At the end of the year in 2008, one of the most legendary motherboard manufacturers of all time sadly went out of business. I am talking about Abit. What happened to Abit motherboards? A combination of factors took it down, including declining quality, loss of a key engineer, and a good old-fashioned scandal.
Abit took 7 years to become an overnight sensation
Abit wasn’t exactly a newcomer when I first learned about them in 1996. The company was founded in 1989 and made a number of 386SX, 386DX, and 486 motherboards. But it was the early hardware sites like Tom’s Hardware Guide and Anandtech that really helped to put Abit on the map during the Socket 7 era and distinguish them from the rest of the Taiwainese motherboard makers. The Abit IT5H was a Socket 7 board based on the Intel 430HX chipset that performed extremely well.
The jumperless Abit IT5H
Thing is, we already had an HX-based board that performed really well. Asus had those bases covered with its P55T2P4. What made Abit special was its board was jumperless. When you installed a processor, it initialized it using safe settings, and then you could go in and configure it to run at the speed you wanted using a feature called the CPU Softmenu. The Softmenu allowed you to change voltages and front side bus speed, not just the multiplier. You could even run your CPU at non-standard bus speeds like 75 or 83 MHz. Running a 166 MHz CPU at 83 MHz with a 2X multiplier actually ran faster than a 200 MHz CPU on a 66 MHz bus with a 3X multiplier. If you actually owned a 200 MHz processor, or a processor that overclocked well, you could run it at 83 MHz with a multiplier of 2.5, reach 208 MHz, and run rings around a CPU running on a 66 MHz bus with a 3x multiplier. It was the ultimate Socket 7 system at the time.
Overclockers loved the IT5H because they could easily test settings without looking up jumper settings and changing clumsy jumper blocks.
Abit BP6: Dual CPUs on a budget
And then there was the legendary Abit BP6. Socket 370 era Celeron processors had a Pentium II core, but Intel disabled the ability to change the multiplier to discourage overclocking and they also disabled the ability to run them in multi-processor configurations. Enthusiasts figured out that if they wired the processors up a bit differently, they could restore the multiprocessor capability. With the BP6, Abit made that unnecessary. They just wired the board up so that you could drop a pair of cheap Celeron processors into it and have a very inexpensive dual CPU setup.
What happened to Abit to cause its demise?
One major problem for Abit was the quality of the capacitors they used was not as high as Asus. That meant Abit motherboards didn’t age as well as Asus boards did. Arguably, in the ’90s, that wasn’t as huge of a problem because enthusiasts would upgrade every 2 or 3 years. As long as the board lasted 3 years, nobody noticed. But as the century turned, people started expecting to be able to keep their computers a little bit longer. Abit’s propensity to go cheap on the capacitors left it extremely vulnerable when capacitor plague kicked in, and indeed, Abit was one of the hardest hit.
Starting in 2002, Abit started outsourcing production of some low end boards to Elite Computer Systems, a notorious cost-cutting manufacturer. You bought from companies like Abit to avoid accidentally buying a no-name board actually made by ECS. So this was problematic.
Abit suffered a major blow in March 2003 when Oscar Wu, the mastermind behind the CPU Softmenu and much of the hardware design, departed Abit for rival motherboard maker DFI.
But perhaps the biggest problem came in December 2004, when questionable accounting practices caused its stock to be delisted. Abit had been inflating its counts and potentially embezzling funds. It wasn’t quite Miniscribe or Media Vision, let alone Worldcom. But adding fraud and dishonesty to a reputation for declining quality isn’t a recipe for longevity.
On 25 January 2006, Abit sold itself to Universal Scientific Industrial. USI sold motherboards under the new brand name Universal Abit. But the venture wasn’t successful, and Universal Abit announced that it would close December 31, 2008, and officially cease to exist on January 1, 2009.
Abit’s legacy
Today, Abit motherboards are prized by collectors, but if you want to actually use them, you will need to replace the capacitors. That said, if you use high quality, brand name capacitors, the boards will perform. Likely they’ll do better than they did when they were new, since the classic-era Abit boards tended to be really well built. It’s unfortunate that Abit cheaped out on the capacitors.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.