Like last year, we entered Abit's booth a bit apprehensive. From outside, nothing has changed for years. The Taiwanese manufacturer still honors the show with a very important booth and numerous animations dedicated to gamers. Once again, the manufacturer denied rumors regarding the end of retail motherboards or even a repositioning towards entry level and OEM. Abit says that it wants to satisfy two markets, OEM (where it plans to take some market share in order to survive) and gamers, because of the image it sends out. One thing is certain, the glorious (or doomed depending on your experience) days in 1999-2000 with the legendary BE-6 (Intel 440 BX) or KT7 (Via KT133) definitely to the past.
The manufacturer displays a certain number of new products on the inevitable wall of motherboard. Nothing to match Asus, Gigabyte or MSI, but there's a good number of models based on the future P45 (DDR2/DDR3 support up to 1333 MHz) and P43 (support limited to 1066 MHz and small overclocking).
There are a couple of nForce 780 as well (one of them, the AN78G has three video outputs: VGA, DVI and HDMI). Those cards features remain small and has nothing to do with the high end models that we find with other manufacturers When it comes to overclocking and low cost, DFI has never been in a better position. Abit had also received orders from NVIDIA not to show its nForce 790 models (contrary to others like Gigabyte).
