Normally $44.99, now $24.99 after $20 mail in rebate (expires 9/30) and free shipping. This micro ATX board has a total of 10 USB 2.0 ports, onboard audio with 6 channels, up to 6 SATA 3 Gb. 4/5 eggs with 8 total reviews.
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Wow, that's cheap. Green from me. Too bad all of those el-cheapo dual-core AM2+ CPUs disappeared off of Newegg in the past few months to make room for new chips. (Chips like the BE-2300 2.1Ghz dual-core for $30 or so.)
VirtuaL said: Wow, that's cheap. Green from me. Too bad all of those el-cheapo dual-core AM2+ CPUs disappeared off of Newegg in the past few months to make room for new chips. (Chips like the BE-2300 2.1Ghz dual-core for $30 or so.)
BE-2400 was as low as $18.00 after CashBack and PriceGrabber rebate (I know, I bought two of them PLUS the version 1.0 of the board). Nice price indeed. Had issues with the Version 1.0 board (1.0 has DVI, this one does not) in that it would lock up every so often. I touched the small southbridge (I think - little silver one with EliteGroup on it) and it was burning hot. I added another heatsink to the top of it (heatsink tape) and also updated the BIOS and it's been up solid for over 7 days now. Will monitor and see.
Would love to get one of the new $99 AMD Quads (released today?) and throw it in this (if I knew it would support it but it "should").
I am not familiar with this particular board, but I have owned ECS MBs in the past. If you have any trouble do not count on tech support. They wanted to charge me for a bios update on a board that did not work at full clock speed.
ECS motherboards = fail. DO NOT BUY. Not worth it for free. I purchase/install many motherboards a month. I wonder if Fry's still carries this brand. I use to walk by the return desk at frys and see a pile of ECS returned motherboards. I think PCChips is a sister brand as well. Soyo might also be included in the similar crap motherboards bin. Avoids these motherbaords. There is a reason they are so cheap...
xfmpcx said: ECS motherboards = fail. DO NOT BUY. Not worth it for free. I purchase/install many motherboards a month. I wonder if Fry's still carries this brand. I use to walk by the return desk at frys and see a pile of ECS returned motherboards. I think PCChips is a sister brand as well. Soyo might also be included in the similar crap motherboards bin. Avoids these motherbaords. There is a reason they are so cheap...
I agree. A motherboard is not the place to cut corners. This is the best price that I could find on this particular motherboard, but I would advise you that the extra $30 for a more reputable brand is worth it for the time and trouble it will save you if you encounter an issue. Of the 10 boards reviewed on Newegg (1 guy bought 4), 3 were reported as DOA, 1 other had issues.
I have 3 ECS boards running at home, 2 of they were from FRY's combo deals and one from Newegg. They all work fine, i never had any issues with them. The one from Newegg G41T-M(2.0) supports eJIFFY.
I guess I'm lucky to never have any problems with ecs. Must be my antec power supplies. Fry's low end combos are rising in price; my last one was $59.99 and they raised the price 2 weeks later by $10.
Have built many ECS NF3/NF4 based boards in the past. All are still humming. The NF4 board is a good overclocker...200MHz to 300MHz FSB without much fuss.
Crooked Fed is printing money 24/7. No inflation my sweet aunt. RAM, MB, CPU, etc...they're all moving higher.
thebestpkever said: Yeah. Never again will I wait for 10% Bing. To be honest you probably saved your self some trouble in the end. ECS boards suck at overclocking and unless its for a low powered PC of some kind its probably better to get good oc options to make your cpu perform 20-50% or more faster.
I've overclocked every single ECS board I've used (while avoiding the ones that don't have any OC settings). They're good for those who dont want to be tweaking a multitude of settings anyways. Just crank up the CPU/mem speed to as high as it will stabley go and be done with it. My first ECS combo was an AMD X2 1.9Ghz OC'ed to 2.7Ghz+ on stock voltage. 2+ years on 24/7, no issues.
xfmpcx said: ECS motherboards = fail. DO NOT BUY. Not worth it for free. I purchase/install many motherboards a month. I wonder if Fry's still carries this brand. I use to walk by the return desk at frys and see a pile of ECS returned motherboards. I think PCChips is a sister brand as well. Soyo might also be included in the similar crap motherboards bin. Avoids these motherbaords. There is a reason they are so cheap...
Oh no you mean the ECS K7S5A motherboard, running in my mums desktop system, which I built in 2001, is going to crap out on me any day now...
I'm shaking my ECS box in anger!!!
klingon888
New Member
posted: Sep. 19, 2009 @ 9:38a
Buyer beware...I have this board. This board occasionally hangs. And when you put it on standby, sometimes it wakes up and sometimes it hangs and when it does finally wake up, the screen frequency does not stick and you have to reboot.
klingon888 said: Buyer beware...I have this board. This board occasionally hangs. And when you put it on standby, sometimes it wakes up and sometimes it hangs and when it does finally wake up, the screen frequency does not stick and you have to reboot.
Have you upgraded to the latest BIOS? I upgraded my girl's BIOS and added another heatsink to the small southbridge (silver one with Elitegroup painted on it), because it was burning hot, and it has made it 11 days without locking up (was locking up every day). Not sure which one seems to have fixed it. Will monitor more and see if it's finally fixed.
klingon888
New Member
posted: Sep. 19, 2009 @ 11:10a
It generally does not lock up while its on. It hangs when waking up from Standby or even when booting up sometimes. Have tried with WinXP, Vista and now appears to be slightly more stable on Win7. But its still not keeping the video frequency when waking up from Standby. Appears to start up with 60Hz eventhough I've set it to 100Hz (still using old CRT monitor since this is a backup). I will upgrade the BIOS and see what happens. Thx for the tip.
BTW, this tech support reply by ECS in comments section cracked me up:
"Constant rebooting is not a result of overheating. It could be a number of other factors, for example weak air flow circulation in the chassis."
went with the cheaper board and made the right choice.
this new board, A740GM-M V1.0A does indeed have GigaLan and the DVI connector! Newegg description and photos are wrong. Part number on motherboard confirm it is the correct new v1.0A version
EDIT: viewing photo at Newegg close up and I see a number on the board between cpu and PCIe slot 15-V15-011010, while the motherboard I recieved has number 15-V15-011011
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