Update: Product Review: ECS K7S5A Motherboard
I still have this board and I am wondering, should I throw it out the window or use it as a serving tray. I put it in a box that had a sufficient power supply from what the support doc said. The board must have drawn so much current to kill the 12 volt circuit on the motherboard and rip through a hard drive. This board is bad luck. Stay away.

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

Forgot to post
I forgot last week to post this story. I was reminded of it when I was looking through last weeks mail bag but I felt it still needed to be posted.

In an article by Brett Glass, on the web site extremetech.com, it is stated that the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) recently banned student computers running Windows NT or Windows 2000 from the campus network, to which students connect in the school's dormitories. They are taking this position because of the numberous holes in the MS server platforms. Finally a school standing up against Microsoft and it's holes. Read more here.