ECS Motherboard Shield Concept

yeah.....stealth technology on a mobo.... i'm sure it won't be detected when it catches fire.
 
I think it kicks ass.


I had that purple ecs mobo to overclock my Athlon 1500+. They should have made it purple.
 
I'm not sure which is fuglier, an Alienware or this motherboard..... hmmmm.....
 
It's ECS, never been a fan of their junk, great if your cutting corners and trying to build a cheap system, but you want something reliable to build on...They are not it in my book, and that board looks full of RMA and DOA joy.
 
I don't think having a fan matters all that much. The original Sabertooth P67 didn't come with one, it was optional, and the Z77 Saberbooth does not come with it installed by default. Putting on the fan makes the peripheral temperatures drop by a few degrees and makes CPU temperatures go up by a few degrees. It's pretty freaking pointless in the real world. I'd take a regular motherboard over this because IMO it's just a gimmick.
 
SkribbelKat said:
Who even cares what their motherboard looks like. You put it in the box and plug a buncha stuff into it, then forget its there until you hafta replace it or open the computer to clean out the hair your cat shed into it.
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It´s useful to be able to inspect your MB - even get to components with a multimeter.

PS: "hafta" ..really? The writing equivalent of holding your handgun sideways I take it.


Personally I will never buy a MB featuring any kind of "shield" (lid).
 
It would make cleaning the PC out even harder. Dust gets everywhere, am I supposed to try and blow air under that thing and hope its clean?

No thanks

Who buys ECS MBs anyway
 
I wondered to myself who in their right mind would publicly release such an amateur and ugly concept image. Then I hit the link and visited their facebook page. Is ECS owned and operated by the Dynasty Warriors?
 
Sad to see other motherboard company going this direction. It was a useless gimmick when ASUS put out its overpriced Sabertooth boards.

I have owned two ECS boards and they both were great. Not junk at all. One ran as a Linux router and had a four year uptime.
 
nakedhand said:
It´s useful to be able to inspect your MB - even get to components with a multimeter.
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So you want to poke your motherboard with a multimeter and look at the components to do exactly what with them? Unless you can perform surface mount soldering, you're not going to fix it. Motherboards either work or they don't. If they don't and they're under warranty, you call someone and they send a new one to you. If it's out of warranty, you get to purchase a new one. Poking at it with a multimeter or oogling the parts is pretty pointless and exposes the components to increased risk because you're possibly clumsy probing (hehe) will short out something and screw it up.

nakedhand said:
PS: "hafta" ..really? The writing equivalent of holding your handgun sideways I take it.
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Hafta? Yah rilly! I does it on porpoise even! :p Whatcha thinks about that mister nudeyfingers?
 
Ugly as hell! Seems like a lazy way to go. Maybe we can put stickers on the cover as well like our trapper keepers in grade school... Personally I like the look of the components on the board. Hell get artistic and add color to the individual components or something if that possible without sacrificing cooling potential.
 
gunbust3r said:
I wondered to myself who in their right mind would publicly release such an amateur and ugly concept image. Then I hit the link and visited their facebook page. Is ECS owned and operated by the Dynasty Warriors?
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I got a good chuckle out of this. I don't think they were thinking clearly covering a terrible board with an equally terrible and strangely shaped shroud.
 
Unless they are somehow using that shroud as some kind of giant inefficient heatsink, that looks like the dumbest idea I've ever seen.
SkribbelKat said:
Who even cares what their motherboard looks like. You put it in the box and plug a buncha stuff into it, then forget its there until you hafta replace it or open the computer to clean out the hair your cat shed into it.
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I have a big window on the side of my case, LEDs, and nice cable management so it looks pimp. My last case I had some blacklight in there so my cables and a few other items would fluoresce.

And use a filter on your intake fans man, this is 2012. ;)
 
The first thing I do when I get a motherboard is inspect it for bad caps and tell-tale signs of it not being new. Having a shield over the board doesn't let you see what might be wrong with it. I imagine that thing traps dust like crazy. No thanks.

SkribbelKat said:
Unless you can perform surface mount soldering, you're not going to fix it.
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I fixed a broken power connection on a laptop motherboard. The solder had broken and the power plug was loose as a result. It still works fine to this day. I've also re-soldered broken I/O connectors, caps that were knocked off, etc. Those types of problems can be fairly easily fixed. Other problems, such as a failed IC, cannot be fixed without specialized equipment, as well as the required replacement parts, and is not cost effective to do. It all depends on what you're dealing with.
 
Ducman69 said:
And use a filter on your intake fans man, this is 2012. ;)
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But then there's no little bits of kitty love inside my computer! :( Well, there that and I don't own a desktop.

Phoenix333 said:
I fixed a broken power connection on a laptop motherboard. The solder had broken and the power plug was loose as a result. It still works fine to this day. I've also re-soldered broken I/O connectors, caps that were knocked off, etc. Those types of problems can be fairly easily fixed. Other problems, such as a failed IC, cannot be fixed without specialized equipment, as well as the required replacement parts, and is not cost effective to do. It all depends on what you're dealing with.
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I guess. If it's a dead laptop, I'll just go find another one from CraigsList instead of spending all that time messing with it. I do admit that there is a soldering iron in my pile of stuff someplace, but I haven't used it in a long time and I don't plan on it when I can get a working, used whatever for less than $100 USD and just not worry about it. :) Besides, birds have better eyesight than humans so you'd be able to see what you're doing more easily.
 
Ducman69 said:
Unless they are somehow using that shroud as some kind of giant inefficient heatsink, that looks like the dumbest idea I've ever seen.
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That was my first thought, if they can use that cover as a giant heat spreader then it might work pretty well at keeping things cool. It still looks pretty silly and as others have already pointed out, makes it impossible to inspect your caps etc.
 
Is stupid , what is it made of ? no never mind ..it's just stupid .
 
spamdie said:
But on the plus side. Now they can use crappy capacitors and you can't see them leaking. As removing the shroud will no doubt void the warranty.
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That was my exact thought upon seeing the image. There will now be no way for you to notice the shoddy components that they put on the board. Aside from the "ECS" logo telling you to stay the fuck away.
 
Haven't gotten an ECS board ever since Fry's stopped packing them in with CPUs. At least a good half of them were DoA, but amusingly the few that weren't refuse to this day to die. I mean, I'm sure I could kill them if I tried to OC them even a little, but I think that'd make me feel like I kicked a special-ed kid on crutches down a flight of stairs or something.

As for this one... leaving aside how functional the shroud might be (at things other than hiding exploded caps), the graphic they chose to use on it (if that is a graphic) just seems really, really bad... bad in a "just figured out how to create gradients in a photo-editing program" kind of way. They really could've done better than this, even if all they were trying to do was to make a cheap imitation of ASUS's design.
 
Steve01S4 said:
Not a fan.
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what-you-did-there-i-see-it.thumbnail.jpg
 
It was about ten years ago when I first encountered ECS boards, my boss would buy them because they were, and still are cheap. One particular model of motherboard he insisted on using had this peculiar habit of once every eight months would scrub the CMOS, and it wasn't just one customers system, there were two of the damn things.

Other ECS boards kept up the long standing tradition of being DOA, or RMA a few months down the road, and didn't change my opinion when I worked at Fry's either, most of their "custom" Fry's systems came back with dead boards, I think it got to the point where they just swapped them for an HP system of equal value, they were that bad (ECS motherboards, standard CPU fans, and ECS graphics cards, one big box of fail...kind of like their laptops as well the GQ rubbish, where the hinges broke the mounts from the plastic shell they were so stiff).
 
this is stupid. How do you change the CMOS battery? How would you determine if caps are blown? Where do you view diagnostic LEDs?
 
captainfish said:
this is stupid. How do you change the CMOS battery? How would you determine if caps are blown? Where do you view diagnostic LEDs?
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I think that blown capacitors would be easy to diagnose because the computer wouldn't be working. Honestly though, is this really a common problem? I've gone through lots of computers and have had very few failures and nothing I could really say in specific was due to capacitor failures. It seems like that's something people on this forum fret over, but isn't a major issue in reality.

Stayfr0sty said:
I think ECS is ok. Decent budget mobos for basic home builds.
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I owned an ECS GREEN320 laptop for a few years. It was a VIA C3 based computer that was sold under the Balance brand through Wal-Mart with Lindows preinstalled. The only really annoying thing was the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra-ish system blower. It was OMG-ear-splitting loud, but I used it for like four years before I gave mailed it to a relative I don't like very much. It's a one-time experience, but you can mark me down as another person who doesn't find ECS all that scary.
 
SkribbelKat said:
I've gone through lots of computers and have had very few failures and nothing I could really say in specific was due to capacitor failures.
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I've seen failing caps before. It's not super common, but you can usually tell when they're on the way out as they get a little bulge on the top instead of being nice and flat. Usually the machine starts to get flaky before it dies completely. Most of the time that I've seen caps fail it was in a cheap PSU or some accessory card. I don't remember seeing motherboards with that problem.

I'd say the most interesting failure that I've seen was a power supply that had a diode explosively decouple from the PCB. The solder on the end of the diode had gotten so hot it welded the end of the diode that had been attached to the PCB to a nearby heatsink, leaving a burned hole in the PCB where the diode used to be, and leaving the diode vertically displaced from the board by a full inch. I have no idea how it dumped that much energy that quick without blowing the diode in half. I'm used to seeing charred resistors, but that was a first.
 
Phoenix333 said:
I don't remember seeing motherboards with that problem.
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Motherboards were actually the most affected by the problem for two reasons:

The number of caps that they used effectively increased the likelihood of capacitor failure to 100% during the capacitor plague.

You immediately knew when a motherboard was affected because all the caps were visible without needing to open something up and void the warranty.

EVERY motherboard I had come across (or personally had) from about 1998 to 2006 was affected. I still hear about new cases.

Not so surprisingly... ECS were among the worst offenders when it came to using the faulty caps.
 
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