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Dave Farquhar Retro Computing December 30, 2025December 30, 2025 1 Comment

Overclockers loved the IT5H because they could easily test settings without looking up jumper settings and changing clumsy jumper blocks.

Starting in 2002, Abit started outsourcing production of some low end boards to Elite Computer Systems, a notorious cost-cutting manufacturer. You bought from companies like Abit to avoid accidentally buying a no-name board actually made by ECS. So this was problematic.

But perhaps the biggest problem came in December 2004, when questionable accounting practices caused its stock to be delisted. Abit had been inflating its counts and potentially embezzling funds. It wasn’t quite Miniscribe or Media Vision, let alone Worldcom. But adding fraud and dishonesty to a reputation for declining quality isn’t a recipe for longevity.

On 25 January 2006, Abit sold itself to Universal Scientific Industrial. USI sold motherboards under the new brand name Universal Abit. But the venture wasn’t successful, and Universal Abit announced that it would close December 31, 2008, and officially cease to exist on January 1, 2009.

Today, Abit motherboards are prized by collectors, but if you want to actually use them, you will need to replace the capacitors. That said, if you use high quality, brand name capacitors, the boards will perform. Likely they’ll do better than they did when they were new, since the classic-era Abit boards tended to be really well built. It’s unfortunate that Abit cheaped out on the capacitors.

And then there was the legendary Abit BP6. Socket 370 era Celeron processors had a Pentium II core, but Intel disabled the ability to change the multiplier to discourage overclocking and they also disabled the ability to run them in multi-processor configurations. Enthusiasts figured out that if they wired the processors up a bit differently, they could restore the multiprocessor capability. With the BP6, Abit made that unnecessary. They just wired the board up so that you could drop a pair of cheap Celeron processors into it and have a very inexpensive dual CPU setup.

One major problem for Abit was the quality of the capacitors they used was not as high as Asus. That meant Abit motherboards didn’t age as well as Asus boards did. Arguably, in the ’90s, that wasn’t as huge of a problem because enthusiasts would upgrade every 2 or 3 years. As long as the board lasted 3 years, nobody noticed. But as the century turned, people started expecting to be able to keep their computers a little bit longer. Abit’s propensity to go cheap on the capacitors left it extremely vulnerable when capacitor plague kicked in, and indeed, Abit was one of the hardest hit.