Is the SIS chipset any good?

I only have experience with VIA boards but I got stuck with an ECS K7S5A with SIS735. It has support for AMD XP and DDR RAM and I was thinking of replacing my Shuttle AK11 with it.

Well, with out going to much indepth the ECS K7S5A is one of the best boards out there for the money. If you are on an extreme budget, it is the best choice. I think it retails for around 70-80 bucks right now. Where you got it for free it may be worth replacing your FIC with it. You may get a little bit more speed out of the chipset. The SIS735 got very good reviews when it was first released. You should do a search on Google for some reviews on the board. I think you'll be a bit surprised when you read what people are saying about it.

the chipset works well, but the only con I've heard is the board can be "buggy"
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I think this board can be found for around $55

I put the board and a Gig Duron in my second computer and its working great. Done alot of ripping and MP3 encoding and decoding with no problems. It really woke up the Rage Fury video card. Im playing games I never could before with the FIC board. Wolfenstein works as good as it does on my main computer, actually a little faster.

hey there,
I have this motherboard as well (along with a 1gig duron and 512mb sdram), but I'm having problems installing Win2K. The install keeps freezing during the hardware detection ... has anyone else had these problems? Any ideas?

- Bram

Thats why I took out the FIC board in my other computer. Kept getting "hardware malfunction" during hardware detection in Win 2k installation. But I was having freeze ups in 98 too which hasnt happened with the ECS board. You should try installing with just the video card, cdrom and HD connected. Also try installling with just 128 RAM and add the rest if the install goes through. And make sure all the BIOS settings are right, maybe even lower video aperature size.

Ya might want to try ....

Hello there,

You might want to try a ECS K7VTA3 rev.2 motherboard ( its a via kt266a based board ). I got this board for about $10 - $20 more than a K7S5a & built a box up around it & a Retail box 1 ghz duron.

I had the system up & running in like 35 minutes or as windows reports 33 minute install. I have not had any problems so far with it & would definaly recomend it over a K7S5a.

I believe by getting this board I bypassed alot of the b.s associated with getting a good running K7S5a.

I will post my specs if interested.

Elsewise ... good luck.

Terry