ABIT

» see abit.com.tw as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A forum signature was a hardware list. Motherboard at the top, then the processor with whatever you had it clocked to. Memory timings underneath if you were showing off. On frmtr I wrote mine out the same as everybody else, and the line that carried the most information about you was the first one, because the board was the choice nobody made by accident.

ABIT was one of the names that meant something in that position. It did not mean the fastest and it definitely did not mean the cheapest. It meant you had bought for headroom, and that you intended to use it.

The company started in Taipei in 1989 and spent its first decade as an unremarkable board maker. What changed everything was a BIOS feature called SoftMenu, which put the bus speed and the CPU multiplier into a settings screen instead of onto a block of jumpers you moved with tweezers by torchlight. Other manufacturers followed within two years. Before that, overclocking meant opening the case and consulting a table printed in the manual, and afterwards it meant pressing Delete on boot.

The board that made the name was the BH6, an Intel 440BX design, and the reason was what it did with a Celeron 300A. That processor ran at 300MHz on a 66MHz bus and it would sit at 450MHz on a 100MHz bus without complaining, which is a fifty percent gain for the price of changing one number. In 1998 that combination was the cheapest way to have a fast computer, and everyone who read a hardware forum knew it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the trick ~

ABIT kept doing this. The BP6 in 1999 put two Socket 370 slots on a consumer board and let you run a pair of unmodified Celerons in symmetric multiprocessing, which Intel had gone out of its way to make impossible on the cheap parts. It was the first board to do it. Nobody's software could use two processors properly in 1999 and people bought it anyway.

The NF7-S in 2003 was the Athlon XP equivalent, an nForce2 board that overclocked so far past its rating that reviewers stopped reporting numbers and started reporting whether they had run out of cooling first. There was a chip on the later boards called uGuru, a small dedicated microprocessor that let you change clocks and fan curves without rebooting. That is a normal feature now. It was a strange one to put on a motherboard then.

~ the unraveling ~

None of the failure had anything to do with engineering. On 15 December 2004 the stock was downgraded over questionable accounting, and the investigation found that the company's import and export business was running through seven shell companies registered to a single address, each of them carrying almost no capital. Management faced embezzlement allegations. The company had gone public on the Taiwan exchange in 2000, which meant all of this happened where everybody could see it.

By June 2005 ABIT was taking financial support from Wan Hai to stay upright. On 25 January 2006 Universal Scientific Industrial announced it was buying the motherboard business and the brand, and the boards went out under the name Universal ABIT after that. The engineering was still decent. The company that had earned the name was already gone.

~ what it left ~

USI spent 2008 restructuring and cutting costs, and the motherboard line did not survive it. The announcement in December said production would stop at the end of the year, and 31 December 2008 is the date everyone uses. The brand was formally finished on 31 March 2009, three months later, with nothing shipping in between.

What ABIT actually changed is now so ordinary that it is invisible. Every board sold today has the multiplier and the memory timings in a settings screen, and the manufacturers advertise how far you can push their product rather than pretending the option is not there. Overclocking stopped being something you did against the hardware and became a feature you paid for. ABIT is the company that made that switch and then did not last long enough to sell into the market it had built.

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