New motherboard advice for SVCD converting.. K7S5A or 830LR?

[DVantrease]

I am looking to upgrade my motherboard + cpu and am searching for advice. This pc is primarily used for DVD ripping and SVCD convertion. I'm going cheap (yea, I'm married haha!). Going by PriceWatch, I can get a Anthlon XP 1800+ / motherboard combo for $132 shipped. For this pricerange, I've seen 2 motherboards listed, the K7S5A (ECS) and the 830LR (PC Chips). As far as I can tell, they have virtually the same specs, including using the Sis-735 chipset (which I am not familiar with).

Can anyone give me some advice on selecting the best motherboard here? Any good/bad things to say about either one? Or can you point me to some reviews? I'm really wanting to stay below $150.

[Kdiddy]

Actually PC Chips bought ECS last year sometime, and having order both boards I can tell you they are the EXACT same board. I have 3 of them, the longest for 6 months running with athlon XP 1600. All 3 running, ripping, & encoding just fine.

[spiderman2k1]

K7S5A is a bad board for video capturing but any thing else its good I have the dazzle e and it would not work get the new via chip set's i have MSI and it use's the 266a chip set. for encoding the K7S5A and games

[danylab]

I have been using a K7S5A + and Athlon 1800+ for the last 5 months to capture with my old DC10+ with no problem at all.

I've done more than 200 vcd. I use the integrated sound board and nic. Cheap and realiable for me.

danylab

[chrome307]

My current setup is the K7S5A with 1.8ghz Athlon XP, 512 DDR and 40gb ATA100 HDD.

I'm using this to rip DVD's with a 16x LiteOn drive and for me it rips and encodes in less then twice the length of the movie.

I use an old TView99 capture card (Askey) to capture tv programs and hopefully get my VCR connected up too. I use Virtual Dub and TMPGenc Plus to capture and encode the avi files and that too works brilliantly.

Every mobo and cpu will give different results, so go with whatever you can afford. If it dosen't meet you expectations, you can also buy something better.

I am satisified with my setup and have updated my BIOS whenever I needed to.

chrome ;0)

PS Personally I would give the PC Chips mobo a miss as you get more PCI slots on the ECS board.

[DVantrease]

Thanks guys, I DO appreciate your feedback! I've pretty much decided on the K7S5A and Athlon XP 1800+ combo, probably this weekend (pc show). Now I'm reading up on fans, power supplies and DDR. This will be a HUGE difference from my current Duron 800, which takes me at least 10 hours for a 2-hour movie!