Pros: Quiet fans sure have come a long way. Pushes air well is very quiet. The rifle bearing is a modified sleeve bearing that is designed to last longer while retaining the sleeve bearing's low-noise characteristics. Well-balanced fan without any noticeable vibrations. A top-notch, quality fan for those who desire quiet cooling for standard cooling. An easy choice when replacing stock fans that come with a case.

Cons: None

Overall Review: I threw two of these in my case and ended up removing one. Thought they wouldn't push much air due to the low noise but one does the trick. :) If you have a hot running rig with lots of hot components (eg. dual video cards/overclocked processor), you should probably go with something that pushes more air. For regular systems, they do the trick very nicely! :)

Pros: It's around the same size and weight as the stock cooler, so fits without modifications. No need to worry about socket damage from weight on a Socket 939. Also makes use of the stock backplate, so no need to remove the motherboard either. Makes use of 3 clamp spots on each side of the socket -- stock HSF only clamped on one. Very solid connection. Very quiet and keeps my Athlon 64 3000+ cooler than before -- and with much less noise. Not an overclocker product but does great for running things at regular clock speeds and voltages. Love the metal grill fanguard! :) No vibration at all on the fan -- very well balanced. Easy to install -- no tools needed. Very refreshing for a change. Cools the surrounding motherboard components too since it's designed to blow downward. Some side-blowing heatsink/fan setups don't do that.

Cons: The bottom surface was fairly rough, so I lapped it with fine grade sandpaper to smoothen things out. Probably doesn't make a difference since heatsink compound fills in gaps, but I'm a stickler about such things. Haven't run into anything else.

Overall Review: I was glad to see a regular-sized heatsink/fan combo with good cooling, a quiet fan, and a realistic size & weight. Felt uneasy about hanging some of the large tower coolers off my board. This one sits close to the board, weighs close to the original, installs very easily, is only a tad bigger footprint wise, and comes with a well balanced, quiet fan. Should fit most motherboards and cases just fine. Does a great job on my Athlon 64 3000+. Never goes above 107 Fahrenheit -- even when under full load. It's wonderful having a quiet PC! :)

Comments: I switched from an old Nvidia card and man does this run cool. The fan is evidentally for show since it doesn't ever get scalding hot. Speaking of the fan, it's whisper quiet. I was looking for a reasonably priced video card that would run cool, be quiet, and would get respectable scores on the current crop of video games. Mission accomplished! On a final note, comes with a DVI-to-VGA plug and an SVideo-to-analog cable. Nice touch.

Comments: This motherboard is definitely a no-brainer for those interested in a cheap motherboard that performs well. The overclocking and poweruser community won't like it due to the lack of BIOS tweaking controls and 1-Gig of RAM ceiling. However, for people like me who want a cheap upgrade motherboard that is stable, extremely fast, and sets up with a minimum of hassles it's an easy decision. I benchmarked my new AMD 1500+ XP cpu with 512Megs of Crucial PC2100 DDR Ram against a friend who was using an iWill KK266Plus with some PC133 RAM that is highly overclocked. My K7S5A setup tore his overclocked equipment up on the memory bandwidth benchmark and my motherboard is running with conservative memory settings. The built in sound isn't very good -- very underpowered amplification. With a good set of powered speakers it's tolerable for the average person. The built-in network card is awesome! Set up was extremely easy via the driver disk and it's sweet to open your case and only see an AGP card sitting in there. A good thing for airflow if nothing else. To summarize, the ECS K7S5A board is extremely fast, stable, and has a sound card and NIC built on. The home user will love it -- the overclocker/poweruser won't. The price is about half of other DDR motherboards available and the driver install under Win'98SE was flawless for me.