just took my servermmotherboard back to the retailer as the thing was bluescreening for fun.  3 different OS installed (XP64, Home and Win2k3 all doing it).  memory was fine, PSU was swapped out removed all the cards etc and it was still crashing.  Wandered in and the dude booted the board up, and in BSODd on him within 5 minutes.  So, he offered to replace it.  All he had left was an ECS board, which im not too keen on.  Though he swung me round with the fact its a 770 series chipset so i can Phenom or similar it if or when I want to.  

My question is, do i keep the Asus M2A-VM in my desktop machine, or do i swap it out for this one?  there are some possible performance improvements, but ive not used an ECS board out of choice in years because they didn;t used to be very good.  Thoughts folks?

From personal experience with ECS i would take a chance , i have had a couple of really good mobos from them , built quite a few more & they have been really solid.The very cheap /integrated 1s are or were a bit of a lottery.
Have a look for reviews & go on to some other forums that have a specific ECS mobo section & check out the problems.

Dell used to use ECS boards in some of their stuff. Basic but pretty good.

If its better than the old one Id take it.

Quote from: BeakerMy question is, do i keep the Asus M2A-VM in my desktop machine, or do i swap it out for this one?  there are some possible performance improvements, but ive not used an ECS board out of choice in years because they didn;t used to be very good.  Thoughts folks?

The new bios, from 11, prevents some of the problems with the graphics and a few other problems of the m2a vm motherboard.  Personally found it much better the ECS which does not have dual monitor display and no Hdmi with S-video out bracket as the vm does.  Although have an ECS system still overclocked for 5 years never one crash.

Quote from: sdpIf its better than the old one Id take it.

not so much better, the quality of the Asus is much better.  The things is the ECS had PCI-E 2.0, Hypertransport 3, and a few other little extras that come with the very latest AMD Chipset.  

QuoteThe new bios, from 11, prevents some of the problems with the graphics and a few other problems of the m2a vm motherboard. Personally found it much better the ECS which does not have dual monitor display and no Hdmi with S-video out bracket as the vm does. Although have an ECS system still overclocked for 5 years never one crash.

im on the latest BIOS with the Asus, i think its found a new home though.  Im going to use it to base a new Media PC on, and ive dug out enough stuff that the old 1.8 P4 ive got has been put back on server duty.  The 4200+ X2 should be happy as a media machine

All appears to be up and running OK at the moment.  No noticeable difference to use, but Ive not played any games on it yet.  The extra bandwidth on the PCIe and HyperTransport may be helpful though.  

The one issue I did find is that there was no floppy disk connector, so i had to do a crash course in slipstreaming drivers (not done it since i did a W2K install with all SCSI devices).  Ended up playing with "nlite", and would seriously recommend it to anyone that is having issues.  It seems the latest AMD boards just dont have a floppy drive on most of them!

nlite is good yah, I used it for the RAID drivers.