I own a K7S5A. I think the board is great for low end computing. It is cheap, and you can find hacked bios' from HoneyX out there that are stable. The one problem I have is using the onboard sound at clock speeds of 143/143 and 150/150 (200)+)on my 1700+. The sound simply cuts off after a couple of hours, and requires a reboot to get it back.
Airspirit (God bless him) helped me out alot on figuring out some of the problems with this setup. I was warned that the overclocking of this board to 150/150 leads to data degredation and a soon "non-booting" os. I started getting boot errors the other day, after running at this speed for a bit. I now am bumping it back down after only getting minimal benchmark increases from this overclock.
I could have easily cooled a higher clocked chip at higher settings. HOWEVER the board will not allow for higher voltage increases, so the chip wont boot. I had to reset my cmos to get the board to boot up, and reset back to a slower speed.
For the price and for your parents. This is one GREAT board for having everything onboard, and low problems. It isn't however suitable for overclocking. The K7S5A pro boards shipped mostly with NO HOLES for mounting your blocks. They are on clearance at Fry's and online if you want a good cheap board. They are fixing the hole problem as we speak.
Kevin.. are you sure thats not 150X11? Thats 1650 vs 1608. Mine posted at 1.65 mhz. Settings 150 150 133 133
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