Starfalcon
Gawd
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2020
- Messages
- 532
I have a large amount of Abit boards in my hoard, around 15 or so with a large chunk of them being Socket A.
The good ole Abit Dayzz..Loved them..
Wiki more or less covers it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_AbitWhatever happened to Abit anyway? They were easily the most popular boards among enthusiasts in the late 90s.
ABit was my go-to brand until the IT5H 1.5 was released and it soured my enthusiasm for them. This was back in 1997 and I was involved in a usenet discussion with ABit marketing and support and other buyers of the IT5H 1.5 trying to get parity enabled in the BIOS. The symptom was that if you had installed parity memory (I had Micron EDO/ECC 50ns 8x36 modules) and set BIOS setting "DRAM ECC/Parity" to "Parity" and "Detection" to "Enable", an NMI interrupt would always occur when the Award BIOS cleared the screen to print out the boxed table of info about the computer and the segment was always 0000. After much back and forth, ABit did some internal testing and verified that ECC/Parity support was indeed broken. They admitted that early in development they had tested parity support and it worked correctly, but sometime later during further development revisions of the board they inadvertently broke support for parity memory and there was no fix via BIOS possible. Their website still said the board supported parity though. I switched to Asus after that.Wiki more or less covers it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Abit
But the really short answer is that motherboards are an incredibly competitive market and the margins are razor thin. There is a reason why Asus as an example (arguably their biggest competitor in their time) sells a ton of stuff other than motherboards. But as noted in the Wiki, embezzling is probably not the way for the future of any company.
To the statements in the thread though, Abit was and still is to a large degree my favorite mobo manufacturer of all time. Terrible shame when they left the market. Basically I learned pretty early on that the Abit boards were the best - and they actually supported their hardware unlike the nightmare that is Asus. The NF7 was fantastic. The VP6 might be the best 'inexpensive' dual processor board ever. But I owned quite a few boards from Abit and they were all great.