Board Revision:

BIOS Version: 08/29/2001

Today, the ECS board is one of the few SiS 735 boards that is widely available. Though Elitegroup usually targets the low cost and OEM market, this motherboard should be suitable for most users.

Thanks to the full size ATX format, it has five PCI slots, one AMR, on-board AC97 sound and on-board 100 MBit LAN. You may have already noticed the two pairs of DIMM sockets: There are two sockets for DDR DIMMS (blue) and two more for standard SDRAM. In case you should have recently bought huge SDRAM DIMMs, you can continue using them with this motherboard. But it's not possible to mix both DDR and SDRAM DIMMs.

The RJ45 LAN connector is right above the two USB ports.

The K7S5A is equipped with both a pair of SDRAM and a pair of DDR RAM sockets (blue).

As opposed to the Chaintech board, the Elitegroup board ran solidly, regardless of the memory timings I used. Actually, the performance difference between the fastest and the slowest possible setting is not very large. There was a similar characteristic with the SiS reference board.

At approximately $80, this motherboard provides much better value than any AMD760, Ali MaGiK or KT266 board can offer. In other words: Spending the extra money for a motherboard based on one of these last three chipsets will give you neither a substantial increase in features nor a performance increase worth talking about.