Why have almost all my failed motherboards been ECS brand?

[c_hegge]

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

^
Typical ECS junk

[larrymoencurly]

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

ECS uses the bare minimum of components required,

Here are 4 brands of nearly identical motherbaords based on the Intel G41 chipset. 3 of them have a heatsink over the NH82801GB chip, but the ECS one does not:

[tmiha71]

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

Was/am satisfied with ECS hardware, could always squeeze few more percentage of performance out of it. Still using (not regulary) K7S5A at 166 MHz, with ULTRA CPU settings (only CAPS modded, official BIOS - switching done in Windows)...

[Home_Command_Center]

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

Well, it might have been an nVidia design/board, but built by ECS. The off-brand companies buy outdated designs and surplus motherboards and use those to base their builds on.

which is what I'm dealing with right now...

I'm now glad most of the HTCP's I've set up for people are based around ready built deskbooks...

[edit] BTW, ASUS GPU's are built by galaxy... just google image search ASUS nVidia GPU's and compare the PCB's to the same model Galaxy GPU's. the only difference is the heatsink, fans, and stickers...

[Blargh523]

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

Next time get ASUS, it is simple as move and you get at the safe side.

I have lost faith to all the others, few months back, an very expensive Gigabyte stopped booting with out reason.
No more experiments, medium or high priced ASUS boards is all that I am touching those days.

AS-Rock (which I think was a subdivision of Asus, but split off) seem to be okay. I'm not happy with Gigabyte, myself -- my current motherboard needed a *lot* of bios muckery to run 4G of ram, and 8G seems to be right out unless I want random blue-screens. Board itself is awesome, but the bios leaves a bit to be desired.

ECS is on my list of ZOMGNO, along with First International, Jaton and a couple others. Re-capping won't fix poorly-soldered BGA's or under-spec'd on-board cache.

imagine my surprise when i get a ecs board for recap last week and think to myself that the build quality is too good for an ecs.even with leaking samxon gd on it.
then i notice the fcc id is to nvidia!
its a real nvidia board with an ecs sticker on it.
btw this had not died yet and was in for a preemptive recap.belongs to a friend who does not wait for the failure when he knows it is coming.
the samxons looked fine till i desoldered them.then they stunk and sizzled.

Well, it might have been an nVidia design/board, but built by ECS. The off-brand companies buy outdated designs and surplus motherboards and use those to base their builds on.

[Home_Command_Center]

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

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

yeah, since I always use AMD CPU's the next mobo will definitely be an ATI based gigabyte mobo.

this AMD/nVidia frankenstein will keep the low end nvidia 3d ready GPU, creative sound card, and POS ram, but get re-cased with a cheapo 600w PSU I have laying around and a mid tower case I have in storage after a repaint, then it's becoming nothing more than a windows XP based HTPC for the living room to replace the roku thats out there now.

my current case and fatal1ty 750 psu will get a full atx ATI mobo from gigabyte and a higher frequency dual core AMD cpu, as well as a mid range triple display 3d ready ATI GPU, 8gigs of ddr3 from g.skill, and a higher end, perhaps m-audio, PCIe audio card.

then I just have to redistribute all these hard drives I have in a sensible fashion. these days I think it makes more sense to store your media on a few 1t WD my-passports than to fool with having massive drives in the machine itself. my 320 sata will probably become my OS drive for the new rig, and the 80g sata I have for my OS now will move with the old stuff into the HTPC only set up... from there I just have to pull a bunch of cat-5 and get them all talking to one another efficiently for media sharing.

while everything is apart, I will go ahead and recap the 6100 mobo for good measure...

where do you guys buy your through hole parts? I've been using Mouser, but I wasn't aware there was such a big difference in cap quality by brand. I mostly just repair car stereo amplifiers though...

[kc8adu]

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

imagine my surprise when i get a ecs board for recap last week and think to myself that the build quality is too good for an ecs.even with leaking samxon gd on it.
then i notice the fcc id is to nvidia!
its a real nvidia board with an ecs sticker on it.
btw this had not died yet and was in for a preemptive recap.belongs to a friend who does not wait for the failure when he knows it is coming.
the samxons looked fine till i desoldered them.then they stunk and sizzled.

[lti]

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

A lot of cheap computers still used the defective 6100 chipset with AM3 and AM3+ CPUs. That chipset might still be used today unless the old stock finally ran out.

[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.

[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...

[shovenose]

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

@c_hegge: what about AM3 and AM3+ ?

[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.

[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?

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?

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....

[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...)

[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

[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 !

[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.

[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.