I gotta give a +1 to the 533A. Weren't all that popular but a really good overclocker for the money. I had one @ 824MHz on an Abit VH6 with a Golden Orb. That combo was what replaced my 300A @464 on Abit BH6.
Coppermine Celerons were a great value due to their high OCs. I ran my 533mhz @ 896mhz for two years then sold it to a friend. Not sure what became of it.
Full stats: Celeron 533A - 66mhz FSB, 128 KB, Socket 370
that has nothing to do with Abit's closure.What killed Abit was...Intel...
Strong pressure from Intel retained majors MB manufacturers
from launching officialy Athlon dedicated boards , Abit did even
state that they wouldnt release such boards as they were bidding
instead on the soon to be released Intel i820 chipset that would
take advantage of Rambus Ram for the PIII platform.
Alas for them , after million MBs were sold it became obvious
that the chipset was buggy and millions cards had to be recalled.
Where Intel had enough means to pay for its own MBs , Abit was left
bleeding since they didnt have the growing Slot A market as a saving
grace as was the case for ASUS.
They soon embarked in the slot A bandwaggon , but it was too late.
On December 15, 2004, the Taiwan Stock Exchange downgraded ABIT's stock due to questionable accounting practices. Investigations revealed that the majority of their import/export business was conducted through seven companies, all located at the same address and each of which had a capital of only HK$2. This made it easy to inflate the reported number of motherboards sold. The Hong Kong media also reported that the management was being investigated for embezzling funds from the company.
In June 2005, ABIT partnered with Wan Hai Industries. This container shipping company, also a principal investor in China Airlines, brought the company much needed capital, since the company had financial problems at this time, partly due to a class action lawsuit involving faulty capacitors on their products., but also because of marketing highly technical products to the general public while offering longer-than-average warranties and generous return policies.
On January 25, 2006, ABIT announced that USI intended to purchase ABIT Computer's motherboard business and brand and announced a special shareholders meeting to discuss the sale of ABIT's Neihu building, changing ABIT's company name, the disposition of the company's assets, and the release of the directors from non-competition restrictions. ABIT sold its own office building in Taipei to Deutsche Bank in order to raise money to cut its debt.
REALLY miss my DFI boards. They were finicky as hell, but it was just a blast to eek every last fsb you could out of them. Huge loss...
Too late in 1999? So, how did they keep on going for the next 6 years (I'll grant that USI likely marked the end, since USI lacked emotional interest in the company)? It had a rocky road, and there just wasn't room for them, anymore (it could have been another company, too, but Abit was weak). Funny accounting, a little PCI voltage scandal, and getting--unfairly, unless they denied RMAs--sued over bad caps, and there being too much competition in the motherboard market (integration and commoditization lead to different companies' products not having enough to differentiate themselves), all led to them having no way out.They soon embarked in the slot A bandwaggon , but it was too late.
What killed Abit was...Intel...
Strong pressure from Intel retained majors MB manufacturers
from launching officialy Athlon dedicated boards , Abit did even
state that they wouldnt release such boards as they were bidding
instead on the soon to be released Intel i820 chipset that would
take advantage of Rambus Ram for the PIII platform.
Alas for them , after million MBs were sold it became obvious
that the chipset was buggy and millions cards had to be recalled.
Where Intel had enough means to pay for its own MBs , Abit was left
bleeding since they didnt have the growing Slot A market as a saving
grace as was the case for ASUS.
They soon embarked in the slot A bandwaggon , but it was too late.
that has nothing to do with Abit's closure.
the chipset wasn't buggy. They suffered, as did MSI and several others, from bad capacitors.
what really happened:
Abit enjoyed a lot of success with socket A as far as I know... they only started fading during the k8 era, and I still remember buying a Abit NF8 I think for 754 with Nforce 3, it was not so bad, but at the time first DFI was a big problem for them, and later Asus, Gigabyte, ECS and the other big players just dominated everything...
the memory translator hub had a defect.The capacitors issue has impacted many manufacturers although
Abit was badly hurt and wasnt related with the i820 debacle.
Actualy Abit had no replacement for the i820 chipset
that was delayed for many months and when it came it was buggy
while a DDR Intel chipset was yet to come , all they had at hand was
outdated BX chipsets for SDram while having no AMD product
to fill the gap in the waiting , and when they released one
this market was already very competitive.
^No ones knocking the performance of the Northwood/i850. i850+RD-RAM was just so much more expensive. Don't even get me started on running a P4 on SDR-i845, that was horrible. At the time at least I thought that AMD was much better value... not least due to the venerable nForce2...
Coincidently some of my closer family was running an AthlonXP 1800+ for close to 9(!) years. That's what I call value. Unfortunately the MB died in late 2010...
The Pentium 4 line, Worst ever, second worst to the Intel iAPX 432 CPU.
And the insult to injury was the whole Rambus deal. The Pentium 4 era was the darkages of Intel, when Marketing dictated to engineers how do design a CPU, they to design for pure MHZ just to win the Megahertz wars.
Stupid. The best I would say ivy bridge right now. I am still Amazed at how much power in such a small space my Mac Mini powered by Ivy bridge packs.
^
Performance costs...some people will always whine over that...dosn't alter the fact that Northwood with RDRAM PC800 rocked better than anything AMD had to offer at the time (it took a long time for DDR RAM to catch up.)...and I have never cared for price, perf/watt...or the other FOTM metrics...performance(and stabiliity) is the king...the rest is just for consumers...not enthusiasts.
The most important metric for most buyers within the last 3 decades or more is FOTM? I'm pretty sure we're not even in the same universe, but that AT forums' server just happens to be the same in both...^
Performance costs...some people will always whine over that...dosn't alter the fact that Northwood with RDRAM PC800 rocked better than anything AMD had to offer at the time (it took a long time for DDR RAM to catch up.)...and I have never cared for price, perf/watt...or the other FOTM metrics...performance(and stabiliity) is the king...the rest is just for consumers...not enthusiasts.
Ugh. P4 was the fastest thing out during the Northwood era, and also had low-cost variants that could overclock up to the fastest retail chips out there.
People with memory problems seem to judge P4 for some rough spots :
Socket 423 / Willamette, waste.
RDRAM, overpriced.
Prescott, hot and slower IPC.
Cedar Mill, way too late to be competitive.
That ignores a long period of time from the 1.6A to the 3.4C of Northwoods kicking butt. The 845 and 865 DDR chipsets also had great stability, overclocking, and AGP/HDD/USB performance.
One can certainly say that they never should have gone down that road to begin with, and I'd agree with that. Tualatin was pretty good, and I'm sure if they put more resources into the development of those successors things would have been better. Even so, it's plain ignorant to say that P4 overall was anywhere near worthy of being mentioned as 'worst ever', particularly when there was a pretty good run of being as fast or faster than anything on the market.
The most important metric for most buyers within the last 3 decades or more is FOTM? I'm pretty sure we're not even in the same universe, but that AT forums' server just happens to be the same in both...
I think northwood overclocked and RDRAM was pretty good, I remember some guys overclocking PC1066 RDRAM up to 1200... it was pretty fast on memory benchmarks compared to the AMD machines using DDR, but I think northwood really became great later with the 865PE and dual ddr 400, it was fast and more affordable
the problem of RDRAM is that it was quite expensive, to expensive for the gain, and particularly for Pentium 3 and Willamette (with SDRAM it was a lot worse, but willamette as a whole was a bad deal, even using rdram) it was not really worth it.
I actually had a northwood and RDRAM and upgraded to a DDR nforce 2 socket A PC, and at the time I was pretty happy with that, but to be fair I made a poor choice with my s478 MB and I was to limited to overclock, and I needed more memory, so going for socket A was cheaper, and in my case faster.
Yes. I don't ever recall fabricating chips, installing them into packages, and then soldering those to PCBs. I recall buying parts, and something plugging them into each other.Are people here most "consumers"?
Read again.
No matter how many times I read it, it looks the same. When there's money that can go towards a computer, there's also money that can go elsewhere. Not caring about price is ridiculous.and I have never cared for price, perf/watt...or the other FOTM metrics
Best, by far, was my Intel E4300 Core2 Duo. Stock it was a 1.8ghz chip. I had it overclocked to 3.4ghz on the STOCK cooler for about 2 years! That's an 89% overclock!
Worst CPU I can think of was just about any P4, be it skt 478 or 775. Some of the Pentium D's were stinkers for the price. However the Pentium D 805 was cheap and one of the earliest dual cores (maybe the first, I can't remember). The Athlon 3800 was way better though and ended up about the same price.
Best CPU's..in context because of price and what else was out at the time, including cpu's from the same 'range' that were not as good value, i'd go with
E6300 Core 2 Duo
Q6600 Core 2 Quad
AMD Llano range because of the value of the IGP.
Core i7 920
Core i7 2500
Some of the Bulldozers ended up pretty good value for gaming.
I had an Intel 486 that was poor value at the time...can't remember the spec, something like sx25.