I've got a K7S5A too, fortunately.
i'm using a 1333mhz TB Athlon on it, and the bios agreed to use 133mhz FSB just fine...i'm not sure what is the problem with yours but you could try flashing the bios....the older bios releases were notorious for having some bugs and being unstable.
the volcano heatsink is not known to perform that well and if you go to the AMD website, if i'm not wrong its not recommended for use on 1.4ghz TB athlons. but even so, when i used to use a volcano heatsink, the temperature never went over 60 degrees celsius. your cpu overheating is either caused by a bad heatsink installation or a poor or non-existant thermal interface material between your cpu core and the heatsink, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the type of motherboard you are using.
you could buy the most expensive asus motherboard and still fry your cpu if you don't use a heatsink or don't install it properly.
as for the BIOS PCI IRQ assignment, again if i'm not wrong, you can adjust it manually in the bios or through software, but yea....the auto settings are dumb i guess.
hey i totally agree! i'm using a ECS K7S5A board as well, and the current record is that i've had it up and running perfectly stable for 23 days, with WindowsXP, encoding mp3s, games, etc.
to be honest, when i first got the board, it was slightly unstable and would hang up occasionally for no reason and my display would sometimes get a bit corrupted...it turned out it was caused by the crappy power supply i was using that had come with my casing. it was some no-brand 250w and as soon as i bought a decent 300w AMD-approved power supply, all the stability and display problems dissappeared, period.
i'm now perfectly happy with this board as it has given me absolutely -no- problems whatsoever and the onboard sound works fine and give no problems as well.
this is unlike two other shuttle ak31 v3.1 boards that i used to build systems for two other friends. both had problems with the onboard sound, sounding all crapped up and distorted, and one of them had power retention problems so you couldn't power it on right after you had turned it off.
most often, the problem with people who experience "problems" with ECS boards is that they use cheap parts for the whole system, which aren't both cheap and reliable like ECS boards. most probable causes for an unstable ECS based system is a crappy power supply, ram, or sometimes heatsink (especially for AMD processors).
granted, the ECS production lines, like any of the other companines, does churn out a lemon every once in a while but that shouldn't be taken as representative of the overall quality of stuff that ECS produces.
as for crappy email support, i once had trouble flashing the bios because i was using the wrong flash utility, and within a day of writing in to the tech support, i received a full page reply from the tech support which was definitely not a "canned" reply given the nature of my questions and the replies. unfortunately, i don't have it anymore now, but you can take my word for it.
and lastly, i can say that at least for the ECS K7S5A board, they have been regularly releasing new bios updates, on average monthly, which have been dealing with any stability issues and bugs and after the second bios release, the board was no longer unstable, as it was with the first bios release.
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I've got a K7S5A too, fortunately. i'm using a 1333mhz TB Athlon on it, and the bios agreed to use 133mhz FSB just fine...i'm not sure what is the problem with yours but you could try flashing the bios....the older bios releases were notorious for having some bugs and being unstable. the volcano heatsink is not known to perform that well and if you go to the AMD website, if i'm not wrong its not recommended for use on 1.4ghz TB athlons. but even so, when i used to use a volcano heatsink, the temperature never went over 60 degrees celsius. your cpu overheating is either caused by a bad heatsink installation or a poor or non-existant thermal interface material between your cpu core and the heatsink, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the type of motherboard you are using. you could buy the most expensive asus motherboard and still fry your cpu if you don't use a heatsink or don't install it properly. as for the BIOS PCI IRQ assignment, again if i'm not wrong, you can adjust it manually in the bios or through software, but yea....the auto settings are dumb i guess.
hey i totally agree! i'm using a ECS K7S5A board as well, and the current record is that i've had it up and running perfectly stable for 23 days, with WindowsXP, encoding mp3s, games, etc.
to be honest, when i first got the board, it was slightly unstable and would hang up occasionally for no reason and my display would sometimes get a bit corrupted...it turned out it was caused by the crappy power supply i was using that had come with my casing. it was some no-brand 250w and as soon as i bought a decent 300w AMD-approved power supply, all the stability and display problems dissappeared, period.
i'm now perfectly happy with this board as it has given me absolutely -no- problems whatsoever and the onboard sound works fine and give no problems as well.
this is unlike two other shuttle ak31 v3.1 boards that i used to build systems for two other friends. both had problems with the onboard sound, sounding all crapped up and distorted, and one of them had power retention problems so you couldn't power it on right after you had turned it off.
most often, the problem with people who experience "problems" with ECS boards is that they use cheap parts for the whole system, which aren't both cheap and reliable like ECS boards. most probable causes for an unstable ECS based system is a crappy power supply, ram, or sometimes heatsink (especially for AMD processors).
granted, the ECS production lines, like any of the other companines, does churn out a lemon every once in a while but that shouldn't be taken as representative of the overall quality of stuff that ECS produces.
as for crappy email support, i once had trouble flashing the bios because i was using the wrong flash utility, and within a day of writing in to the tech support, i received a full page reply from the tech support which was definitely not a "canned" reply given the nature of my questions and the replies. unfortunately, i don't have it anymore now, but you can take my word for it.
and lastly, i can say that at least for the ECS K7S5A board, they have been regularly releasing new bios updates, on average monthly, which have been dealing with any stability issues and bugs and after the second bios release, the board was no longer unstable, as it was with the first bios release.
and no, i don't work for ECS.
that's all i guess