Did I get screwed by Outpost.com?

[platasnatch]

I bought a P4 2.4 Ghz processor and ECS ELITEGROUP motherboard combo. Had to assemble CPU to motherboard myself, and with everything connected, and I mean everything down to the 4 pin 12v power cable that only P4 compatible power supplies have. I use an All in wonder 9600 128 mb graphics card, and have a sony vaio monitor and an auroravision low radiation monitor. Neither of these monitors come out of standby mode. The orange light never turns green, despite the spinning disks in the hard drive obviously doing their thing. There is no FSB switch on the motherboard, like you'll find with AMD supported motherboards, so what I am wondering is, what am I overlooking? Why can't my monitor click over and show me my bios screen? It doesn't come out of standby even with a PCI graphics card or my other AGP card. The motherboard manual says that the AGP 8x slot supports only the latest 1.5v AGP cards. Can this be of use to me? Is my killer graphics card not 1.5v?

from ati(.)com



System Requirements
Intel® Pentium® 4/III/II/Celeron™, AMD® K6/Athlon® or compatible with AGP 8X (0.8V)/4X (1.5V) slot
128MB of system memory
Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
DVD playback requires DVD drive
Interactive Program guide requires Internet connection for listing updates
Remote control receiver requires available USB port
1GHZ minimum processor speed for MPEG-2 video capture
Sound Subsystem with DirectSound® drivers
Operating Systems Support
Windows® XP
Windows® 2000
Windows® Me
Windows® 98 / 98SE*
*Windows® Me driver can be installed on Windows® 98/98SE

Memory Configuration
128MB of double data rate SDRAM
Display Support
Two VGA displays simultaneously or One VGA display connected with a TV or VCR.


I meet every one of those demands, what gives???

 

[69Flavors]

What was the outcome at Outpost.com?

Did you get the P4 2.4 Ghz processor and ECS ELITEGROUP motherboard combo to work?
Was it worth the price and work?
How much did you pay?

thanks - I am considering to purchase FRY's combo: ECS PT800CE with P4 3.2 GHz

 

[mdkoh]

To Good To Be True

Hey guys,

I have built nearly 25-30 computers in my near 4 years as a A+ Certified tech. Some advice about Outpost.com and their combos, you can do better than an ECS motherboard. I had a "sales associate" at Fry's (their AZ store name) talk me out of buying their combos. Pointing out the failure rate of the ECS motherboards as the primary reason. This happened not once but twice in the last year. Why do you think all their great priced combos come with a ECS M/B? The only time I have experienced newbuild problems have been with ECS motherboards, in fact I have one haunting me now.

My advice, if you are having problems, scrape up another $60-$110 and buy a good motherboard like ASUS, Gigabyte, Abit, or Soyo. Money well spent, and time less wasted. If you price out the combo you buy you will find that you basically pay just for the processor anyway. Good luck with your project and I hope that this helps. :angel:

For the P4 that were mentioned may I suggest the ASUS P4P800E-deluxe from www.computergate.com It cost $114 +shipping but a really nice and stable platform, over clockcapable with nice results. Might I add that it complements that P4 very nicely. You will be amazed at the speed and ability of it to do its job quickly (as expected)

 

[EvilFallenAngel]

I wanted to know, Ive heard great things about ASUS, but I wanted to know everyones take on MSI boards, I have always used them and am thinking of getting the diamond one for AMD 64. MSI vs ASUS.

Evil
:darth:

 

[mdkoh]

My Suggestions About MSI

Never heard a bad thing about MSI boards. Can't be any worse than ECS. If you want to know about motherboards (they can't review them all) in general goto www.motherboards.org and read about the different motherboards they review. I get a lot of information from the articles about specific boards and their variant. Helps expand your knowledge base too.

Just thought I would throw this in too, I checked the highest ranked ECS board on their sight, it only ranked a 58 out of a possible 100 here is the conclusion part;

Conclusion
For the price this is a very solid piece of equipment and essentially what you get with the L4S5A is a working mans motherboard that is affordable enough for just about anyone's budget. If you have to have the latest of everything look elsewhere, but if you need a fairly loaded board that offers ample features based on last cycles technology this is worth looking into, especially if the TCO is a factor in your purchase.

I have yet to see the board on the market though and I wonder if ECS is going to release this board in America or if this version has been scrapped. Being easy to setup and configure is one of its strong points and the L4S5A wins points in my book for that fact. You can find the six PCI no RAID version all over www.pricewatch.com so if the RAID function is not important to you the board is even less expensive to buy.

The Good
Low priced and solid features including on-board LAN and sound.

The Bad
No USB 2.0 or ATA133 support. Mediocre performance.

The Ugly
The horrible placement of the 1.44 Floppy connector.