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Well, you may have seen my thread in GenMay about my Black Friday disaster. The center of it was two motherboard/CPU combos from Fry's: A P4 511 and X2 3800+ - that both came with ECS motherboards. The first was a Via P4M800 based MicroATX, the second an NF4 full ATX. When he called me at 630AM on Friday to tell me he was bringing them home, I had reservations about the motherboards, but remembered reading about ECS improving stability and overall build quality both here on the [H] and elsewhere. I was genuinely impressed when their SLI board was 100% stable at stock during the [H]'s 56 hours of stability testing. I decided to take a chance on them, and boy did I regret it.
Admittedly, these boards were going to fairly demanding applications, but they were taken care of at the same time. The P4 MATX board was paired with a 300W 80% efficient ATX 12V 2.0 Fortron FSP SFX PSU, and the NF4 board was paired with a 565W Enermax ATX 12V 2.0 PSU, with a total of 36A on +12. I went with a 9800Pro on the Via board, and an X700 Pro. 1GB of Value of DDR400 was installed in both boards, along with a fine selection from my [H]ard|Drive stable.
Nothing but problems on both, related to video card stability. The 9800Pro started overheating, and the power supply circuitry on the board started getting very warm as well. Neither of these problems were issues in its previous home, a MSI K7N2 Delta. The NF4 board faired even worse, with random hard locks (this was after I had to do a BIOS update to support dual core chips on a motherboard that was bundled with a dual core CPU!!!
) We exchanged the video card at Best Buy, but the replacement faired even worse. I could Prime95 this setp on both cores indefinitely, and it would log the results, but I would see no output as the display would hardlock after mere minutes. I was not even able to complete a single run of 3DMark2001SE on the NF4 board.
Yesterday, I decided I was sick of dealing with it. I yanked the NF4 board, and went all-in. I sacrificed the motherboard from my sig system (A8N-SLI Deluxe) to get the X2 3800+ rig (it's my dad's new workstation) going. *sob* I have a DFI Ultra-D coming on Wednesday, but it still sucks having my rig out of action
ECS simply still isn't there yet. Avoid, Avoid, Avoid. ECS is now on my short list with Gigabyte of boards that simply don't work.
Admittedly, these boards were going to fairly demanding applications, but they were taken care of at the same time. The P4 MATX board was paired with a 300W 80% efficient ATX 12V 2.0 Fortron FSP SFX PSU, and the NF4 board was paired with a 565W Enermax ATX 12V 2.0 PSU, with a total of 36A on +12. I went with a 9800Pro on the Via board, and an X700 Pro. 1GB of Value of DDR400 was installed in both boards, along with a fine selection from my [H]ard|Drive stable.
Nothing but problems on both, related to video card stability. The 9800Pro started overheating, and the power supply circuitry on the board started getting very warm as well. Neither of these problems were issues in its previous home, a MSI K7N2 Delta. The NF4 board faired even worse, with random hard locks (this was after I had to do a BIOS update to support dual core chips on a motherboard that was bundled with a dual core CPU!!!
) We exchanged the video card at Best Buy, but the replacement faired even worse. I could Prime95 this setp on both cores indefinitely, and it would log the results, but I would see no output as the display would hardlock after mere minutes. I was not even able to complete a single run of 3DMark2001SE on the NF4 board.Yesterday, I decided I was sick of dealing with it. I yanked the NF4 board, and went all-in. I sacrificed the motherboard from my sig system (A8N-SLI Deluxe) to get the X2 3800+ rig (it's my dad's new workstation) going. *sob* I have a DFI Ultra-D coming on Wednesday, but it still sucks having my rig out of action
ECS simply still isn't there yet. Avoid, Avoid, Avoid. ECS is now on my short list with Gigabyte of boards that simply don't work.