Universal Abit Reportedly Leaving Motherboard Market
There have been reports that abit would be exiting the motherboard market for some time, starting when the company was acquired by the Taiwanese manufacturer Universal Scientific International (USI) in May 2006. Universal abit were quick to dispel the rumors back in May 2008, but HEXUS.channel have received confirmation from industry sources close to South East Asian distributors that abit sales representatives were to be sending notifications of their departure to distributors on August 28th.
According to the sources, Universal abit will not be halting its motherboard production straight away, but will instead continue to ship until the end of 2008. Warranty claims and RMAs will continue to be honored for a further 3 years.
This follows reports from earlier this month that Universal abit were dismissing employees from many departments, including those who previously worked on the popular Fatal1ty and MAX series of motherboards.
Abit, a second-tier Taiwanese component manufacturer, are well known for their high quality enthusiast motherboards boards. The company suffered serious financial problems during 2005 and sold its office building in Taipei to Deutsche Bank reduce its debts. In May 2006, USI acquired the company, including all patents, products and human resources related to its motherboard business.
USI are now expected to shift the company’s focus away from enthusiast hardware and onto consumer electronics. Some of these devices, such as the FunFab digital photo frame and printer were on display at this year’s Computex.
Universal abit did not immediately provide an official comment on this story, but we will update if they do.
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blppt Sad....never had any problems with Abit mobos...had a KT7A-133 mobo from them that was probably the most stable "out of the box" board I ever owned.Reply -
gondo I've been a fan since their very first board. I remember they had the only dual socket celeron and I overclocked 2 400MHZ CPUs to 500MHZ. I owned a store and exclusively stocked Abit, which most people never heard of. I heard many complaints about the package Abit shipped. Other companies shipped rounded cables while Abit included 2 regular ribbon cables.Reply
uGuru was a great thing and it'll be a shame to see it leave. If you can't beat em, join em...Abit shoould have joined forces with Asus and have Asus featuring uGuru technology by Abit.
Also Abit never made anything else than motherboards. A few video cards for a while but that died fast. Then they had those digital speakers which were a waste of time. What they should have made were good 5.1 and 7.1 speakers to compete with Logitech. Creative no longer makes the high end gigaworks so Logitech has a monopoly in the high end speaker category. They should have gone strong with good speakers at good prices, notebooks, the best micro PC on the market etc... They didn't cash in when they had a strong name and were a top contender.
Goodbye Abit I will miss you. -
Cmhone Damn. My first time overclocking was with an Abit NF7-S, and i've used three other Abit boards since.Going to consumer electronics is a sad way to go.Reply -
I think I'm going to cry. Abit has been around since the early 90's. They were the VERY first (and this is no exaggeration) to use jumper less motherboards to adjust cpu / bus speed. (this is back in the Pentium 200-233 days. Now a days, most of us can't imagine trying to pull out our mobo to change the clock settings.Reply