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I was at Fry's Electronics and saw a ECS P4 board for $70.00. It has
USB 2.0. ethernet slot and many options. Is it a good one to get? Is it
reliable and durable?

I was also going to get the 2.4mhz chip of 256mb of 2700 mb memory.
With tax it was $385.00.

I was looking at MSI, ASUS and a few others. Does brand make a
difference?

Thanks for all your help.

ECS is a low end board.

I built a system using an Asus P4S533 this summer and it's still surprizes me with the stuff it can do.

Read reviews and spend alot of time selecting your MOBO.

It's the most important part.

Asus, Gigabyte, MSI are good boards but you must do the homework.

With the prices on P4 CPU's these days I was looking at AMD for my next system.

Here's a good site that has information on motherboards.
http://www.motherboards.org/

ECS is like the Lite-On of the motherboard industry. Their products are affordable, but don't have all the bells and whistles that some others do. I used an ECS motherboard for my wife's computer. It doesn't overclock very well, but it works fine otherwise.

Isn't ECS manufacturing Abit's motherboards now too.

Thanks for all the input. I've decided to go with an ASUS even though it's
about twice as much (maybe twice as good, too).

ricrat wrote:Thanks for all the input. I've decided to go with an ASUS even though it's
about twice as much (maybe twice as good, too).

I hope you enjoy your Asus board as much as I have with my Asus A7V333.

hey buddhatb i agree with that motherboards.org, im a frequent poster in their forums, im in the process of switching over to an intel system, p4 2.4GHz, gigabyte GA-8PE667 Ultra, 512MB 2700 muskin (2-2-2) ram, swiftech mcx-4000 heatsink

It's all about the chipset for the most part, usually one generation of motherboards using the same chipset all perform within a few percentages of each other. Unless the OEM totally jacks up the PCB and introduces a bad flaw, you're buying the chipset

Matt wrote:It's all about the chipset for the most part, usually one generation of motherboards using the same chipset all perform within a few percentages of each other. Unless the OEM totally jacks up the PCB and introduces a bad flaw, you're buying the chipset

and the extras - # of slots, # and types of ports (USF/FireWire), O/B sound and LAN... overclocking extras & BIOS options

thats what the chipset runs, its like the main control center for the mobo, besides the cpu

Ian wrote:ECS is like the Lite-On of the motherboard industry.

I disagree. Lite-On's a pretty good drive (if not picky about media). I have had an ECS P4 board die on me and a friend has had 2 die. Spend the extra $ on an Asus, Gigabyte, Abit or Tyan.

Soyo, Abit, ASUS, Epox, and MSI are the way to go with a motherboard. I've still yet to see an Abit motherboard die. Their stuff is just built to last.

Derek

I'm settled on either an MSI or ASUS (pretty much the same specs and
price).

For now, I'm going to settle with my P3 550. Things are changing too fast.

Thanks to everyone for input.

I have had a Abit die, it was a nice bx6 revision2 and it just refused to power up anymore one day. I did get all my use out of it and it was in the living room as a second machine so it wasn't a total catastrophe, but it was a pisser. My friend builds systems and like that for a living and Abits aren't as good as they used to be. I had a Asus a7v133 and it was a rock till I upgraded the video card and it was too much for it. I now have a MSI kt3 ultra aru and it's been nice and stable with the same combo as long as I don't push the memory too hard
Right now we both think MSI makes one of the most stable boards you can get, but any of those are nice if set up with good parts and and like that.