EliteGroup K7S5A

THE BAD:
Not too impressed with the riser card and I think an extra PCI slot would have been far more practical. I had a few BIOS issues when I bought my XP Processor and needed to flash the BIOS. Was a pain in the ass to flash the bios but with the aid of winflash, it was fine in the end.

SUMMARY:
Happy that the drivers have been regularly updated on the ECS site. With various BIOS and driver upgrades, the board has kept up with my other upgrades that I have performed. I will be keeping it for a while yet!

I think that the K7SEM is also a great board with its onboard Duron 1.3, video, lan, sound, riser, 2xusb, AGP slot, 2 PCI all for £65.00

THE BAD:
No AGP 8X. If I want to upgrade to the latest Nvidia or ATI cards. I'll have to get a new board. Oh well, atleast I have a 128MB ATI Radeon 8500 LE for now. It will last me for a while.

SUMMARY:
I would definitely recomend this board.

THE BAD:
Can only go up to PC 2100
Very poor tech support
Chipset isn't that great for DDR RAM

SUMMARY:
This mobo is great if you are looking for a very cheap motherboard and you aren't concerned with performance. It has a good price, but the board does have its problems. It is a slow motherboard. The tech support for any ECS product is really bad. I sent a few questions to the tech support, but never received any response from them. It's a nice motherboard, but there are better choices.

Bottom line:
You get little more than what you pay for.

THE BAD:
I find AMR slots pointless, i would rather have an extra PCI slot. The onboard "Sis 7012" audio is not supported by linux or bsd.

SUMMARY:
I bought this board online about 10 weeks ago for $55 along with a 1ghz 266fsb athlon. Reviews and benchmarks give it excellent ratings, I can't judge that but it does work very well and is an excellent value given that it supports the 266mhz FSB and DDR ram.

Minor disappointment: I had to purchase a cheap ($20) AudioPCI card for sound under linux as the chipset on the motherboard is not currently supported.

With a motherboard like this out there, there is no excuse for paying the extra $50-150 that other boards cost.

THE BAD:
Not much overclocking options, some compatibility errors in win 2k/xp.

SUMMARY:
This board from newcomer ECS seems to follow the AMD marketing lead, the most power for the least money. This board is based on the reference SiS 735 board, which outperforms every other mobo currently available. (The impending release of the KT266A could change that.) Some of the high points:
-supports DDR as well as PC133 SDRAM, so you can hold off a little longer on the DDR purchase.
- Can be found for $65 on price watch.
- Onboard LAN
- Let me repeat that: $65!!!!!

However its not perfect and leaves a little to be desired for the power user.
-Very picky about PSU, MAKE SURE ITS AMD APPROVED!
-There are currently issues with floppy disk corruption under win 2k/xp, making flashing the bios a risky procedure
-Limited overclocking options. With a new bios from www.ocworkbench.com or the program CPUCool, you can change the FSB setting, but the multiplier remains locked.
-No extra features such as RAID etc.

But overall, for 65 bucks, this is as good as it gets, couple it with an athlon 1.4 and 256 meg of PC2100 ram and you got one heck of a system for $200.