ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

[dood]

Board is around a year and a half old... extremely unstable. You can load windows, but then it just crashes no matter what after that. Main caps on the board are (7) OST 3300uf 6.3v. None are visibly bad, but I'm going to try replacing them with Nichicon's and see if it becomes stable again. If it does, I will likely use this board in my main computer, as it's nicer than the one that I have in there now :o

Unfortunately, Mouser has those caps backordered 'til February 6th, so it'll be a week or two 'til I get them in anyway...

[dood]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

Recapped the board and it seems to be 100% stable now. The only thing I couldn't get to work were the SATA ports, and I think that might be a problem with the drive I was testing with. The drive does work on a different SATA controller, but I can't get it to be picked up at all on this one. At any rate, the board is perfectly stable with an IDE drive. Here's the pics:

After the Recap, with Nichicon caps:







The old OST caps that I removed:

[linuxguru]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

You used Nichicon VZ? It's not a low-ESR, high ripple-current series - but it may be adequate for a lot of motherboard bypass applications; it's fairly inexpensive and available in compact sizes. Keep us posted on how it holds up in a motherboard VRM application - I'm a little skeptical.

[Rainbow]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

I think that it will last at least two years, probably more.
BTW. Good to know that OSTs can be bad without bulging.

[dood]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

Hmm... i didn't realise that they were not a low ESR cap. I just picked out what I thought were the best for the price! I did notice that although they're the same diameter as teh OST caps, they're a little shorter... is that bescause they're not low ESR?

[dood]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

Here's a link to the caps i used- http://www.mouser.com/index.cfm?hand..._pcodeid=64704

I just picked the only 105 degree 6.3v 3300uf 10mm dia caps i could find.

[linuxguru]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

It will perhaps work, but with a reduced life-time due to the high ripple-current in the VRM. What is useful is the tradeoff between operating temperature, ripple current and endurance. You can have higher ripple currents if you're willing to settle for a shorter lifetime and/or can keep the caps cool.

[dood]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

I need some capsinks

[MD Willington]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

Fry's was blasting these combos out at bargain prices... (Sempron + KT600-A etc)

Maybe it will come back to haunt them...

MD

[dood]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

IT actually looks to be a very decent board, with the exception of those caps... SATA RAID, lots of slots, lots of USB ports. Probably one of the better featured skt A boards I've seen.

[MD Willington]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

They are decent boards...

MD

[dood]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

It picks up SATA drives just fine *thumbs up*. The drive I was using is SATAII (3.0gbps) and needed a jumper to be set to SATAI speeds. After doing that, it picked it right up. I believe this board is going to be going into my main system tonight. It has better features than the Gigabyte board I have in there now, and I've been looking to upgrade to SATA.

That will also give me the opportunity to do a true long-term test on these caps

[davmax]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

Dood it seems that you are aware that those 3000uf Nichicon VZ are not a good VRM choice. Why not get better MBZ from TC?

[dood]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

At the time, it was the price, and that I wanted to get them in 3 days instead of waiting... Maybe if I have the desire to, I'll order the MBZ later and recap it again. For now, it's working fine and is stable. I put it in my machine last night with an Athlon 2200+ (1.8ghz) and immediately overclocked to 1.96ghz and everythings been running fine. I did a fresh reload of windows XP and everything went well...

[MD Willington]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

FYI

Shared PCB:

ECS KT600-A
Soyo SY-KY600 Dragon+
Matsonic MS8177C v1.1
Kobian KVT600X-L

I'd expect the same to occur on those boards as well.

MD

[Rainbow]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

Matsonic and Mercury/Kobian are known to sell ECS/PC Chips boards. I thought that soyo makes their own boards...at least they used to.

[Newbie2]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

ECS/PCCHIPS motherboards are good decent boards. I have a PCCHIPS board and my brother has an ECS board. The only problem is that both of the boards me and my brother are using both have defective rear microphone ports, because they didn't work right out of the box and everything in my computer is configured properly and the microphones used to test it were confirmed working in my dad's laptop!

dood, does your ECS board have a defective rear microphone port?

[dood]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

Don't know... don't ever use the microphone port. I do have something connected to the line in, and line out, and they're both working fine.

[Rainbow]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

http://radel.inet.net.nz/m810lmr.html#misc - see #39

[Newbie2]

Re: ECS KT600-A Rev 1.0

Thanks for the info Rainbow. Why does ECS/PCCHIPS have to get incorrectly made microphone ports for their motherboards?

The microphones I use are dynamic microphones and they do not work with my PCCHIPS motherboard or my brother's ECS motherboard. But it said on the site that condensor microphones work.

I have a PCCHIPS M955G motherboard and my brother has an ECS PM800-M2 motherboard.