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.
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.
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: (Score:2)
Re:Sad News (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm still running an Abit MB with a P3 for the past 9 years.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I had a BE6 that was, at the time, the baddest-ass overclocking board there was. I got my Celeron to new unfathomed speeds. I eventually gave the machine to a friend as an MP3 host and it was in service until a year ago or so running XP.
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: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I had one with a rather horrid VIA hyperion chipset. If ever I wanted to use DMA mode on both IDE channels, crashes and corruption would result in minutes.
CD (or hard drive) access in PIO mode is quite... bad.
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.
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:2)
I know, but I think he had issues at 333/667 MHz to, but I'm not sure if he really have used it or if it has been 533/1066 the whole time, not my machine ..
The ram is speced at 2.1 volt, and gets 2.1 volt, the motherboard isn't that high end.
I don't remember, but maybe FSB in BIOS was set at 333 MHz and quadrubled on the FSB to the CPU (E8500) to 1333 MHz and rams would run at 333 MHz default to?
Stock multiple is 9.5 x 333 MHz = 3166 MHz but I guess what I wanted to do was to run RAM and FSB at 533 MHz with
Re: (Score:2)
Or maybe the chipset is only supposed to go to 333 and not 400 MHz? But I think the box for the motherboard mention 1600 so I guess 400 is safe.
Re: (Score:2)
Ok, this will be off-topic for this thread but whatever, maybe it can interest someone :D
His motherboard is an ASUS P5Q-E (1) running stock BIOS I guess, there is a newer one out (2) version 1703 which mentions "Enhance the compatibility with certain memory." so I guess that may help to, can be upgraded with ASUS update utility (3) from within Windows so he should be able to do it. The motherboard runs Intel P45 (4) chipset which spec page mentions 1333 MHz FSB although Asus webpage (1) says 1600 MHz, guess
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: (Score:2)
Re:Sad News (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Sad to read this. Have had several Abit mobos in the past, always good quality reliable boards.
I had a BE6 R2, which was, at the time, the best overclocking board around. I have no complaints - attached to my Celeron 466, it was beautifully stable at 525, and lasted about half an hour at 581 with the stock HSF. I still have it lying around somewhere.
The only thing I didn't like about it was having to load the Highpoint IDE drivers off a floppy for XP...
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.
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)
I just started at stock speeds (ie DDR2 @ 800) with a standard multiplier and checked system stability with OCCT (better for multicore) to make sure everything was fine at stock and the temps were good.
Then just keep bumping it up nearer to 1066.
OCCT has been really helpful for identifying issues quickly for me, faster than Prime95 / memtest86+.
Re: (Score:2)
Mine have been flawless and am still using 4 or 5 now. I'm starting to think that the hardware can sense whether a person likes the product or not, kinda like a self-fulfilling prophesy.. hate the boards and they crap out on ya. hehe
Re: (Score:2)
But I really loved my A7N8X Deluxe - I was gutted when its replacement didn't work with fast RAM.
I loved it so much I still have it as a toy file server - shame it eats more power than a C2D for a lot less performance!
Re: (Score:2)
Off the top of your head, what are the settings to get Corsair XMS2 to actually operate at it's rated speed? I've got some of that in my PC, but although the board will handle up to 1800MHz, they're only running at 800MHz (dual channel mode). I guess I need to fiddle with voltages?
Re: (Score:2)
Erm, I have XMS2 Dominator 8500C5, which is guaranteed up to 1066, however it will only do this above the stock 1.8V, it is intended to be used at 2.1V. There are different XMS2s though, check Corsair's website for the spec on the exact model number. http://www.corsair.com/products/xms2/default.aspx [corsair.com]
Originally I had to drop the multiplier on my CPU to achieve this, but now have got it stable with the multiplier intended for 800MHz ram by upping the core voltage a little (1.4V instead of 1.35V) and bumping mo
Re: (Score:2)
Oops I lied.. there's also XMS2 Dominator, which IS what I have. You can tell cos there's a D on the end and big fat heatsinks. The page for that is here...
http://www.corsair.com/products/dominator/default.aspx [corsair.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks - that's definitely the stuff. I was expecting it to "just work(tm)" but I guess I was expecting a bit much for the motherboard to magically work out it was 1066MHz RAM. Didn't expect that the Corsair website would cover it though (kind of expected the instructions from a RAM maker to be "plug it in").
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
That about sums it up for me. I now get a dead black chicken and a voodoo doll with each new motherboard, whatever the brand.
In my experience they can all fail in equally spectacular ways. And you never know beforehand because it might come down to some bizarre interaction with some hardware you've already got and some reviewer hasn't. In the end it's sheer luck (although stuff *mostly* works nowadays).
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I read a few years back that Asus had 1 per 10 boards fail, Abit 4 in 10 and MSI was 3... this has been a long time ago but a lot of boards do fail.
Of all of them I've had more Asus in 12 years than anything else and I've had 2 failures.
I've had abits that were just too much work to keep running. However I once gave an Abit to my sister that was overclocked 300mhz and it ran a long while and probably would still be running today. I finally changed it out after 4 years.
I'm currently running a rock solid giga
Re: (Score:2)
No, the lesson is that the plural of anecdote is not data.
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:2)
My Asrock has been doing quite well, in fact. Of course, I've only ever had one motherboard go sour on me, and it was after about 2 years being dragged back and forth to LAN parties in moist basements. I think that one was Abit, but I never really held it against them; I've simply found better deals.
I've found that simply buying off of the bruised edge has worked well at keeping me from dealing with $200 paperweight motherboards and kept me dealing with perfectly functional computers at a fraction of the pr
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
ASRock is the budget sub-brand of Asus.
Not any more. It was floated on the Taiwan stock exchange in 2007.
Re: (Score:2)
I became suspicious of Gigabyte when they did a board where half the power phases were on an "optional" daughterboard.
Of course the ad copy wibbled about how it improved reliability, but what I read was "We don't have the engineering talent to fit everything on the board". With my experience, the power board was anything but optional, and even with it the board didn't really enjoy having a beefy graphics card plugged into it. Funnily enough, when I replaced it with a practically identical Tyan board, my s
Re: (Score:2)
For test rigs, I run mainly salvaged whatever-comes-along, so I've seen lots of Abit boards. While I haven't had notable problems with early deaths, they do seem to be quirky and buggy beyond the norm, and often have rather outdated BIOS limits (they were probably the last mobo to leave the 8GB HD limit era, and I've seen more of that type bug on Abits than on anything else, which probably explains why so many wind up junked before they've actually died).
Pre-Gateway eMachines were Asus seconds. Every Gatewa
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Everyone has a different tale, I've been building machines since I was 13 (so that's 18 years in a few months) and I've had 0 problems with Asus, several with gigabyte.
Only ONE company has asked me for money when trying to return a faulty product and that would be gigabyte, so fuck them.
Asus may cost a little more but generally their boards are well built, reliable, overclock well and are supported very well (web site etc)
Gigabyte can rot as far as I'm concerned, I wish they were failing instead of ABIT who
Re: (Score:2)
*shrug*
And I'm a 100% Asus user. I've purchased two boards from em in the past ten or twelve years and have had no problems with them.
There's probably something going on there that our limited sample sizes will never allow us to figure out.
I seem to remember seeing somewhere (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, wasn't attacking DFI. (Score:2)
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)
Re: (Score:2)
The first Maximus Formula serves me well. I 3 it.
Re: (Score:2)
And MSI and DFI?
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Not since the early days of Socket 7 have I seen ONE flaky motherboard. That's after personally managing thousands of systems in the past several years.
99.99% of all the bugs and instability that get laid at the feet of computer hardware are purely the fault of software, and by that, I mean Windows. Much like the pseudo-religious superstitions of the primitive people of the dark ages, Windows users keep themselves sane by try
Re: (Score:2)
Dozens, in fact.
At worst, that state of affairs keeps up for a week, before the capacitors either completely give out and the board stops working, or the chips get fried from the wonky unfiltered power.
Dude, (Score:2)
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.
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)
Re: (Score:2)
I fail to see why that should take six months.
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.
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)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
BANKRUPTCY WINS
FLAWLESS VICTORY :P
Filter error: Don't use so many caps.Filter error: Don't use so many caps.Filter error: Don't use so many caps.Filter error: Don't use so many caps.Filter error: Don't use so many caps.Filter error: Don't use so many caps.Filter error: Don't use so many caps.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I have an AOpen/Supermicro board in my antique DOS box -- 11 years old and still plugging away 24/7. It was a very common board in the late P233 era, and extremely reliable. I've NEVER seen a deader.
AOpen doesn't brand much under that name, tho; never has that I've seen.
Re: (Score:2)
Regarding capacitors that's just how they are so I doubt switching brands help.. I think ASUS sell motherboards with three different kinds of capacitors but if you want a cheap motherboard that's what you get. Probably cheaper to get a new one than buying a premium board though :D
Re: (Score:2)
Overall I've had the best longevity with Tyan and SuperMicro/AOpen. Better than average performance in their classes, too.
A while back I got an iBase industrial mobo (a P4 with ISA slots! http://www.ibase.com.tw/mb800.htm [ibase.com.tw]) and so far I love it -- tho time will tell if it's as durable as my Tyans. My oldest working Tyan is from about 1996, and I've never had one die, and have never seen one that was "made on the cheap".
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.
They were good overclockers (Score:2)
Download your mobo drivers now! (Score:2)
Before you can't get them again without using drivers-r-us.com (now with 50% more spyware!)
I had 1 Abit Board (Score:2)
I don't remember the model number, but it had a 1.2Ghz Athlon T-bird on it and I had nothing but problems. Bought it to replace an intel PII mother board and nothing ever quite worked. The chipset on board hated my video card and the entire system ran hot. I had to run the machine with the side off. I think the machine lasted only two years and was the primary reason I said screw it, nothing works, and bought a mac.
Their site has been hosting malware over a week! (Score:2)
The site www.abit.com.cn has been hosting exploit code for the IE data binding vulnerability for over a week (injected iframe), and still hasn't been cleaned up. This may explain why they don't care.
As an industry insider I got to say this... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Abit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Hopefully nobody ever bought their crap. I've always gone with ASUS or Gigabyte. Good motherboards.
Of those three brands I know that ABIT has the best fan speed controller. I got my PC making less noise than the Wii, and faaar less than the Xbox360, simply by adjusting the fan speeds in the BIOS.
With Asus you have to use "Speedfan", giving you another annoying tray icon, and if you're not running Windows... too bad.
Drats.
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?
Re: (Score:2)
[laughing] My everyday machines are 10 and 11 years old. Everything works, nothing breaks, they do all that I ask of them, and why on earth would they need a driver update?? (Okay, I finally came across an MPEG that was beyond a P3's ability to decode. Guess I'll have to break down and finish building that P4... Real Soon Now. (The previous two P4s both died of the bloating capacitor plague.)
The upgrade craze seems mostly driven by people chasing the latest games, and few really need that much horsepower fo
He I've had this gigabyte Re:Urgh (Score:2)
Through three capacitor changes so far. It's a 2004 board.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, get them now. While the website is still up (haven't checked).
And with Abit, an upgrade can be helpful even years after you bought it. I have an Abit IC 7 here (maybe 4 years old) and a recent BIOS and chipset driver update finally brought acceptable USB2 performance.
Apart from that, I won't miss Abit due to the lousy quality. This board has shown various problems over the years that cost some time and money to fix:
-lousy onboard sound => bought a plug-in sound card
-bad northbridge cooler fan =>
Re: (Score:2)
Wow. How do you get an old BX-chipset motherboard to support 1.4 GHz? I had a BH6 back in '99.