So I broke down about 2 weeks ago and picked up a new motherboard for my PC. It’s an ECS — which I’ve never heard of either - but I have to say I’ve definitely been pleasantly surprised by the performance.

My last mobo, an Abit, was a complete heaping pile of shit. It ran hot — and I mean hot. CPU was about 70 C if I was lucky, 70 or 80 for the case/mobo itself. She overheated quite a bit.

I replaced it with the ECS, and my temps are all down by about 30 C. That’s insane. To make things even better, I was able to get my front panel audio jacks working on this board (since they thought to include that howto in their manual, Abit assumed you knew how).

Now, I’m rocking my 3.2 P4 HT @ about 40 C with 1.5GB of DDR2. Delicious indeed. All in all, it’s a superior board. The audio support on the Abit was a little bit better, but it’s hardly anything that outweighs the benefits of the ECS.

Not that I’m suddenly an ECS fanboy - but I can definitively say Abit sucks.

Edit 7/03/07: This board has been just about perfect the whole time. Once in a while if I restart the internal NIC card won’t work. If I shut it down for about 10 solid seconds and then back on it always comes back up. I know I could probably RMA it, but it’s such a pain in the ass to pull a motherboard.

Edit 12/10/07: This board either sucks, or I have really bad luck with hardware. Sometime last month it completely died on me. That’s what you get for $50 I guess…