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Abit To Close Its Doors Forever On Dec. 31, 2008

Posted by kdawson on from the then-there-were-fewer dept.

ki1obyte writes "Earlier this year the Taiwanese firm Abit, once a leading-edge maker of computer mainboards and other components, was slated to shut down motherboard production by the end of 2008 and focus on consumer electronics devices. Now X-bit labs reports that Abit will cease to exist entirely after midnight on the last day of 2008 because the owner of the brand, Universal Scientific Industrial, is in the process of restructuring and cutting their costs."

5 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Sad News by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sad to read this. Have had several Abit mobos in the past, always good quality reliable boards.

    1. Re:Sad News by jamesh · · Score: 5, Interesting

      good quality reliable boards

      I bought an Abit BP6 about 8 years ago, and it served me well up until about a year ago, but I wouldn't call it reliable or good quality. Abit had heaps of trouble with crappy firmware releases for it, and the onboard ATA-100 controller was known to be crap. It caused massive corruption under Linux, which could have been a driver bug but I more suspect it was hardware related.

      A later version than mine was released with bad capacitors. Apparently replacing those improved reliability in that model.

      Still, it was a dirt cheap dual celeron board that did the job (I wanted to experiment with SMP coding). It's sitting on the floor next to me right now, but only because I haven't gotten around to turfing it yet.

  2. so long by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Their timings and voltages were always off a bit So I will miss them, but only a bit

  3. From Leader to Out of Business overnight. by upuv · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have to say a name like Abit to go under. That was a bit of a shock.

    I've personally probably built / owned / used a couple of hundred systems based on Abit MB's over the years. However I can't remember actually building or owning an Abit based system in the last 1.5 years.

    True enough the last couple of years the company literally had nothing that competed on the MB front. ( Flame away ).

    The cash burn must have been something beyond my comprehension.

    I truly morn the loss. Less competition is bad. I really don't want to see the price of a main board hit $300. And still suck. If Lenova ends up making the best board on the market I'm going to retire and hide in the bush. ( Personally I don't much care for anything IBM or IBM tainted. )

  4. Re:Not surprising... by mpeskett · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So to summarise...

    Abit suck, but Asus are good
    Asus suck, but Gigabyte are good
    Giagabyte suck but MSI are good

    Maybe the lesson here is that every company is capable of producing both shit and gold, and having a run of good/bad luck from the same manufacturer is down to just that, luck.