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Abit To Bow Out of Mainboard Market
Steve Kerrison writes "Taiwanese technology firm Abit will be pulling out of the mainboard market at the end of this year. HEXUS.channel, citing sources close to South East Asian distributors, reports that the company will continue to deliver mainboard products until the end of 2008 and will still honour all warranties in subsequent years. Rumours of this decision circulated in May but were dismissed. Apparently the decision was made in the last couple of weeks. Abit is a popular brand amongst PC hardware enthusiasts, many of whom will be disappointed to see it leave the market."
As I was when my KG7 and KT7 both quit last month with bad caps. To heck with ABIT!
All ABIT motherboards I have ever owned had bad capacitors even though they claimed they didn't. I have owned the KT7E with the AMD Athlon XP 160++ and it ran OK for the first year and then ever since it couldn't run for more than a few days without becoming fubared. I then looked over the motherboard carefully and noticed the capacitors were going bad, so I went and got myself an NF7 nForce2 MB w/ an AMD Athlon XP 1700+ and didn't even think about RMA'ing since I figured at the time the KT7E was pretty much aging anyway and I didn't care for VIA chipsets to begin with. The first NF7 had to be RMA'd cause it hardly ever posted fully even then the second the nvidia drivers loaded up for the AGP card (GeForce 4 Ti 4200 64MB AGP 8X) it crapped out. So, I did cross shipping which worked out great (had to pay full price up front for the board and then they would refund you the cost except shipping when they did receive the defective MB).
The board I received of the NF7 was in fact newer and had the 2.0 board revision with the new 400FSB chipset. Worked great for nearly two years and then again POST wouldn't go successfully. RMA'd again and this time I got back a motherboard that has memory issues. Try running Opera for half an hour and browsing around and get graphical glitches where half the window wouldn't render. Try playing Steam games and 1/3 of it wouldn't render and games crashed to desktop.
So, then I figured why not try replacing the 512MB stick I was using with 3x512MB newer from newegg. I did that and did not solve memory corruption issue. So then I tried with getting a GeForce 7600 GS 512MB AGP 8X to replace my aging GeForce 4 Ti 4200 64MB AGP 8X. No go, still memory corruption issues.
You might ask why didn't I RMA a third time? Well, I didn't notice the issues until two months later (was busy with college work to do any serious gaming or anything) when my warranty expired on the motherboard. So I suffered with that crap for a while then this past christmas I saved up enough I got myself an ASUS Maximus Extreme board with a Q6600, 2GB (2x1GB sticks) RAM, and a GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB GDDR3 PCI-E x16 card, and I have been enjoying it ever since, but it hasn't been a year or two yet so I cannot vouch for how long lasting it is. :)
This space is not for rent.
More like: They were making boards with terrible capacitors and voltage regulators, had no customer service to speak of at all, and completely neglected to support their products with software after releasing. They used to be great, but right now? Happy to see them yield some shelf-space to better manufacturers.
I just bought a Gigabyte motherboard last month, so they're the only manufacturer allowed to get out of the business this year.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?