We all want them to survive. Else it's one less player.

But they're in deep trouble here. They have mucho debt, and have made virtually nothing in an industry dependant on heavy R&D.

Shame.
-Mole

I cut my teeth on Tyan Tomcat boards, but didnt get into the overclocking until Abit BH6 boards. They will be missed.

All of my favorite boards have been Abits. I'm really going to miss them. But this is really a case of criminal corruption rather than a case of the company failing in the market. I've been trying to follow the case since it began, but really only Digitimes has any news on it at all. But I do know that everything started going down real fast when the Taiwan government halted trading of their stock and told most of their top executives not to leave Taiwan. Apparantly their was large scale embezzelment and lots of false financal reporting. Any company will go down in a hurry with that hanging over their head. Nobody's going to extend them credit to get parts and materials; and without that you have nothing to sell. Hence the precipitous drop in sales. The people who worked at Abit as well as the customers who loved their products got screwed by a handful of dirtbags.

I've always liked and bought Abit boards. I really don't understand how a company can go under when (atleast in my experience) their boards have been top notch. I consider their boards on par with Asus.

I guess I'll have to start buying Asus for my premium boards :(

Darn. Abit's been one of my favorite motherboard manufacturers. My old TX5 is bulletproof and it just works, even with a K6-3. My KV7 was also a rock solid board which could handle a Mobile Barton Athlon XP @ 2.4GHz. It's a shame to even think that such an innovator (SoftMenu, at least 3 OTES variants, vGuru, etc...) would fall by the wayside.

This is really a damn shame. My first PC was built around Abit's AX5 Socket 7 motherboard. I've owned their BX6 and BF6 motherboards too. I switched over to ASUS a few years back but this still breaks my heart.

Abit, I'm gonna miss thee :(.

The first mobo I bought was a BH6, but the last Abit board I owned was a KR7a-133R.

I've been using Asus and Gigabyte boards for a while now, but I got the impression that Abit stuck with Via's lackluster chipsets far longer than they should have.

lol @ "enthusiast Via motherboard"

I, for one, am very glad that Abit is going down. Their tech support was absolutely horrible, and after I got burned with their VIA-based PIII board I vowed to not buy Abit or VIA products for myself in the forseeable future.

Just recently a friend of mine who had a fried Socket A Abit board tried to get an RMA and they started asking him for a receipt for a 2-year-old board which was supposed to be covered by their 3 year warranty. When he failed to produce the receipt they refused the RMA so he got stuck with a dead board.

This is why I buy Asus' Nvidia-based boards now. They don't ask for receipts or junk like that. Granted, they're a bit more expensive but their "no questions asked" RMA service is worth the premium imho. I hope Abit fries and their dead motherboards go to PC hell where they have to work with Mac components :).

I'll miss them. The KA7-100 is one of my favorite boards. Abit gave us soft bios support with a satisfying array of tweaks and expandability in the form of extra memory and PCI slots. Maybe that was the problem, they had no cut to the bones boards for Dell to use.

I have three KA7-100's. Sure all three needed their caps replaced. But they fixed two of them for free, I call that good tech support. I never got around to sending the third. Guess I'd better try before they are gone.

I wonder what kind of impact the nature of the relationship between Abit and Nvidia has had:

Abit made the switch from Nvidia to ATi graphic cards (in 2003 IIRC). After that it took Abit a long time to release Nvidia NForce mainboards for the Athlon64. I remember only seing Abit mainboards with VIA chipset for Athlon64 when I bought my last PC in March 2004. I would definitely have bought an Abit NF3 board back then if it had existed, and I think a lot of people felt that way back then.
The Fatality-boards were too little, too late.

OTOH Abit always has made good mainbaords with Intel chipsets, too. Why the sales of these dropped so hard, I don't know.

Pretty sad, really.

A 96% fall in profit is easily understandable, but a 96% fall in sales - are you sure?

ABIT is not really special anymore and like the other said no real OEM backbone to rely on. They tried to cater to the ethuasiast, but end up catering to the hardcore gamers with $$$$$. ABIT spend way too much on marketing with all the Fata1ity deal and blinging up their performance line of boards. It is sad to see another good motherboard manufacuturer to go down the tubes.

At least, DFI has taken the gap that Abit left behind. EpoX has been an underdog choice for ethusiast and it will be for a while yet. MSI is slowly rising up to challange ASUS and have recently made several good ethusiast boards. ASUS still has its' OEM backbones and makes consistant products that usually work, but IMO command too much of a price prenium.

Damn. They've made some of the most cherished boards in X86 history. What idiots. Hail DFI and Epox. Maybe that O. Woo guy saw the writing on the wall when he made the jump to DFI.

Rampant speculation follows, feel free to dis me if you want:

As anyone who has ever manipulated blocks of jumpers to set bus speeds and multipliers can tell you, it's a PITA. ABIT made its fame with the Softmenu bios and jumper-less boards. At the time, that was new and fresh, so it became hugely popular. Nerds everywhere rejoiced, and ABIT became the DIY and overclocker board of choice for many.

Nowadays, with multiplier overclocking pretty much a thing of the past, and nearly all enthusiast boards being jumperless and having feature-filled bioses, ABIT just ain't that special anymore. The problem they had with capacitors a while back didn't help either. Plus they don't have the OEM deals that the likes of MSI, Asus, etc do, so that means the vast majority of their profits came from the retail sector. It just seems they stopped innovating and being a market leader and were content to rest on their laurels. You can't do that when you don't have OEM deals to fall back on for profit. Oh well. It's too bad, but there are plenty of other good manufacturers out there.

Hmm.. Maybe time to start buy Abit boards, competition is good and in the case of Abit, they made quality

This really is a shame, my last 2 boards were Abit and I have had nothing but success on their forums, I guuess I am one of the lucky ones.

It's pretty hard to survive a 96% drop in sales.

RIP Abit.

Fatal1ty!!!

It really is a shame, they made some really great boards.

I have had a feeling all along that they were pretty much done with. I think the community knew as well, whenever someone would say to stay away from abit boards due to uncertain support no one came to their defense. Even the die hard abit supporters seemed to quietly slip away.