ECS Intel H61 LGA 1155 i3/i5/i7 - HDMI Micro ATX Intel Motherboard - $14.99 aMIR Shipped @ NE (was $45)

Can't beat the price, but the reviews are a bit scary. In my experience w/ most budget boards, it's hit or miss. All your savings go out the window if you get unlucky and get a bad board. A lot of time wasted diagnosing problems, RMA'ing, etc. And your chances of a bad board are much higher w/ ECS than say ASUS or Gigabyte. But to be fair, if you get a good board, it will usually work as well and last as long as any other board. Order w/ your fingers crossed.

eibgrad said:   Can't beat the price, but the reviews are a bit scary. In my experience w/ most budget boards, it's hit or miss. All your savings go out the window if you get unlucky and get a bad board. A lot of time wasted diagnosing problems, RMA'ing, etc. And your chances of a bad board are much higher w/ ECS than say ASUS or Gigabyte. But to be fair, if you get a good board, it will usually work as well and last as long as any other board. Order w/ your fingers crossed.

It has 3 year warranty. What are you worry about? No usb 3 is the deal breaker for me.

WeaselBroom said:   SberianDude said:   I assembled an HTPC for my daughter with this mb, G530, a 120GB SSD as a system disk, and an old awfully slow 2.5" HD (left after a laptop SSD upgrade) as a second disk.
Everything works fine, the system is surprisingly zippy and the integrated graphics shows 1080 video quite well.

Shows no integrated graphics, are you talking about the same board?

Most current Intel chips have integrated graphics, notice the hdim/vga out on the board.

jjfat said:   eibgrad said:   Can't beat the price, but the reviews are a bit scary. In my experience w/ most budget boards, it's hit or miss. All your savings go out the window if you get unlucky and get a bad board. A lot of time wasted diagnosing problems, RMA'ing, etc. And your chances of a bad board are much higher w/ ECS than say ASUS or Gigabyte. But to be fair, if you get a good board, it will usually work as well and last as long as any other board. Order w/ your fingers crossed.

It has 3 year warranty. What are you worry about? No usb 3 is the deal breaker for me.

A long warranty is no indication of reliability. I've had some ECS boards and they have never been worth the money. Troubleshooting weird errors, sending back the board at your own expense, etc. makes this MB extremely expensive. My recommendation is to stay away...

Richardito said:   jjfat said:   eibgrad said:   Can't beat the price, but the reviews are a bit scary. In my experience w/ most budget boards, it's hit or miss. All your savings go out the window if you get unlucky and get a bad board. A lot of time wasted diagnosing problems, RMA'ing, etc. And your chances of a bad board are much higher w/ ECS than say ASUS or Gigabyte. But to be fair, if you get a good board, it will usually work as well and last as long as any other board. Order w/ your fingers crossed.

It has 3 year warranty. What are you worry about? No usb 3 is the deal breaker for me.

A long warranty is no indication of reliability. I've had some ECS boards and they have never been worth the money. Troubleshooting weird errors, sending back the board at your own expense, etc. makes this MB extremely expensive. My recommendation is to stay away...

+1
Warranty process for ECS is really painful. Doesn't matter for me if they give 5 years warranty if their RMA steps are extreme and non-sense. At the end I dumped two boards, because of time I spend back and forward with their support department wasn't worth it.
I also have more ECS boards purchased same time, and they work still with no problems. Like others said "Order w/ your fingers crossed".

Richardito said:   A long warranty is no indication of reliability. I've had some ECS boards and they have never been worth the money. Troubleshooting weird errors, sending back the board at your own expense, etc. makes this MB extremely expensive. My recommendation is to stay away...The final price is $15. Buyers should be making the gamble that the board will be trouble-free because it's not worth the time or money to ship the board back.

I won't buy ECS because it was too much hassle to get my last rebate (had to deal with fulfillment house and ECS). Not worth the time or aggravation.

the rebate has to be mailed in 18 days of the order. If you order today it will not ship
until monday. you will reduce the rebate limit to 16 days, as the order date will be today.
If you can, wait till monday to order this.

Bought one paired with a Intel Pentium G620 $49 from Microcenter for my daughter. It rips. Faster than my Pentium 4 3Ghz. The on-microprocessor chip video is nice.

For slightly slower performance, Microcenter has the G530 for $34.99.

I missed this deal AGAIN! I bought one of these for about $25 a few months back and still haven't gotten around to building it in a system, but for $15 it would be nice to have another!

Still, I notice that ECS has changed rebate processors again. For my rebate, they used 4myrebate.com which is a terrific rebate processing company - they process rebates for Asus, Intel, and others. I got my last ECS rebate via 4myrebate within about 8 weeks as promised. This time they are using a different company, so I'd be less enthused about it...

SberianDude said:   I assembled an HTPC for my daughter with this mb, G530, a 120GB SSD as a system disk, and an old awfully slow 2.5" HD (left after a laptop SSD upgrade) as a second disk.
Everything works fine, the system is surprisingly zippy and the integrated graphics shows 1080 video quite well.

integrated graphics is more than enough to show 1080P content.

People have odd views on integrated graphics. If you're not going to game, integrated graphics is usually more than enough.

I've owned several ECS boards starting with the K7S5A.... never had a problem with them. Seems like a good deal for $15, Thanks!

splice said:   I've owned several ECS boards starting with the K7S5A.... never had a problem with them.The K7S5A was known for its capacitors failing (most were the infamous G-Luxon brand) and had RAM timing problems due to the BIOS and CMOS memory amnesia because of a hardware design flaw. My ECS K7VTA3 ver. 8 suddenly stop working for good, but I could never figure out what went wrong with it (probably a chip). My ECS nForce3A had a badly written BIOS that caused intermittent sluggishness and the empty floppy disk drive to occasionally buzz, but it was cured with a BIOS update -- with a BIOS from a BioStar NF325-A7 motherboard. Every time a capacitor exploded in an ECS board of mine, it either rebooted or shut down, but when when the same thing happened with any Asus/Asrock board, the computer kept working without interruption. Fortunately the ECS H61H2-M2(1.0) is made with good capacitors, except for a few Teapos (a bad brand) that probably aren't in high-stress circuits (Japanese capacitors there).