On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Guy Van Sanden wrote: > I have a ECS K7S5A based on the Sis 735 chipset, very good stuff. > It's by far the cheapest board arround here in Belgium (costs about half > of the second-cheapest).
I have four of these. The rev 3.1 boards have been great except for one losing the second IDE controller. The PC Chips 830LR is an identical board and may be a few bucks cheaper. The only downside to this board is the number of SDRAM/DDR slots. It has two of each, but they cannot be used simultaneously. It does allow you an easy upgrade path since your old SDRAM will work. > > Performance is very good, and stability is excellent. Apart from me, I > know 3 other people that own one and they're all happy with it. 2 of > them are also running Mandrake 9 like me. > > The board has LAN onboard, which is very good, it is faster than the > Intel 10/100 PCI NIC I had before. If I'm not mistaken the better > performance of the onboard NIC is achieved because it doesn't have to go > through the PCI bus (I could be wrong here). It also has onboard sound. One minor problem shows up because it's locked to a certain frequency (I forget the particulars). MP3 playback is fine, but certain applications that make assumptions about the frequency will be chipmunked and high-pitched. Notably, the crossover plugin will play Quicktime sounds incorrectly. Trying to rip DivX using some encoders will require futzing with the audio encoding rate. Since the OP is using a soundcard this is probably a non-issue.
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