Which is better? MSI K7T TURBO? or ECS K7S5A? 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?

 

[pcgirl]

For what the machine will be used for either board will do the job. From my personal experiences though, MSI has been much better than ECS. I have an MSI board in my main pc right now, and it's never failed me. Stable as a rock.

A few months ago I was building a pc for a friend and I used the ECS K7S5A. I spent almost a week just trying to get it to boot, and I never did get it to work. So, needless to say I'm going to be a little partial towards MSI...

 

[JDXNC]

For a little different opinion here, I have to say go with the K7S5A, Its what I have in my 1600+ and my 1.3Ghz T-bird and both are rock solid, never a prob. PLUS you have the option of going to DDR in the future with just a swap of ram chips. It doesn't officially have overclocking potential but with a flash of the bios you can change the FSB quite a bit. I'd just like to stress that it is a very stable board and performs quite well. If your son is a gamer he will like to b able to go with DDR ram down the road, I switched to DDR earlier this year and it was a pretty good improvement. Hope that helps your decision.

 

[Araltd]

When I bought these combo's from Fry's ($79 for Athlon XP1700+ T-Bred in retail box with HSF, plus ECS K7S5A mobo), I was unsure of either board. I happen to have a new MSI K7T Turbo2 (red) board, which was an RMA replacement from MSI for an K7T Pro2A that died, and someone gave me

I actually bought 2 of these setups... I've built one using the ECS board, flashed it to Cheepomans 1029F bios, and overclocked it to 150/150 fsb, and got the Tbred athlon to Xp2000 speeds in 10 minutes.

I'm giving this setup to my Daughter for christmas, most was built with spare parts:
ECS K7S5A with cheepomans 1029F overclocking bios
AMD Athlon Xp1700 thoroughbred cpu retail with hsf
512mb PC133 sdram
10gb ibm 7200 hd
TNT2 Ultra nvidia graphics (Diamond viper 770) 32mb agp 2x
Toshiba dvd-rom
InWin mid-atx case with window added blue neon and blue lighted 80mm case fan

Overclocked to 150/150 no problem. HD is slow but its free!
With old graphics card (tnt2ultra) scored 1970'ish in 3dmark2001... Just for fun I put in GF4 Ti4200/64mb in there, got 9000.

Bottom line: The system has not been "used" yet, but setup was a breeze, and seems fine. I personally have no complaints on the ECS board- except for speed, but considering its running PC133 ram, and has a old slow HD, and considering its about $125 PC... I can't complain!

 

[infinitwisdom]

my mother has a msi K7T turbo 2 mobo, kt33 chipset, x86 family 6 model 6 steppng 2 amd~1394 mhz chip. award bios 6.00pg,1129 2001. svh bios 2.2? not sure of svh or suh. i am looking into overclocking her machine by maybe 200 to 400 mhz. i am not sure if this athlon chip must be unlocked, or modded by bridging the L1 caches on the chip, something she won't do as it is still under warranty. she has easy tune III. would it not be safe to set a higher FSB or change the external clock rather than trying the chip mods? she does have both manuals that came with the mobo, but i havent had the chance to look at them. as i said before with my brother's machine, i don't know as much about AMD boards and chips as i do intel's stuff, as i run asus intel bx board. i have done some research in this area, but am sick right now and don't have the energy to study this entire forum to find the answers to my questions right now. anybody with ideas for a safe overclock of this setup without mods that the manufacturer could "see" if a warranty issue arises would be of great help to me.

thanks agian, wisdom.

P.S. from what ive seen so far, if i were to upgrade i probably would go for an amd based system next time around. for now i am happy with what i have.

 

[AMDdoolbooter]

Both are great boards. I built a K7S5A system for my inlaws, and it is rock solid. Only 1 important thing about the K7S5A, you MUST use an Athlon XP in it. It will not restart with a standard Athlon. I had to do a complete shutdown anytime something was installed on it. When I swapped in an XP 1600+ it restarted fine every time. Plus its a sweet black, and onboard 10/100 is always a plus.