Ever seen a motherboard litterally burn out? I just did....

[Hammer]

@the_leander.
 
In relation to K7 motherboards, I have never bought anything outside of ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte brands and only limited to NVIDIA and VIA chipsets. thus I haven’t seen any scenarios that you have describe.

ECS K7SOM… a SiS740/962L chipset as I recall... My last SIS based solution was from Pentium II era e.g. BX Pro (5595) junk.  

[Hammer]

 

Well my gaming rig is an ECS K7S5A and quite frankly its a beast, never had a days problem with it and its running with an overclocked cpu in a warm room, being ritually abused by my playing high end games on it via windows 2000pro.
 I cannot dis the k7s5a because it is a wonderful motherboard,

That’s nice hear in relation to the experience with that particular motherboard.

 

that said, the reason I went for the K7SOM was because it shares many of the componants the K7S5A has (north/southbridge etc)... the only real differences being the inclusion of the SiS740 embedded graphics chip and lack of sd-ram slots and an agp connector.

Its either ECS has dropped the ball in regards to quality assurance OR somebody/something has damaged your K7SOM motherboard during transit to you. There's a greater chance that the value end motherboards may be fitted substandard components.
 
IF it’s under warranty one should RMA the board for a replacement.

[Hammer]

Glaucus wrote:

Bought a dandy little ECS K7SOM motherboard, onboard graphics, sound and lan, came with a cpu on board and was what I was after, a nice cheerfull little board that has a cpu included in the bundle.

heh, I was planning on getting this motherboard for a friend of mine. I typically stick with ASUS boards, but they don't make a board quite like this one, and for that price. Anyway, keep us posted on the outcome!

  - Mike

One could try ASrock brand i.e. it’s a subsidiary of ASUS for the value end market…