Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

[Kiriakos GR]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

That's a known issue. Tried removing the CMOS battery and leaving it out for a day or so? And of course every discussion turns around capacitors: this is Badcaps.net after all.

This MB haves dual Bios, no mater which one does the boot there is an problem.
I will agree this is Badcaps.net
If you have the list of which caps fails first on those boards I will greatly appreciate it.

[c_hegge]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

The Gigabyte ultra durable boards don't ever get bad caps, as they always use Japanese polymer caps (Chemi-Con, Nichicon or Sanyo OS-CON). ASUS often use low quality Apaq caps on their mid range boards.

[BigTroll]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

ive had lots of problems with ECS, Biostar is my favorite low end along with asrocks boards they usually have a decent mix of OST, Su'Scon and other quality middle grade caps.

[larrymoencurly]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

I use a BioStar Socket 775 that was one of Fry's last mobo-CPU combo bargains, at $30. It has no PCI-E 1x slot, and it defaults the DDR2 memory to 1.95V, maybe to allow booting with junk RAM. OTOH the BIOS lets the RAM voltage to be set to a chip-frying 2.8V (absolute maximum for DDR2 is supposed to be 2.3V).

I also had a BioStar Socket A that was kind of unusual because it had only a 20-pin power connector but ran the CPU from the sole +12V wire on that connector. Also if something went wrong with the boot process, I'd have to remove the clock battery because merely moving the CMOS jumper didn't help.

[c_hegge]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

have a decent mix of OST, Su'Scon and other quality middle grade caps.

OST and Su'Scon? Decent?


Those brands should all be replaced on sight and avoided at all cost.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

I also have an old ECS K7S5A pro board (v5). It has survived several years of 24/7 use, it has outlasted that Antec SP300 that I needed to repair...

PCChips I have to agree as crappy. but the one PCChips Socket7 board I had, had a noname chipset on it... not even Via, not even SiS...

[c_hegge]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

The K7S5A was the very board that initially turned me off ECS. Seeing many failed ECS boards in customer's PCs only confirms my opinion of them.

[Hondaman]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

Yes, ECS and PCChips are horrible brands. They are also at the lowest end of the price spectrum. They were the last makers producing 32-bit stuff, using KT600 and KT800 chipsets (AMD CPUs). So they are "behind the times" and producing for the lowest price point. Years ago I saw a Newegg review that said "at least when it caught fire, it did not burn down my house". That's ECS/PCChips quality!

And according to an old article online about PCChips, they once used FAKE cache chips on their boards (or they used counterfeit logos for BIOS manufacturers, I forgot which).

As for ECS / PCChips, stay away. Stay far away.

[mariushm]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

PC Chips was a brand belonging to a company that had several brands and did OEM designs similar to how ECS works.

They used to relabel chipsets to sound similar to Intel chipsets... you can see a whole series of names they used:

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/print...-Pro-and-Co/59

I actually owned PC Chips Elpina M577 ... luckily it was with the popular VIA MVP3 and it was pretty solid.

They also used fake level 2 cache on the boards, especially those sold in Asia... claiming 1 MB and used only 512KB or 256 KB on some boards or even nothing at all.

Nowadays, with the internet, it's somewhat harder to fake stuff.

ECS is OEM manufacturer, like Foxconn, Asus, MSI ... they all do boards and customize existing models for companies like gateway, hp, dell etc to make them cheaper... but some are willing to cut more corners than others.

[Gariarto]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

You know.. All you guys keep ragging on Asus motherboards being low quality crap and all, but I have to tell you, I've never had a board from them yet that didn't well exceed its warranty. I've used hundreds of them over the years (with a smattering of other makers, just to try 'em out). Never felt the need to jump tracks with Asus. Never had a failed board from poor build quality or parts. That statement also includes some failed caps on boards that had been in service for years. Easily way beyond the mtbf of a caps rated hours.

I'm either exceptionally fortunate or something's different with me ? I guess that makes me a, what is it ? An Asus fanboy. Haha !! But there it is, I kid you not. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm just always puzzled at the bad press Asus attracts here since I've always had good -luck ?- Go figure.

If I were to pick a peeve it would be bios revisions, they have a tendancy to be rushed to production and tweaked later at the customers frustration. I learned early that it doesn't pay to buy the latest releases. ALWAYS wait for bugs to be wrung out. Hardware and software both.

PC Chips, Biostar, ECS, Epox and so on, I can understand, but only by reading about their quality standards and failure rates. Hence I never purchased any of them as a result. Well, that and I never trust a product thats way below the competitions price pitch. Well's my 50c, I'll keep buying Asus until forced to do otherwise.

[Gariarto]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

Got a laugh out of the PC Chips Chipset aliases !! Especially the M585.. I suppose it was made from stiffer material to reduce board flex !

[lti]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

Why do they need four aliases for the SiS 5591 and three for the 5598?

Also, Viagra chipset

[eccerr0r]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

I don't know why the K7S5A has not failed on me yet. At this time I think I've extracted what I want out of the board and if it fails at this point, it was well spent. It is not without faults though - the things I didn't like about it are that it did not like being stop granted (power savings) and can't remember power state after a power outage...

I do however have a KT7 and a P5GD2 that I have no idea what's going on with them... Well the KT7 is littered with bloated capacitors on it so that one I can guess... but the P5GD2 I have no clue... it freezes randomly but the capacitors don't look way too bad (visibily and with ESR meter... Scoping it, did not reveal too much ripple across the caps, either...)

[Home_Command_Center]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

Anyone know anything about EC35 on the ECS geforce 6100 sm-m? it's right by the pcie slot, it's a little bloated, but not blown all over the place. this mobo has been glitchy and wierd ever since I got it. it had a cheap barebones PSU go on it a long time ago that I replaced with a OCZ fatal1ty 750w and it ran well for a while, but now it's acting very strange during the boot process. sometimes I have to boot it 20 times or so before it will load into the os. also, sometimes, it won't even post, it'll just power up the optical drive and then the power light flashes. it doesn't beep, it just flashes and won't post. I'd never buy an ECS product again in my life. if you look around, most people building rigs these days are going with gigabyte mobos....

[c_hegge]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

That would be an nVidia chipset board. It probably has the under-fill defect.

What brands are the caps on the board?

[Home_Command_Center]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

not sure off hand, the bulged cap is a purple/burgundy electrolytic cap. I can try to look it up. as for tearing it back down, well if I do it will be quite a while before I could post again....

this thing is just absolutely aggravating.

what's the "under-fill defect"?

[c_hegge]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

The under-fill defect was a manufacturing flaw that affected all nVidia chipsets and GPUs from a few years ago. It would cause the chip to fail prematurely. All Socket AM2 and 775 boards with nVidia chipsets were affected by it.

[shovenose]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

@c_hegge: what about AM3 and AM3+ ?

[Home_Command_Center]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

well I swapped in a newer GPU that I got for christmas yesterday and it began to do the bad ram beep rather than posting. moved the ram to the other slot and not only did it boot, but the no-post issue from before was gone. still glitches during boot up into the os though...

[c_hegge]

Re: Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

@c_hegge: what about AM3 and AM3+ ?

They are fine. nVidia did fix the problem by then. Nowadays, though, no one really uses nVidia chipsets now that AMD make their own.