ki1obyte writes "Earlier this year the Taiwanese firm Abit, once a leading-edge maker of computer mainboards and other components, was slated to shut down motherboard production by the end of 2008 and focus on consumer electronics devices. Now X-bit labs reports that Abit will cease to exist entirely after midnight on the last day of 2008 because the owner of the brand, Universal Scientific Industrial, is in the process of restructuring and cutting their costs."
I bought an Abit BP6 about 8 years ago, and it served me well up until about a year ago, but I wouldn't call it reliable or good quality. Abit had heaps of trouble with crappy firmware releases for it, and the onboard ATA-100 controller was known to be crap. It caused massive corruption under Linux, which could have been a driver bug but I more suspect it was hardware related.
A later version than mine was released with bad capacitors. Apparently replacing those improved reliability in that model.
Still, it was a dirt cheap dual celeron board that did the job (I wanted to experiment with SMP coding). It's sitting on the floor next to me right now, but only because I haven't gotten around to turfing it yet.
Ah yes, the (in)famous BP6, an excellent cheap SMP motherboard if you had the time and knowhow to replace potential broken components, re-imaging the firmware and all that. But it did run Windows 2000 perfectly for me, and as long as you didn't try to use the damn onboard HPT366 controller then it ran GNU/Linux and FreeBSD just fine as well.
I too had a BP6 and was very satisfied with it. Having said that, I challenge you to name a single motherboard maker without any faulty motherboards. If I had to, I could list two-digit numbers of corrupted motherboards from Asus, MSI, Foxconn, Chieftec, AOpen and Intel.
I had hundreds of BE6's (and their impressive array of variants) in workstations and servers. The great majority of them died with nasty leaky and explosive capacitors. Abit cheaped out by getting their cut-rate caps from a questionable supplier and *I* was the one who had to pay the price...never bought another Abit mobo again.
That wasn't limited to Abit by any means. I've seen the same on ASUS, Biostar, eVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, XFX, Foxconn, PNY, Supermicro, and even a couple Intel boards.
I'm gutted too, I currently have an Abit IP35 Pro, which is the only P35 chipset based board I could get to work with the Dominator DDR2-1066 I use!
I will be sad to see them go, I really like their recent parts. My motherboard overclocks fantastically, taking an E6750 from 2.66 GHz to 3.3 GHz with rock solid stability without having to shell out crazy money for the X38, X48 etc.
The RAM. Once you get over about DDR2-6400, you start to reach the normal limits of what can be done within the DDR2 1.8V standard specs. Anything rated higher is intended to live in a different world that's out of the DDR2 spec, usually 2.0V or even 2.1V/2.2V, and budget motherboards often have trouble giving them what they need.
That said, I'm running my IP35 Pro/E6750 @ 425MHz FSB, wayyy over the 333MHz stock. Gawd, I love what you can do with overclocking the Core2s and some quality components to back
I am running the IP35 pro without problems under Mac OS X 10.5.3.
When I bought it, I remember the box saying the capacitors were Japanese-made 100% solid state. It was one of the biggest things promoted on the box. I suppose they wanted to promote that they had addressed the bad-cap issue.
I've been very pleased with the mobo after using it for one year. Sad to hear they're going to close.
Agreed. I have always put Abit mobos in my computers, and they've always been rock-solid, and priced reasonably to boot. It really saddens me to see them go.
I started out on Abit boards and loved them, but after a few years I started having more and more problems with them. I switched to Asus and the problems went away. I was surprised they were still around.
Yeah, the last Asus that worked well for me was an A7N8X Deluxe and even that had BIOS troubles in the early versions.
I had TWO Asus P35 based boards since then and both were returned as their DDR2 interfaces were not happy with Corsair Dominator XMS2 @ 1066. Admittedly, the Gigabyte board has the same issue - the Abit on the same chipset does not.
I friend bought Corsair 4GB (KIT) DDR2 1066MHz, XMS2-8500 or something such with a P5Q E (I think, some P5Q atleast) and an E 8500. He run Vista.
I once tried to lower the multiplier to raise memory and CPU FSB to a similar clock but probably messed up / BIOS settings looked weird (probably because something was doubled / quadubled up from the numbers seen in the BIOS menus.)
Anyway, his machine often halts for like a second he tell me, and it sounds like fans lock up while doing so (may be whatever.)
Exact opposite here. I've had no less than EIGHT of one Gigabyte board model die across four people-- we'd all bought the boards at the same time, online purchase from different places. I wouldn't touch a Gigabyte board if you PAID me to use one now.
MSI, on the other hand, was always rock solid. It took UPS literally shredding the case, board, and components to take that machine down. I've had four MSI boards, and none failed under normal operating circumstances. UPS destroyed the one, the others we
Abit suck, but Asus are good
Asus suck, but Gigabyte are good
Giagabyte suck but MSI are good
Maybe the lesson here is that every company is capable of producing both shit and gold, and having a run of good/bad luck from the same manufacturer is down to just that, luck.
A lot of the taiwanese motherboards (and video cards) and a bad capacitor problem a few years ago. One story was someone tried to steal the formula from the japanese, and the japanese figured it out so they planted an incomplete recipe... One that resulted in the capacitors going bust much faster (e.g. within 1 year warranty).
This affected a lot of companies, and they all made crap stuff for a while.
To me it's more of a batch thing. They'll have bad and good batches. You buy stuff from a bad batch, a lot of them will be bad.
So when you say an Asus motherboard sucks/rocks, to be useful you'd have to provide model and year.
Once you have enough data points then you can figure out which manufacturer has a better track record, is improving or getting worse.
I've had one Gigabyte and had to run the FSB at 2/3 or 3/4 of original speed to get it stable after a while for whatever reason (northbridge fan had died), and later on one of the capacitors around the processor started to burn.
But neither of our comments mean anything since we would have to have a much bigger "sample size."
Every EVGA board made will fail in the warranty period. the LIFETIME WARRANTY. Personally i can't believe none of you mentioned EVGA. Great boards, low cost. BTW, i also have a BP6. Got it 2nd hard at a yard sale, took it home and popped the side off the case, and was baffled that it had 2 cellerys in it. I did some research, and took 2x400Mhz to 2x825Mhz. Took a week to get that grin off. It's a file server now.
that when 'DFI LanParty' (I think that's their stupid name) started up, they took most of the Abit board designers. Hence last few years the Abit boards were very average, despite still being sold at a premium.
Abit specialized in high-end motherboards back in the day. I'm not too surprised that they're closing now; most people are going with laptops now, and the people who get desktops get sub-$1k machines, anyway. Hell, most desktops seem to be less than $500 now.
Oh well, at least Gigabyte's still around. *hugs his mobo*
The high-end market has shrunk for sure, but it's still fairly strong. It's just that there wasn't enough room for all the brands anymore. Asus and Gigabyte both still make some high dollar feature rich motherboards, and the folks buying those are gamers & people who build their own HD video editing workstations (or people who just have money burning a hole in their pocket...). A couple examples: Here's an Asus board, [newegg.com] and also a Gigabyte board. [newegg.com]
You would be amazed how many hours you waste in a year of using a flaky computer. Even more if you are a developer and flaky hardware could possibly be mistaken for a bug.
Dollars and time spent on researching parts then building a computer have a reasonably short payback. (I can only recommend one MB brand: Asus. Even there search Toms and Anantech prior to buying.)
I do wish there was a source of reliable and high performing ready made computers. I know of no such brand or local store. The brands are jokes and the local stores will all sell you out in a heartbeat if they think they can make a buck selling you junk ('DFI is top quality hardware! Why are you walking away?'). I had one store trained while I was running a corporate network. Long sense lapsed to their old habits. Only the owner remembers me (as a profitable pain in his ass).
You don't have to have money burning a hole in your pocket to buy top quality parts. You need money burning a hole in your pocket to buy the neon glow of 'Alienware' etal.
As far as I can tell, there will be no closing of any door. We have this Universal Scientific Industrial (what a name!) that has a brand called Abit, and puts stickers with that name on some products. Now it finds the value of the brand diminished, and will put other stickers on the products, perhaps change the product line, etc. But for all we know, the total production of the company can be growing apace. In short, the only real material change to be reported by this story, is probably the value of some computer records. But well, this is Slashdot after all, and we are interested in that kind of thing, aren't we?
"... the process of restructuring and cutting their costs."
Which means that while there may well be new stickers and boxes for any existing inventory, USI get to kill Abit completely and no longer support anything with that name on it.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that in 6 months time there's a big furore about Abit boards having leaking capacitors or some such - and the consumers will be out in the cold with no-one to sue.
I have to say a name like Abit to go under. That was a bit of a shock.
I've personally probably built / owned / used a couple of hundred systems based on Abit MB's over the years. However I can't remember actually building or owning an Abit based system in the last 1.5 years.
True enough the last couple of years the company literally had nothing that competed on the MB front. ( Flame away ).
The cash burn must have been something beyond my comprehension.
I truly morn the loss. Less competition is bad. I really don't want to see the price of a main board hit $300. And still suck. If Lenova ends up making the best board on the market I'm going to retire and hide in the bush. ( Personally I don't much care for anything IBM or IBM tainted. )
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday December 21 2008, @05:19AM (#26190189)
I loved their product line. If I am not mistaken they were one of the first to have a "jumperless" design/setup. I remember when I was running dual 1GHZ processors long before it was the norm.
Under Linux their dual processor motherboards were fast and problem free...under windows well that's another story...blue screen of death would make an appearance every now and then.
For the custom builder these were the best MBs by far. I tested them against gigabyte, asus, etc., but nobody offered the ports and options that ABIT had.
They were pricey, but you definitely got what you paid for. Markets change...Abit to me now is kind of like Austin Healey. Really cool for it's day, but time and economic conditions make it a thing of the past.
The Abit BP6 kicked butt for the time - 1999 or so. It was an SMP board that used Celerons on top of a 440BX Intel chipset and you could overclock them from here to next week. It was the first time I saw an overclocking menu built in to a BIOS. I'm sure I got a dual-500Mhz configuration after enough fiddling and pointing fans at the case.
Windows 98 only saw the one CPU of course but LFS saw both and was responsive in a way I haven't really experienced since.
Wow. I haven't actually wanted an ABit board since the BX/P/E-6 era (mostly because a lot of their newer boards didn't deliver in a format I liked, of if they did, they had reputations for being squirelly. Still, to see the brand just up and "go away" so suddenly, with no real indicators that there were problems, is still shocking.
I got stung by the bad caps problem back in 2003. (Pic [sanslogic.co.uk]). I never trusted them after that, and I've used Asus boards since. They're good boards but a recent encounter with Asus UK support has changed that. It was just awful. Never again will I buy Asus.
So which brand to go for next time.. that's the question? Who to trust?
Gigabyte seems like the volvo of the motherboard world - kinda boring but safe.
After returning an Abit board twice back in the late 90's, I stayed away. Asus, then gigabyte. I've also always had a softspot for Aopen. They seemed to offer something a little different. I don't even know if they're still around either.
I'm not surprised this is happening. If you look at a computer you buy at retail now, most of them are manufactured by ASUS, Intel, or the more viable manufacturers that use the latest Intel, nVidia or ATI chipsets and are highly integrated in function. My HP Pavilion a6400f uses the ASUS Benicia motherboard, which integrates everything I need (graphics, Ethernet, and REALtek sound control) all on the same motherboard.
It was inevitable since their support had become useless over the whole IN9-32X Max fiasco. I and hundreds of others had multiple boards fail on me. I was promised by their director of sales a replacement for the $330 motherboard after 4 of them failed on me in less than 5 months. Their then director of sales, Daniel, told me, "I wouldn't recommend [The IN9-32X Max] to anyone." He stopped taking my calls and emails when I came around to collect on his promise.
Abit has been suffering because their most popular boards are from the late 90's. They had some very serious quality control issues a few years back with the NForce3/4 and Intel 8xx boards, I personally witnessed a 30% defect rate when most manufacturers were below 5%. As a result, many distributors stopped selling Abit products and they became very difficult to source.
Perhaps the reason why they are "known" as good overclockers is because of the kind of people buying them: cheapskates and suckers who believe online reviews. There was nothing spectacular about the performance, you could achieve the same results on an MSI or Asus board, and I've seen a zillion folks do pretty damned well on garbage boards like Asrock and GigaByte. Abit just made it a bit easier to overclock with gimmicky little things like "uGuru", which is little more than a rudimentary stress tester with clock control.
Abit tried to position their products as high-end while sticking the price somewhere in the upper-mid-range. As a dealer this made them hard to sell, as most people either want the cheapest board available, or a true top-end "Deluxe/Premium/Platinum" kit, and Abit was neither.
I really won't miss them. I haven't sold an Abit product in nearly 5 years, they are already dead to me.
I hope you bit your tounge a bit after a croc statement like that! To this day, I think my favorite Abit board was their BP6... Ahh, remembering when I had dual celerys when it wasn't supposed to be possible. And 400Mhz O/C'd to 600Mhz at that! Of course I don't miss that tower that sounded like a 747 taxiing for takeoff...
Why one year in particular? It seems to me that mother boards are not like milk which goes off when they past it's best before date. Surely it either breaks (in which case you need a replacement now) or it works. If it works, why do you need to replace it? Are you using Windows and they stop delivering drivers or something? I thought Microsoft policy was to include support for most popular hardware by default? If not, maybe you should just convert it to a Linux computer in which case support seems to
Uh... well, I'm guessing he's meaning that newer processors will come out with features not supported by the current motherboard, so he would want to upgrade.
Sad News (Score:5, Informative)
Sad to read this. Have had several Abit mobos in the past, always good quality reliable boards.
Re:Sad News (Score:5, Interesting)
I bought an Abit BP6 about 8 years ago, and it served me well up until about a year ago, but I wouldn't call it reliable or good quality. Abit had heaps of trouble with crappy firmware releases for it, and the onboard ATA-100 controller was known to be crap. It caused massive corruption under Linux, which could have been a driver bug but I more suspect it was hardware related.
A later version than mine was released with bad capacitors. Apparently replacing those improved reliability in that model.
Still, it was a dirt cheap dual celeron board that did the job (I wanted to experiment with SMP coding). It's sitting on the floor next to me right now, but only because I haven't gotten around to turfing it yet.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Ah yes, the (in)famous BP6, an excellent cheap SMP motherboard if you had the time and knowhow to replace potential broken components, re-imaging the firmware and all that. But it did run Windows 2000 perfectly for me, and as long as you didn't try to use the damn onboard HPT366 controller then it ran GNU/Linux and FreeBSD just fine as well.
/Mikael
Re:Sad News (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Good grief!!
I had hundreds of BE6's (and their impressive array of variants) in workstations and servers. The great majority of them died with nasty leaky and explosive capacitors. Abit cheaped out by getting their cut-rate caps from a questionable supplier and *I* was the one who had to pay the price...never bought another Abit mobo again.
I shan't miss them.
'Nuff said.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That wasn't limited to Abit by any means. I've seen the same on ASUS, Biostar, eVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, XFX, Foxconn, PNY, Supermicro, and even a couple Intel boards.
Re:Sad News (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm gutted too, I currently have an Abit IP35 Pro, which is the only P35 chipset based board I could get to work with the Dominator DDR2-1066 I use!
I will be sad to see them go, I really like their recent parts. My motherboard overclocks fantastically, taking an E6750 from 2.66 GHz to 3.3 GHz with rock solid stability without having to shell out crazy money for the X38, X48 etc.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
And that's a problem with the motherboard or the RAM? ;)
The RAM. DDR2 was never spec'd to go over 800. (Score:3, Informative)
The RAM. Once you get over about DDR2-6400, you start to reach the normal limits of what can be done within the DDR2 1.8V standard specs. Anything rated higher is intended to live in a different world that's out of the DDR2 spec, usually 2.0V or even 2.1V/2.2V, and budget motherboards often have trouble giving them what they need.
That said, I'm running my IP35 Pro/E6750 @ 425MHz FSB, wayyy over the 333MHz stock. Gawd, I love what you can do with overclocking the Core2s and some quality components to back
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
When I bought it, I remember the box saying the capacitors were Japanese-made 100% solid state. It was one of the biggest things promoted on the box. I suppose they wanted to promote that they had addressed the bad-cap issue.
I've been very pleased with the mobo after using it for one year. Sad to hear they're going to close.
Seth
Re: (Score:2)
I had a KT7A back in the day, and now I'm running an IP-35 Pro. Good boards, and it's sad to see the company go.
It would be nice if they could release BIOS documentation, but I guess that's highly unlikely.
Re:Sad News (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
so long (Score:5, Funny)
Not surprising... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not surprising... (Score:5, Interesting)
Since 2000 I have had seven motherboards fail within warranty period.
1 MSI
1 ECS
1 Abit
4 Asus (All in the last 3 years)
I'm Gigabyte all the way now and won't touch Asus with a bargepole.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, the last Asus that worked well for me was an A7N8X Deluxe and even that had BIOS troubles in the early versions.
I had TWO Asus P35 based boards since then and both were returned as their DDR2 interfaces were not happy with Corsair Dominator XMS2 @ 1066. Admittedly, the Gigabyte board has the same issue - the Abit on the same chipset does not.
Re: (Score:2)
I friend bought Corsair 4GB (KIT) DDR2 1066MHz, XMS2-8500 or something such with a P5Q E (I think, some P5Q atleast) and an E 8500. He run Vista.
I once tried to lower the multiplier to raise memory and CPU FSB to a similar clock but probably messed up / BIOS settings looked weird (probably because something was doubled / quadubled up from the numbers seen in the BIOS menus.)
Anyway, his machine often halts for like a second he tell me, and it sounds like fans lock up while doing so (may be whatever.)
I've tol
Re: (Score:2)
Exact opposite here. I've had no less than EIGHT of one Gigabyte board model die across four people-- we'd all bought the boards at the same time, online purchase from different places. I wouldn't touch a Gigabyte board if you PAID me to use one now.
MSI, on the other hand, was always rock solid. It took UPS literally shredding the case, board, and components to take that machine down. I've had four MSI boards, and none failed under normal operating circumstances. UPS destroyed the one, the others we
Re:Not surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)
So to summarise...
Abit suck, but Asus are good
Asus suck, but Gigabyte are good
Giagabyte suck but MSI are good
Maybe the lesson here is that every company is capable of producing both shit and gold, and having a run of good/bad luck from the same manufacturer is down to just that, luck.
Parent
Re:Not surprising... (Score:4, Insightful)
This affected a lot of companies, and they all made crap stuff for a while.
To me it's more of a batch thing. They'll have bad and good batches. You buy stuff from a bad batch, a lot of them will be bad.
So when you say an Asus motherboard sucks/rocks, to be useful you'd have to provide model and year.
Once you have enough data points then you can figure out which manufacturer has a better track record, is improving or getting worse.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I've had one Gigabyte and had to run the FSB at 2/3 or 3/4 of original speed to get it stable after a while for whatever reason (northbridge fan had died), and later on one of the capacitors around the processor started to burn.
But neither of our comments mean anything since we would have to have a much bigger "sample size."
What about Asrock? =P
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I seem to remember seeing somewhere (Score:3, Interesting)
High-end isn't in demand anymore. (Score:5, Interesting)
Abit specialized in high-end motherboards back in the day. I'm not too surprised that they're closing now; most people are going with laptops now, and the people who get desktops get sub-$1k machines, anyway. Hell, most desktops seem to be less than $500 now.
Oh well, at least Gigabyte's still around. *hugs his mobo*
Re:High-end isn't in demand anymore. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
The first Maximus Formula serves me well. I 3 it.
Or people who's time is valuable (Score:5, Insightful)
You would be amazed how many hours you waste in a year of using a flaky computer. Even more if you are a developer and flaky hardware could possibly be mistaken for a bug.
Dollars and time spent on researching parts then building a computer have a reasonably short payback. (I can only recommend one MB brand: Asus. Even there search Toms and Anantech prior to buying.)
I do wish there was a source of reliable and high performing ready made computers. I know of no such brand or local store. The brands are jokes and the local stores will all sell you out in a heartbeat if they think they can make a buck selling you junk ('DFI is top quality hardware! Why are you walking away?'). I had one store trained while I was running a corporate network. Long sense lapsed to their old habits. Only the owner remembers me (as a profitable pain in his ass).
You don't have to have money burning a hole in your pocket to buy top quality parts. You need money burning a hole in your pocket to buy the neon glow of 'Alienware' etal.
Parent
Non-event? (Score:4, Informative)
As far as I can tell, there will be no closing of any door. We have this Universal Scientific Industrial (what a name!) that has a brand called Abit, and puts stickers with that name on some products. Now it finds the value of the brand diminished, and will put other stickers on the products, perhaps change the product line, etc. But for all we know, the total production of the company can be growing apace. In short, the only real material change to be reported by this story, is probably the value of some computer records. But well, this is Slashdot after all, and we are interested in that kind of thing, aren't we?
Missing the point (Score:5, Informative)
"... the process of restructuring and cutting their costs."
Which means that while there may well be new stickers and boxes for any existing inventory, USI get to kill Abit completely and no longer support anything with that name on it.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that in 6 months time there's a big furore about Abit boards having leaking capacitors or some such - and the consumers will be out in the cold with no-one to sue.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I fail to see why there would be no one to sue... as the company still exists.
I don't think that if P&G dropped Tide next year that I can't still sue P&G if I find out that Tide put holes in my clothes.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, we are. Are you sure you're in the right place?
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, we are. Are you sure you're in the right place?
Uhm, not sure. Isn't this "Argument"?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, oh, I'm sorry but this is abuse. You want room 12A just along the corridor
Stupid git
From Leader to Out of Business overnight. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to say a name like Abit to go under. That was a bit of a shock.
I've personally probably built / owned / used a couple of hundred systems based on Abit MB's over the years. However I can't remember actually building or owning an Abit based system in the last 1.5 years.
True enough the last couple of years the company literally had nothing that competed on the MB front. ( Flame away ).
The cash burn must have been something beyond my comprehension.
I truly morn the loss. Less competition is bad. I really don't want to see the price of a main board hit $300. And still suck. If Lenova ends up making the best board on the market I'm going to retire and hide in the bush. ( Personally I don't much care for anything IBM or IBM tainted. )
Re:From Leader to Out of Business overnight. (Score:4, Funny)
The cash burn must have been something beyond my comprehension.
Yeah, the only ones that can comprehend such cash burn, are running companies in Detroit.
Abit executives in Washington, in front of a Senate panel, looking for a bailout? You heard it here first.
Parent
My favorite MB company (Score:3, Informative)
I loved their product line. If I am not mistaken they were one of the first to have a "jumperless" design/setup. I remember when I was running dual 1GHZ processors long before it was the norm.
Under Linux their dual processor motherboards were fast and problem free...under windows well that's another story...blue screen of death would make an appearance every now and then.
For the custom builder these were the best MBs by far. I tested them against gigabyte, asus, etc., but nobody offered the ports and options that ABIT had.
They were pricey, but you definitely got what you paid for. Markets change...Abit to me now is kind of like Austin Healey. Really cool for it's day, but time and economic conditions make it a thing of the past.
Ironic product names (Score:2, Funny)
Ahhhh - the BP6 (Score:2)
The Abit BP6 kicked butt for the time - 1999 or so. It was an SMP board that used Celerons on top of a 440BX Intel chipset and you could overclock them from here to next week. It was the first time I saw an overclocking menu built in to a BIOS. I'm sure I got a dual-500Mhz configuration after enough fiddling and pointing fans at the case.
Windows 98 only saw the one CPU of course but LFS saw both and was responsive in a way I haven't really experienced since.
Sad news.
Holy shit! *THUD* (Score:2)
Wow. I haven't actually wanted an ABit board since the BX/P/E-6 era (mostly because a lot of their newer boards didn't deliver in a format I liked, of if they did, they had reputations for being squirelly. Still, to see the brand just up and "go away" so suddenly, with no real indicators that there were problems, is still shocking.
ABit has been gone for a while now (Score:2)
I got stung by the bad caps problem back in 2003. (Pic [sanslogic.co.uk]). I never trusted them after that, and I've used Asus boards since. They're good boards but a recent encounter with Asus UK support has changed that. It was just awful. Never again will I buy Asus.
So which brand to go for next time .. that's the question? Who to trust?
Re: (Score:2)
Gigabyte seems like the volvo of the motherboard world - kinda boring but safe.
After returning an Abit board twice back in the late 90's, I stayed away. Asus, then gigabyte. I've also always had a softspot for Aopen. They seemed to offer something a little different. I don't even know if they're still around either.
Not surprised this is happening. (Score:2)
I'm not surprised this is happening. If you look at a computer you buy at retail now, most of them are manufactured by ASUS, Intel, or the more viable manufacturers that use the latest Intel, nVidia or ATI chipsets and are highly integrated in function. My HP Pavilion a6400f uses the ASUS Benicia motherboard, which integrates everything I need (graphics, Ethernet, and REALtek sound control) all on the same motherboard.
figured as much (Score:2)
It was inevitable since their support had become useless over the whole IN9-32X Max fiasco. I and hundreds of others had multiple boards fail on me. I was promised by their director of sales a replacement for the $330 motherboard after 4 of them failed on me in less than 5 months. Their then director of sales, Daniel, told me, "I wouldn't recommend [The IN9-32X Max] to anyone." He stopped taking my calls and emails when I came around to collect on his promise.
They died a long time ago (Score:5, Informative)
Abit has been suffering because their most popular boards are from the late 90's. They had some very serious quality control issues a few years back with the NForce3/4 and Intel 8xx boards, I personally witnessed a 30% defect rate when most manufacturers were below 5%. As a result, many distributors stopped selling Abit products and they became very difficult to source.
Perhaps the reason why they are "known" as good overclockers is because of the kind of people buying them: cheapskates and suckers who believe online reviews. There was nothing spectacular about the performance, you could achieve the same results on an MSI or Asus board, and I've seen a zillion folks do pretty damned well on garbage boards like Asrock and GigaByte. Abit just made it a bit easier to overclock with gimmicky little things like "uGuru", which is little more than a rudimentary stress tester with clock control.
Abit tried to position their products as high-end while sticking the price somewhere in the upper-mid-range. As a dealer this made them hard to sell, as most people either want the cheapest board available, or a true top-end "Deluxe/Premium/Platinum" kit, and Abit was neither.
I really won't miss them. I haven't sold an Abit product in nearly 5 years, they are already dead to me.
Re:Abit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Why? (Score:2)
Why one year in particular? It seems to me that mother boards are not like milk which goes off when they past it's best before date. Surely it either breaks (in which case you need a replacement now) or it works. If it works, why do you need to replace it? Are you using Windows and they stop delivering drivers or something? I thought Microsoft policy was to include support for most popular hardware by default? If not, maybe you should just convert it to a Linux computer in which case support seems to
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No, Abit used raw meat in their system boards, so you really want to replace them before they go bad.
Re: (Score:2)
If it works, why do you need to replace it?
Uh... well, I'm guessing he's meaning that newer processors will come out with features not supported by the current motherboard, so he would want to upgrade.
Re: (Score:2)
Because he will want newer parts and they don't fit longer?
He I've had this gigabyte Re:Urgh (Score:2)
Through three capacitor changes so far. It's a 2004 board.