Abit To Close Its Doors Forever On Dec. 31, 2008

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."

Re:High-end isn't in demand anymore.

[Penguin Follower]

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]

From Leader to Out of Business overnight.

[upuv]

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:Non-event?

[Gandalf_Greyhame]

Oh, oh, I'm sorry but this is abuse. You want room 12A just along the corridor

Stupid git

Re:Abit?

[HTRednek]

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...

Re:Sad News

[0xygen]

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.

Re:Sad News

[eebra82]

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.

Re:Not surprising...

[mpeskett]

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.

Re:Not surprising...

[gzunk]

ASRock is the budget sub-brand of Asus.

Not any more. It was floated on the Taiwan stock exchange in 2007.

Re:Not surprising...

[TheLink]

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.

Re:Sad News

[bigstrat2003]

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.

Or people who's time is valuable

[HornWumpus]

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.

Re:Remember to download

[Anonymous Coward]

Make sure you have downloaded all the latest firmwares/drivers/manuals for your mobos before they close the site. Those might be needed if you plan to upgrade your CPU etc.