James

Sounds like you won't be going the ECS route anymore indeed.

Can you tell me what has gone bad with the board? Is it the CPU socket area or it just won't power on anymore? etc etc etc?

Maybe it's how you are cooling it? Are you using a proper fan? Are you applying thermal paste to the CPU to make sure it's properly heat resisted?

Abit are ok but a lot of people have been saying their QA(Quality Assurance) has gone down.

As far as chipsets go...people have had great success with all AMD based systems and the Nforce systems...

stay away from Sis and Via..that's my recommendation

Opus :D

the ECS boards i've had all have been sis chipsets.. the problem with this one.. a cap blew up.. really blew up.. the damn motherboard was on fire.. the cpu never went over 57degrees.. and the system overall was always under 40.. i kept the computer very cool..

i had that problem once before about a year ago were a cap blew on the motherboard.. i was thinking it was my power supply back then.. right now i have a 550watt true power power supply that i got from mircocenter.

the board is done but the cpu and delta 1010 are cool.. thats all that i care about.. the NF7-s seems to be great.. very stable and fast.. i had to upgrade to ddr ram and i'm running 1gig of pc2700 k-byte ram.
the cpu cooler is a arctic cooling copper silent2 tc. it keeps the cpu cool and its very quiet..i've overclocked the cpu to a xp2400 and it was still only running at 62 degrees. my overall case fan is a huge one from one of my dell servers..it keeps the computer cool