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."

Not surprising...

[kklein]

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.

Hot tubes no more!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad; abit made some innovative - if admittedly fanciful - products. The hot tube based motherboard comes to mind immediatly, & it's a shame there's one less mobo maker to push the rather stale market.

High-end isn't in demand anymore.

[mind21_98]

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:Sad News

[jamesh]

good quality reliable boards

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.

Re:Not surprising...

[sa1lnr]

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.

Re:Not surprising...

[trum4n]

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.

I seem to remember seeing somewhere

[goldcd]

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.

As an industry insider I got to say this...

[GlobalColding]

Abit is chiefly responsible for its own demise. Their modus operandi of shipping huge inventories to large retailers and essentially consigning them is what killed them. Large retailers historically only paid Abit for what was sold, as it was sold, and when the bills came due they would cut the check for the sold goods and ram the rest of the aged, consumer handled, distress packaged merchandise down Abits throat. Abit would then sell those units at a huge discount to secondary channel liquidators who would release the products to the public at a fraction of the retailers price, thus cannibalizing retail even more and overextending Abit. This went on for years and the company declined. In the end they tried to switch to a much more agressive payment structure and were dumped by majority of retail outfits. If they controlled their inventories and channels tighter they would still be around. Sad, but thats basic business.

Re:Sad News

[PONA-Boy]

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:Sad News

[compro01]

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.