abit exits mainboard market - confirmed

ferr

Limp Gawd
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http://channel.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=15225

HEXUS.channel can exclusively confirm that Taiwanese technology company abit, which is associated primarily with high-end and gaming mainboards, will stop producing all mainboards at the end of 2008.

HEXUS.channel has confirmed this as fact from sources close to South East Asian distributors, all of which will be notified by their abit sales contacts from today onwards.

Apparently abit will continue to deliver mainboards until the end of the year and will honour RMAs and warranties for three years subsequently.

Rumours of abit's demise from mainboards were circulating widely last May, prompting an emphatic denial from abit. Our sources tell us that abit still intended to continue with mainboards at the time and that this decision was only made in the last couple of weeks.

This will mark a wholesale shift towards specialising in consumer electronics devices, such as the Funfab photo-frame-stroke-printer, which we spotted at this year's Computex. We understand that a MID (mobile internet device) is also planned for early next year as well as other photo related gadgetry.

Taiwanese manufacturer Universal Scientific International (USI) acquired abit in May of 2006 and it's now officially called Universal abit. There have been reports of defections and departures from the abit mainboard division ever since then, so there is a certain feeling of inevitability about this news.

In what may be a related development, Universal abit also announced today that it is moving its Taiwan HQ to a location near to the Nangang exhibition hall in Taipei, which hosted many of the leading vendors at the Computex show this year.

It looks like the margins have become too tight for all but the largest mainboard makers to survive, with massive companies like Foxconn able to exploit extreme economies of scale.

If competitive pressures have become too great for abit to stay in the mainboard market, you have to wonder what the future holds for other second tier mainboard makers, of which there are still quite a few. This may not be the last casualty in this market before the end of the year.

Let us know your thoughts about this news. Will abit be missed? What are the implications of the apparent consolidation happening in the mainboard market? Let us know in the HEXUS.community.

:(
 
I wondered what made my NF7-s (Abit NF2 board) die suddenly yesterday. Rest in peace old friend.
 
i dont buy abit but less competition in high end mobos will suck
 
My first board was an Abit be6 2, it's a tenacious warrior that runs to this day. RIP Abit MoBos
 
Don't expect much support, but the article does say they're honoring RMAs for three years.
Apparently abit will continue to deliver mainboards until the end of the year and will honour RMAs and warranties for three years subsequently.

edit: ah, I see you found it ;) :ninja:
 
abit has had a few good products since they became Universal abit. However as far as I am concerned the ABIT we all know and used to love died years ago.
 
aw bummer, I really enjoyed my old abit mobo in my ancient P4 rig...they had a real user friend OCing tool
 
really sad that a motherboard maker bites the dust, that's one less competitor and one less choice

on the other hand, i never really like abit personally, a board i got from them for the t-bird actually shorted itself and burned up, it was brand new and i ended up rmaing it, the only thing i've rma'd to newegg, ever...
 
there is still no confirmation of this story afaik.
it maybe true but it may not be.
 
really sad that a motherboard maker bites the dust, that's one less competitor and one less choice

Sometimes a motherboard manufacturer exiting the business is a good thing. I almost threw a party when Soyo stopped making motherboards.
 
Really, the engineers that were originally working at Abit are still around.

They're simply working for other companies now. DFI, Biostar, and Foxconn being some notables.

Oskar Wu (the one credited with technology that most everybody uses for configuring boards now....Jumperless CPU BIOS configuration) went to DFI, unsure if he's still there or not.

Perhaps it's why many of the vendors we didn't associate as being enthusiast boards are now looking to make us think otherwise.
 
I was looking into purchasing an Abit board last year around this time for someone. I ended up going with gigabyte instead. I am glad I made that move!
Soyo, lol
 
Yeah I would also be hesitant on support. I remember when something similar happened to IWill a few years back. Now it’s like pulling teeth to even find a copy of a motherboard manual for Iwill boards.
 
Sometimes a motherboard manufacturer exiting the business is a good thing. I almost threw a party when Soyo stopped making motherboards.
well i am glad my soyo 24' monitors work :). glad soyo stayed around for that. 48 inches of pmva goodness :D
 
they made some nice pentium 2 boards in 440bx chipset, bh6, bx6, be6 -2 v2. and the nforce 2 boards were ok (better than the asus but nowhere near as good as the dfi). and i hear they made a decent p4 board or 2. other than that the boards were average or below, and they had the problem with bad caps, also.
 
ABIT was responsible for producing both some of my favorite boards and the worst boards I've ever owned. Some of them provided me solid, stable computing as well as badass overclocking while other boards were among the worst I have ever owned.

Favorite ABIT boards:

BH6
BX6 Rev 2.0
BP6
AA8XE

ABIT junk boards:

KT7 RAID
KT7-A RAID
 
My first and last Abit board was/is the IP35 Pro. Too bad I didn't get a chance to taste their other good boards.
 
I liked abit, but it's a good time for them to leave.

When abit was at their height, DFI was not around, Gigabyte was making mostly vanilla products with no features, Asus was still Asus, and beyond those, the second-tier like Biostar, Foxconn, Syntax/PCCraps, etc. were mostly just junk.

The market changed. DFI, GB, Asus, Foxconn, some other manufacturers all make bulletproof, feature-rich products.

I thank you, abit for carving the niche nice and wide for enthusiasts. It's too bad the others followed your trail and then buried you at the end.
 
My first board was an Abit be6 2, it's a tenacious warrior that runs to this day. RIP Abit MoBos

I still have the only ABIT motherboard I've ever owned, the workstation-class VP6 (supports dual S370 P-IIIS CPUs; mine has a single 1 GHz P-III installed), as it still works and is far from dead (even now, it's awaiting resurrection as a cheap Linux/*NIX experimenter box). I originally bought it in 2000 (and it was the core of the Original UNserver, my Windows 2000 Professional box) and it's still running after eight years of service.
 
I liked abit, but it's a good time for them to leave.

When abit was at their height, DFI was not around, Gigabyte was making mostly vanilla products with no features, Asus was still Asus, and beyond those, the second-tier like Biostar, Foxconn, Syntax/PCCraps, etc. were mostly just junk.

The market changed. DFI, GB, Asus, Foxconn, some other manufacturers all make bulletproof, feature-rich products.

I thank you, abit for carving the niche nice and wide for enthusiasts. It's too bad the others followed your trail and then buried you at the end.

It was ABIT (and specifically, the VP6) which got me into higher-end motherboards in the first place (as, prior to the VP6, I had been buying and thus largely recommending second-tier motherboards, especially A-TREND). The VP6 was a decided odd-duck purchase for me: an SMP-ready workstation-class motherboard that also supported RAID (that doubled as an extra IDE controller). It was deliberate overkill (or so I thought at the time); however, I could actually afford it. Turns out the RAID/additional IDE controller feature would actually be useful with Windows 2000 Professional, as I could eliminate contention between different-speed ATAPI/IDE devices by putting each onto its own controller (even if I had three devices, as I did at the time). The VP6 was the core of the Original UNserver for over three years, and would only be replaced for the long-haul by another high-end motherboard (my current ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe); however, it didn't go very far, as my mom used the Original UNserver for another two years as her first computer of her own. (Even though it has sat on a shelf since 2005, I recently dusted off the UNserver for resuscitation as a Linux/UNIX beater-box, due to the extra IDE/RAID support and that it also supports AGP up to 8x, which is almost unheard-of for sub-P4 motherboards.)

Prior to the VP6, I regarded high-end motherboards as largely overkill. As someone that's owned a VP6 for eight years (and my P4C800E-Deluxe for five) I investigate a motherboard's features more thoroughly and recommend based on usage, and I'm not anywhere near as quick to dismiss a feature as spurious or overkill.
 
My first and last Abit board was/is the IP35 Pro. Too bad I didn't get a chance to taste their other good boards.

same here... my abits (ip35, ip35 pro) have been by far the easiest to overclock compared to other motherboards ive encountered in the past.
 
Had an Abit board for a Athlon XP a few years back, no problems with that board. Have an Abit IP35-E running happily with an overclocked Q6600 (dedicated folding rig) and am playing around building with an Abit IP-35 Pro -- looking at my Antec Mini P180 and my Dremmel trying to figure out how to accomplish this feat though...

Always hate to see competition leave the market.
 
Denial always makes it harder......;)
It's not denial. If they are gone as a mobo manufacturer then that's it & we'll all move to other suppliers, life will go on.
I have seen what unsubstantiated rumours can do to the business of what was a sound company though & the internet can spread that quicker & further than ever though so it's even possible that this could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Notice that it's now a couple of days later, after abit supposedly were going to tell disties or whatever yesterday & no-one else has confirmed this from their own sources, it all stems from Hexus.
Given all the contacts that journos have don't you find that even slightly odd?
 
they made some nice pentium 2 boards in 440bx chipset, bh6, bx6, be6 -2 v2. and the nforce 2 boards were ok (better than the asus but nowhere near as good as the dfi). and i hear they made a decent p4 board or 2. other than that the boards were average or below, and they had the problem with bad caps, also.

I had all those 440bx boards and IIRC every single one of them died to bad caps. 25 bucks a pop repair for each of them.
 
abit has "soft menu bios" which allowed you to overclock your pentium 2 or celeron in bios. asus used jumpers into the p3 time. other than those 2 companies, if you were going to overclock, you were shit out of luck.
 
Pour one out for em... the BH6 + BP6 were good times and with the 50% overclock on the C300A helped get lots of ppl hooked for life
 
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