alt Hacker NewsWhat Happened to Abit Motherboards
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What a story. This brings back memories and ties directly into my life.
In fall of 1999, I built my first PC with an Abit BE6 to use with an Intel Pentium 3 'Coppermine' 500 MHz. I was a fifteen year old kid working at pizzeria in the midwest making minimum wage to feed my computer hobby. At the time I was reading hardocp, and compiled a list of "good" BX motherboards to try and find at computer show that was organized on a semi-regular basis at the local fairgrounds. This event saw numerous mom&pop computer stores travel from hours away to sell custom PCs, software, and hardware. I remember having a bit of buyer's remorse because I actually wanted the BE6-II which featured the ability to change the front side bus in 1 MHz steps, while the older BE6, only had a set of fixed multiplers and PCI dividers. My 500 MHz coppemine (5 x 100 MHz) didn't post at 750 MHz (5 x 150 MHz) and was unstable above 667 MHz (5 x 133 MHz). This overclock still 'saved' me a considerable amount of money by allowing me to purchase the cheapest part and squeeze performance out of it. That computer hobby led me down a path of studying computer engineering and my eventual departure (escape) from the Midwest.
Years later, in 2015 I moved to Taipei, and remember walking around Neihu seeing all the headquarters of the computer part manufacturers I used in my childhood (Liteon, ECS, Nvidia). I didn't realize that Abit's former headquarters on 陽光街 is right next to many of the places I've been living and working next to for the past decade.
Another memory from that time was buying 128 MB of SD-RAM from Crucial (Micron). I remember being a little pissed because the price had gone up 50% due to the 921 earthquake, which killed thousands and left many homeless, and knocked the fabs offline which led to a supply shortage.
The super socket 7 motherboards were amazing.
They were backwards compatible with socket 5 (you had to set the motherboard jumpers voltages though).
Some of these boards had both sdram and edo ram slots along with an agp slot, pci slots and an isa slot.
So you had an era where motherboads could take a P-75 or an amd k6 550 cpu. They could take ram scavanged from an old 486 (edo ram) or you could put in faster ram. You could run a pci grapchics card if it’s all you had or you could run an agp card. I used my old 486s isa soundblaster awe in that board for a long long time since pci was of no benefit for a soundcard.
The only set of cpus not compatible were the slot and socket 370 cpus. But they were pretty expensive anyway and it was fun to be able to frankenstein computers so much back in the day.
Interesting read. I had the Abit BP6 and it was a killer in performance/price. The problem I had with it wasn't the capacitors but rather that the PCB itself was a bit thin to support 2x CPUs/fans.
Another cool thing was that the BP6 supported Ultra DMA/66 (aka ATA/66) and it did so by adding a second controller so you had twice as many buses. Looking a pic of it now, it really was a Franken-machine with AGP, PCI, ISA busses too.
An Abit AV8 was my first "Good" new motherboard. I came into some money and decided to build a then-new Socket 939 setup, with a 3200+.
I recall they had one BIOS release that bricked boards, which I missed by not downloading it the first day of availability. The board was eventually destroyed by a sketchy PSU which killed the AGP slot and the Geforce 6800LE that was in it.
Later I tried an IP35-E, but had problems (two different memory sets failed) so I returned it for the Gigabyte P35-DS3L I actually wanted but was out of stock at the time.
When I used the Abit BP6 in a Linux box build, I did it as a one-Celeron budget PC with expandability, and put some notes on the Web at the time:
https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/
That page includes pricing info for each component, and how I bought it. For example:
> Abit BP6 Dual PPGA Socket-370 motherboard, UDMA-66, 2 ISA, 5 PCI, AGP 2X, 3 168-pin PC100 ECC, max. 1GB RAM. Retail version. (Essential Computing $120 + $14.25 UPS Ground + $3.60 insurance = $137.95)
> Intel Celeron 500 Retail version, with warranty and CPU fan and heat sink. (Egghead $135.99 + free UPS Ground = $135.99)
The box was my workstation, and for a time also a public Web server on ADSL. I never actually added a second Celeron (cost money, and I still wasn't feeling CPU pressure) nor the UDMA-66 (reported to be less reliable).
Ah, I kept that BP6 for 10 years before selling it. It meant I could write multithreaded concurrent software and run it at home with LinuxThreads (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxThreads) then NPTL (native Posix threading lib).
Mine was not very stable under even moderate overclocking though!
Good times!
Their Ultra series motherborads were legendary for the time. Namely AN7-Ultra for AthlonXP and AN8-Ultra for AMD64.
Besides being able to overclock anything to its absolute limits, they have repurposed a keyboard microcontroller to monitor temperatures, fans and voltages on the board (aka uGuru), providing unparalleled flexibility and reliability when no other company was able to provide at that time, and after them.
Setting fan curves for temperature response was great and allowed me to run AthlonXP at 2200Mhz (200x11@1T) without excessive noise for normal tasks.
Their AN8 Ultra provided a rock solid foundation for my AMD64 system, too.
None of my capacitors have leaked/bulged despite using systems under relatively heavy load.
Brings back memories of late nights trying to reverse engineer the Abit uGuru chip. Triggered by not being able to read the sensors in Linux while trying to overclock my computer into being less of a shit computer. Reverse engineering was successful but the computer never got any better. Still, fun and educating times it was!
In the late 1990's many HP workstations used Abit motherboards.
I remember being surprised that HP did not make the boards themselves.
Ah, Abit, the maker of Only Famous Motherboard as CRD woud call it in this long, but interesting, video.
Abit, there's a name I havent heard in a long long time...
BX6 r2.0, the motherboard of the first PC I built myself, and still the favorite I ever had to work with.
They were amazing. I had a dual socket board. I do wonder what they'd be up to now if they still existed... 4 socket ryzen boards, 2kw? lol
I had a lot of good luck with Abit motherboards. They did a 3day burn in before shipping.
I like they show schematics in their materials and still have a sticker from an old celeron build. I booted it up recently and it still works.
This brings me back. My first DIY PC used an Abit motherboard. It was a great computer and was still functional after 5 years before I upgraded. I never knew about the poor quality capacitors. I guess I lucked out.
Interesting read. I had the KR7A-133R motherboard as it won Anandtech's gold award for the best 4 bank DIMM support. It was $200 IIRC and was one the more expensive boards. Paired it with an Athlon XP 1800+ and Radeon 8500. Funny enough the AMD naming at the time was to reflect how Athlon's lower clock speed (1.5GHz) was a competitor to Intel CPU's (1.8GHz).
Asus was a strong competitor even then and I remember buying one just a few years before the Abit board that supported SD-RAM as well as DDR as a way to ease the transition for consumers.
It was a good time when IRC, AIM, and physical electronics shopping was still a thing. The only big tech presence that techies hated was Microsoft. Sigh.
EDIT: Their website is still around! https://www.abit.com.tw/page/en/motherboard/motherboard_deta...
A friend of mine won an Athlon XP in a forum contest, I think it was Extreme Systems or Extreme Overclocking. He ended up pairing it with an Abit NF7-S, which I recall being a legendary board at the time. He brought it over to my place and we would LAN Unreal Tournament 2003. Those were the days!
I had good memories of AOpen motherboards in the Super 7 socket times. I keep stored a AOpen Ak-77 board...
My first, last and only Abit was the KR7a-RAID. Along with a phenomenal Athlon XP and that sweet DDR.
Good memories.
I loved abit motherboards back in the day... sad to see the company die.
This is a specifically strange article, niche on niche is putting it lightly.
> The Abit BP6 was legendary with enthusiasts because it let them make a dual CPU system with cheap Celeron CPUs.
And 2 celerons were cheaper than a CPU with double the performance?
The Abit BP6 taught me so much about multithreaded programming. Programs that previously worked fine crashed instantly due to incorrect locking. It really forced me to think differently about concurrent programs.
After that I never found multithreaded programming particularly difficult. Challenging at times yes, but thanks to my newfound mental model not difficult.
I had those brass-looking cylindrical coolers[1] from Zalman, and the two of them next to each other was quite distinctive.
Had the motherboard for many years as a homelab server.
I bought a few more Abit boards after that, but the capacitor plague made me switch to Asus IIRC, and then they folded.
But the BP6 will forever be with me as a incredibly cool motherboard that did something unique in the consumer space.
[1]: https://www.cablesonline.com/soc370airrou.html (except brass finish)