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."

Comments

RIP

[everphilski]

I think I'll fire up my dual processor 366 MHz BP-6 for old times' sake.

Re:RIP

[T5]

Mine ran dual 300 Celerons overclocked to 504 MHz for *years* with only the slightest of hitches: at power on after being off for a few hours, I'd have to hold the power button in for 4 seconds to turn it off, then immediately hit the power again. It would run indefinitely after that.

That was truly an amazing product for several reasons. First, Celerons weren't supposed to run in an MP configuration. Second, the main engineer for that board, who went by the Westernized name of "Rocky", was 18 years old when he did the work. Third, understand that at this time the fastest PII processors were 450 MHz. Essentially the machine in question was the first gigahertz (504 x 2) box that I'd ever seen.

Capacitors

[Ark42]

Abit was the only brand of motherboards I knew of that acknowledged the capacitors problem and claimed to use 100% known-good Japanese caps in their boards. With them gone, does that leave any good companies, or will all motherboards still be doomed to leaky budging and exploding capacitors?

Re:Capacitors

[Amouth]

i'm very supprised.. all of the boards we had with bad caps they replaced with no questions.

at first they didn't but after about 2 months of them being out and they made the public acknowlagement - they replaced them

Re:Capacitors

[Ark42]

Yeah, Abit *was* just as guilty, when the problem was first noticed, but they admitted there was a problem, and took a stance of Japanese-only caps later on. Newer boards from Asus and Epox have STILL had bad caps as recently as a year ago, while Abit boards no longer have any problems. This is from my limited experience with all my relatives and friends that I buy parts for and/or fix computers for.

Re:Capacitors

[Agripa]

Many of the motherboard makers including Gigibyte and Asus have switched to using OSCON style solid electrolytic capacitors which do not suffer from the same problems that normal aluminum electrolytic capacitors do. While they like to brag about how noble this makes them, I suspect the real reason is that it just became more economical because of the increasingly stringent requirements for the processor's voltage regulator. In designs where the capacitors' equivalent series inductance and resistance have become fundamental limitations, the higher cost for OSCON style parts can cross over with the cost of using many more aluminum electrolytics.

Computers are like TVs now.

[BitterOldGUy]

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.

Which is exactly what the TV industry went through. Even the big players left and licensed their names to Chinese companies. Do you really think the Sony TV is really a Sony? Or RCA or GE .... It's just a commodity.

The margins are just too low to even bother with them.

RIP - Perhaps Fatal1ty

[nevermore94]

Perhaps Fatal1ty would be more appropriate.

http://www.uabit.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=32&Itemid=48&page=2&model=338