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 used the pooled abilities of its innovative engineers to design motherboards with fewer components to keep prices low.

The innovation which brought Abit to the forefront of PC enthusiasts minds was the concept of being able to change critical PC mainboard frequency and frequency divider settings in firmware or BIOS, as opposed to using cumbersome and small jumpers on the motherboard to do the same. This innovation holds obvious attraction to PC enthusiasts and overclockers in their efforts to continually tweak these critical settings in order to extract the maximum performance from their components. Abit termed this feature Softmenu and the first motherboard from Abit which the Softmenu had the greatest impact was the Abit BH6 motherboard, based on the venerable Intel 440BX chipset. The release of the BH6 motherboard coincided with the release of the Celeron 300A CPU from Intel, a 300MHz CPU from Intel, which overclockers promptly used the BH6 to overclock them to typically 450MHz easily. With the almost 100% success rate of this hack, Abit catapaulted to the top 5 motherboard manufacturers in the world in terms of enthusiast brainshare, which it remains to this date.

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 ABIT 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 is an incredibly unique company, in terms of its ability of innovate and make a success out of it. Their innovations include, but are not limited to:

1) 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.

2) Abit was most famously known as the inventor of the concept of changing frequencies via BIOS, calling it SoftBIOS. Today, every motherboard manufacturer selling motherboards to enthusiasts via the retail channel includes this feature into their motherboards.

3) Abit was the first to put a RAID chip (Highpoint) on the motherboard for almost no additional cost, starting with the Abit BX133-RAID, resulting in a mania among motherboard manufacturers to do the same. This cumulated with the major chipset manufacturers, Intel beginning with the ICH5R and nVidia beginning with the Nforce4 Ultra chipset, to incorporate the RAID circuitry directly into their chipsets themselves.

4) Abit was the first to bundle an entire operating system, Gentus, based on Linux, with their motherboards for free.

5) Abit was the first to eliminate all fans from the motherboard in the Abit AN8 Ultra motherboard, by using a cutting edge heatpipe system to cool the chipset. This was an excellent innovation in view of the preponderance of the chipset fans to get contaminated and fail within a year or two of operation.

6) Abit was the first in signing on new age gaming idols to use their name in marketing their products, namely Jonathan Fatal1ty Wendel, creating their Fatal1ty series. Even Creative Technology, the leader in the area of sound cards, used the Fatal1ty branding in the top end their latest series of X-Fi cards.

Sorrowfully, early Abit motherbards were famous for failing to support Adaptec SCSI cards, which were notoriously difficult those pre-Plug and Play days.

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

Another blow came when Abit bought a batch of defective capacitors, which caused their motherboards to fail prematurely. 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 [http://www.badcaps.net]. Now they only use high quality Japanese capacitors, notably, Rubycon.

Some of ABITs major customers include the likes of Alienware, Falcon Northwest and Voodoo PC

=Corporate and financial history=

ABIT was founded in 1989. In 1991, they had become the fastest growing motherboard manufacter, exceeding $10,000,000 US dollars in sales. As demand for their products increased, they opened a new SMT line in order to increase production capacity in 1995, and in 1997, acquired a second factory in Taoyuan County (Taiwan).

In 1999, ABIT sold more than 1,000,000 BH6 motherboards over a 12 month period, making tremendous sales records and boosting company profits.

In 2000, ABIT received ISO 9001 certification and underwent an IPO on the TAIEX stock exchange. As their success continued to grow, they opened up a state-of-the-art factory in Suzhou, China and moved to a new headquarters in Neihu, Taipei.

In 2001, their sales doubled from those of the year before.

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.

Recent developments, however, bode better for Abit s future. The complaint against Abit has been returned with the recommendation, according to Abit, that there was no evidence found to warrant further actions on the charges brought against Abit. Abit expects all charges against the company to be dropped in the near future.

In addition, Abit now has a new financial partner in Wan Hai Industries. Wan Hai is a huge Chinese containerized shipping company, and they are also a principal investor in China Airlines. As a new principal investor in Abit, Wan Hai has infused new capital and credit lines into the Abit organization.

Abit s new-found confidence about their future was evident everywhere in the extensive range of new products in their booth at Computex 2005.

=External links=