Which is better? ECS K7S5A or MSI K7T Turbo? HELP!

[Araltd]

Which is better? ECS K7S5A or MSI K7T Turbo

First, I am cross posting this to the ECS and MSI area's for fair opinion.

I'm going to be build a second system, for my son who is 15 and a big time gamer and a pretty decent "power user", ie: lots of downloading, unrar'ing, burning cd's, etc.

I happen to have a brand new MSI K7T Turbo, which was a swapped out RMA from MSI on a previous warrantied MSI board. So MSI replaced the old board with this new MSI K7T Turbo, which this MSI board is brand new, never been powered on. It has the Via133a chipset I believe???

Now: I bought a CPU/MOBO combo, its a Amd Athlon XP 1700+ T-Bred , retail boxed and came with an ECS (elitegroup) K7S5A board. He will be running this CPU in one of these 2 boards, but I don't know which one yet. And I've got to sell the other one pretty quick, so I need opinions and help.

The potential system specs are as follows:
RAM: will either be 2x 512mb PC133 sticks SDRAM, or 1x 512mb PC133 SDRAM + 1x 256mb PC133 SDRAM... Not sure what I'll have left over yet.
HD: 120gb Western Digital (ATA/100,7200rpm,2mb buffer) + 60gb Maxtor (ATA/133,7200rpm,2mb buffer)
CDR/DVD: 40x CDR (maybe 48x or 52x, depends on sales for christmas ) plus a DVD-ROM, that he uses to watch movies and stuff.
Video: PNY Verto GeForce4 Ti4200/64mb - AGP 4X

No DDR ram, I don't have any extra, and with all the SDRAM I've got extra- I'm not too sure I want to spend extra money for DDR ram right now.

So, based on this info- Which board is the better board? The MSI K7T Turbo, or the ECS K7S5A?

I know NOTHING about either board- except that I know neither one has RAID, Neither has USB2.0(?) or firewire, or 8X AGP.

Opinions?

 

[CrystalMethod]

Is it the KT7 Turbo 'LE" or the regular KT7 Turbo?

 

[Araltd]

update:

the MSI board is the K7T Turbo2 (the red one)

 

[Lord Moreira]

You should be ashamed of urself posting something like this!
ECS is no match for MSI
ECS lol
Please!
I've owned ECS and my cousins still do , good thing i managed to get rid of mine.
MSI and u'll never regret it
...........

 

[Araltd]

Thats seems to be the consensus everywhere

I guess I'll be building the system on the MSI K7T Turbo2

 

[plbowler]

Dad?
is that you?

 

[SickBoy]

The ECS will be faster at stock speeds. Doesn't overclock as well though.

The ECS has that DDR RAM upgrade option later on.... the MSI doesn't. The ECS can only use 2 sticks of either type of RAM and not simultaneously. The MSI has 3 slots but only takes PC133.

Contrary to popular belief the SIS 735 is one fast chipset for PC133 SDRAM. My roommate's Duron 700 with 128 MB of generic CAS3 PC133 running at 133 MHz CAS3 beat out my (tweaked out)KT7A with Crucial PC133 running @ CAS2.

So I'd need to know a couple of things before saying one is better than another (they're both older technology).

1. Will this PC be overclocked?
2. How long do you intend this PC to last? (i.e. will a DDR memory upgrade be feasible or will he be ready for a new PC by the time he feels the need to upgrade)

Tough call....

 

[Araltd]

Those are good questions. Honestyly, I think YES- He will overclock it. As for DDR, I'm gonna say that before DDR ram is put into this system - A new chip and board will probably grace his case

Ultimately he wanted a P4, 2.4gb with Soyo ultimate dragon board, 512 to 1gb of DDR ram, and a couple of 8mb cache 80gb or 120gb HD's for Raid 0 (like his old man)

BUT: Thats not gonna happen right now- I'm sorry to say. I can afford the board and chip (barely) but not the DDR ram. That damn ram will cost me MORE than the CPU/MOBO.

 

[atariguy]

I just got rid on my ECS K7S5A board and replaced it with a MSI K7T Turbo2 board. Still using the same Athlon XP 2000+ processor and memory sticks. I think the ECS may have been just a bit faster but when trying to use 2 sticks of PC133 ram I had nothing but problems with it. I work with servers at my job so I was able to get my hands on 2 Compaq 256MB CL2 ECC sticks and that did help, but still when rendering video for a few hours the system would lock up. So I installed the MSI and couldn't be happier with the stability and performance. The ECS also would loose it bios settings every now and then which was also a pain.

I highly recommend the MSI.

 

[MikeBD35]

I'd agree with atariguy. I've had the k7s5a for a little over a year now. It was rock solid with one stick of ddr but I had nothing but trouble when I put a second stick in. They are both corsair xms 2400 sticks and the board works perfectly with either one, just not both.

Mike