ABIT is a Taiwanese computer components manufacturer.

ABIT has been manufacturing PC components, like VESA bus IDE accelerator cards as early as 1992. Today ABIT primarily produces motherboards intended primarily to appeal to the PC enthusiast/overclocker market. ABIT wanted to manufacture fast motherboards that rival offerings by Asus and other brand names, for half the price. Abit used the pooled abilities of its innovative engineers to design motherboards with less components to keep prices low.

ABIT is particularly famous for getting motherboards and chips to do things that they were never intended to. With perhaps the most famous example of this being the BP6 model, which had SMP support for Celeron on the Intel BX chipset, which was intended for Dual-CPU use only with expensive Pentium-II/III processors. The low cost Intel Celeron (Mendocino) chips were definitely not supposed to be used for SMP use, yet Abit did it. Later the Intel Corp. introduced measures to block use of newer edition Celeron processors in dual-CPU configurations.

Abit was also the first to introduce 133MHz FSB operation for the Intel BX chipset, which was originally designed by Intel as a 66/100 MHz bus system. This was a daring stretch of the product specifications.

Sorrowfully, early Abit motherbards were famous for failing to support Adaptec SCSI cards. The engineers decided to drop those capacitors, which were needed to support standard 5 volts PCI bus operation, from their designs to keep costs low. This meant most SCSI cards and some other uncommon PCI equipment simply did not work or intermittently worked in ABIT boards.

In recent years ABIT has expanded into the video card market, producing cards based on NVIDIA and, more recently, ATI Technologies chipsets.

In around 2001, ABIT was one of the motherboard manufacturers to own up to having used capacitors that were of a poor standard, and recalled and repaired any boards from users that did fail. Extra information can be found at http://www.badcaps.net

Now they only use high quality Japanese capacitors, notably, Rubycon.

Financial Troubles

On December 15th, 2004, Digitimes reported that the Taiwan Stock Exchange had downgraded Abit's stock due to questionable accounting practices. One of the accusations levied against Abit is that a majority of their import/export business was conducted through seven companies, all of which were located at the same address and had a capital of only HK$2 each. Also, the management at Abit has been accused of embezzling funds from the company.

External links

• Official site
• ABIT support forums
• Digitimes article on the financial troubles