Abit To Close Its Doors Forever On Dec. 31, 2008 195
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."
Sad News (Score:5, Informative)
Sad to read this. Have had several Abit mobos in the past, always good quality reliable boards.
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.
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.
Re:Sad News (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
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.
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 it up...
Re:Sad News (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