Abit: heating the house by burning the furniture

[CityK]

http://www.digitimes.com/mobos/a20051226A7037.html

I never really "got" the Abit lovefest that was so prolific across the net. I know they somewhat catered their products towards the overclocking crowd, but outside of that aspect, all too often I would see heaps of admiration spoken of them, yet no one ever explained what was so special about their products to vault them to such loafty heights above the rest of the crowd. In other words, it always struck me that the praise these guys were receiving was very similar to Asus -- unwarrented. That's just my opinion, and you are, of course, free to disagree ... unless you live in China, whereby you're probably required by state to disagree.

 

[MaxBurn]

I rather agree. If you are not overclocking your favorites list probably doesn't include ABIT or ASUS as your #1 favorite. I'm on the fence at the moment on an ASUS A8N-SLI Premium for my workstation and I'm having reservations on committing.

 

[fb]

I have an Asus A8N SLI Premium with my X2 3800+, but it doesn't like my Asus 6600GT Silencer GPU. Perhaps it doesn't like the RAM (Kingston value 2-Gigglebyte kit) or something, but it feels a bit strange that two Asus products doesn't work together... The problem is that the screen shuts down, and the computer locks up after it's been on a while, and it doesn't do that with any other graphics card I've tried.

 

[MaxBurn]

Oh lovely, fb.

I wish the Tyan Tomcat K8E-SLI (S2866) was available. Supermicro, my current favorite, continues to shun AMD.

 

[Mercutio]

Abit did at one time have a pretty decent midrange product... 10 years ago.
Everything they have done since has coasted off of that reputation.

I think they were hurt worse than most by the early-00s capacitor problems, and I think catering to the Overclocking Crowd since hasn't helped them much.

Truth be told, I shudder when I find an Abit board nowadays. If they're dropping out of the market, that's something that'll make me a happy camper.

WRT Asus all I can say is don't do it, please. As many other folk here have found out, it's not worth the effort.

 

[CougTek]

Supermicro, my current favorite, continues to shun AMD.

Really? I guess I was dreaming when I saw that page then.

 

[LiamC]

Abit found fame with BIOS overclocking & th BH6. Nobody was doing it at that time.

But in a couple of years everybody had caught up, and Abit was still charging a premium, for no added value. EPoX springs to mind as offering the same features at a better price point.

Then most of their talented engineering staff were poached by DFI, and then Abit charged a premium for less than the opposition were offering. The market wised up.

I smell a lot of bungled management issues.

 

[MaxBurn]

Abit found fame with BIOS overclocking & th BH6. Nobody was doing it at that time.

If I think back I think the BH6 was my first ABIT and should have been my last. I had a Celeron 300A in it doing 464MHz, was very happy with that. Then I moved on to AMD with some ABIT motherboards of the KT133 series that had the 686b southbridge soundblaster bug, totally frustrating, but to be fair not really ABIT's fault.

Supermicro, my current favorite, continues to shun AMD.

Really? I guess I was dreaming when I saw that page then.

Wow, I can't believe I missed that. If you go to supermicro.com I can't see a way at all to get to that page though. It's a little strange that they don't list all of their motherboards under products-motherboards from their main page isn't it? Maybe because they are OEM only or something, wonder why that is?

 

[LiamC]

Wow, I can't believe I missed that. If you go to supermicro.com I can't see a way at all to get to that page though. It's a little strange that they don't list all of their motherboards under products-motherboards from their main page isn't it? Maybe because they are OEM only or something, wonder why that is?

That page only appeared after AMD launched their legal action against Intel. The IT press has covered this page and it is common knowledge that there is no direct link to it on SuperMicro's site—you have to know the URL to get to it. SuperMicro are still firmly in Intel's pocket.

 

[sechs]

All the SuperMicro AMD products are OEM. That's why there's no direct link to them.

Why they're OEM only may have something to do with Intel and pockets.... but that they *are* making boards for AMD chips shows how seductive their performance is.