By Joel Hruska | Published: August 11, 2008 - 05:58PM CT
It was only last week that I reported VIA's departure from the motherboard chipset business, and now the bell is tolling for one of the original top players in the enthusiast Slot 1/Socket 370/Socket A market. From 1998-2001, give or take a bit, Abit was was the golden child of the overclocking industry. If you were a dual-core enthusiast, the company's BP6 was the motherboard to have, as it brought symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) into price ranges mere mortals could afford. Back then, the Celeron 300A's 128K of onboard L2 cache was significantly faster than the Pentium II's 512K of slower, off-die cache; dual overclocked Celeron 300A's were simply the mint frosting on a cellular peptide cake.
Abit went on to launch a number of other popular enthusiast motherboards, including the BH6, K7A, and IC7-G, but the combination of extremely shady financial dealings and the industry-wide capacitor disaster of the early 2000s sank the motherboard manufacturer. Abit was purchased by Universal Scientific Industrial in 2006, and while the company has kept the Abit name, manufacturing and distribution have been handled by entirely different groups. Now, according to CustomPC, the company will cease all motherboard production. Most of the Fatal1ty team has apparently transferred to either Foxconn or Biostar.
Abit may intend to focus its manufacturing efforts on products that synchronize more easily with USI's product lines, including notebooks, UMPCs, and photo frames, but the company's time as a motherboard competitor has come to an end. One thing I have to give Abit credit for, in closing, is being one of the only, if not the only motherboard manufacturer to ever admit that it had built boards with faulty capacitors. The problem was industry-wide, but virtually no one owned up to it. Thanks for the good times, the overclocking, and the dual SMP way back when.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/hardware.ars/2008/08/11/abit-reportedly-leaving-motherboard-business
It was only last week that I reported VIA's departure from the motherboard chipset business, and now the bell is tolling for one of the original top players in the enthusiast Slot 1/Socket 370/Socket A market. From 1998-2001, give or take a bit, Abit was was the golden child of the overclocking industry. If you were a dual-core enthusiast, the company's BP6 was the motherboard to have, as it brought symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) into price ranges mere mortals could afford. Back then, the Celeron 300A's 128K of onboard L2 cache was significantly faster than the Pentium II's 512K of slower, off-die cache; dual overclocked Celeron 300A's were simply the mint frosting on a cellular peptide cake.
Abit went on to launch a number of other popular enthusiast motherboards, including the BH6, K7A, and IC7-G, but the combination of extremely shady financial dealings and the industry-wide capacitor disaster of the early 2000s sank the motherboard manufacturer. Abit was purchased by Universal Scientific Industrial in 2006, and while the company has kept the Abit name, manufacturing and distribution have been handled by entirely different groups. Now, according to CustomPC, the company will cease all motherboard production. Most of the Fatal1ty team has apparently transferred to either Foxconn or Biostar.
Abit may intend to focus its manufacturing efforts on products that synchronize more easily with USI's product lines, including notebooks, UMPCs, and photo frames, but the company's time as a motherboard competitor has come to an end. One thing I have to give Abit credit for, in closing, is being one of the only, if not the only motherboard manufacturer to ever admit that it had built boards with faulty capacitors. The problem was industry-wide, but virtually no one owned up to it. Thanks for the good times, the overclocking, and the dual SMP way back when.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/hardware.ars/2008/08/11/abit-reportedly-leaving-motherboard-business