doesn't have drivers to download off their site, I would check the sis website. They have a wide assortment of drivers. Have you downloaded the latest driver for your geforce 2?

 

[jlanka]

how good is that RAM?

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

 

[Civilized]

what revision of the board do you have?....with the earlier revisions this board does have some problems with this sort of thing
....also check out this link for some good info on this mobo
http://www.ocworkbench.com/2002/ecs/k7s5aguide/
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by civilized on 12/10/02 08:59 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Tilepusher2]

Yo T,

This may not help, but have you extracted the Bios files to a Floppy first? If the files are in "Zipped/compressed" form they cannot be read in DOS.

What are your cpu & system temps? What brand of sd-ram are you running? is it 1 stick of double sided 512mb or 2 sticks of 256mb. A lot of the single sided sd-ram is cheap junk that cannot run correctly. Good Luck

Peace Out................tile2

Why do you want to believe me?

 

[tolerable]

Okay, ive made some progression but the problem still exsists. I found a more detailed instruction set on their flash utility and now have the latest BIOS. However, after a good hour or so of running at 1900 I ran into the same problem.

System just froze and get these weird high pitched pulse sounds from my speakers... same thing everytime.

So, I went into my BIOS and was watching the hardware monitor setup that comes with the BIOS. I watched the CPU temperature rise 6 degrees from 105 F at 1200mhz to 111 F at 1600. Now this is just the PC sitting idle in BIOS. Not when I put all the stress on it playing the games that I do.

So, perhaps this fancy Thermaltake VOLCANO 9 with variable speed CPU fan isnt cutting it? I can only imagine how hot that thing gets during a game of battlefield or in the bazaar in everquest.

Alright, so now... is there a good utility for me to use out there that will monitor CPU temp in windows and maybe record and flag warnings and what not?

Still no response from ECS... but AMD responded to me in one day.

Thanks for the help folks