Product Review: ECS K7S5A Motherboard
I go to Fry's Electronics often. I never explained Fry's here before but Fry's Electronics is a computer/Electronics store that could make a CompUSA obsolite. They won't because of their crappy customer support and service. They do have a good OEM stock and if you need a part, they are likely to have it. If you remember Outpost.com, well, they bought it. It is also family owned.

Well Fry's had a special this week, a ECS K7S5A Motherboard for $50. I figured 'why not?'. The lowest price on pricewatch.com for this board was $51.99 with a high price of $94.00. I got it home and put it in a case with a AMD XP1900+ CPU, 256M of PC2100 RAM and a 300W Generic Power Supply. It powered up fine and I went to adjust the BIOS. When I looked at the AMI BIOS config I found a section called CPU PnP. The CPU PnP section detects the multiplyer but only lets you adjust the frequency of the RAM/CPU to either 100Mhz or 133Mhz. The AMD XP1900+ is set with a multiplyer on 12 and at the 100Mhz I would only het 1.2Ghz. I tried to take it to 133Mhz but the board wouldn't go through POST anymore. I looked at the Knowledge Base on the ESC web site and where every board had about 80 posts, the K7S5A had 2027posts. I knew I would have trouble. The issue looks like the K7S5A requires heavy power. The specs are below but it is not as easy as just buying any 400W power supply. I tried that already. I have the board running at 1.2Ghz and it's pretty stable. I would not recommend this board. You might want to spend more in the board and less in the power supply.

Power specs:
+3.3V need 28A
+5V need 30A
+12V need 15A or above