ugh, the following paragraphs were copied from one of Anandtech's recent Athlon motherboard review:
Honestly speaking, ABIT is far from the best motherboard manufacturer worldwide. While they have had some successes in the past, such as the IT5H, AX5 (later revisions), BX6, and the ever popular BH6, they have never been known for their outstanding stability. We've always left stability up to the bigger names in the industry, the ASUSes, the AOpens, and the Tyans.
While there have been numerous pleasant experiences shared by overclockers and tweakers alike with ABIT motherboards, ask any vendor that carries their motherboards alongside a line from ASUS or AOpen and they will tell you that the RMA rate on ABIT motherboards overall is much greater. There was a sigh of relief last year when ABIT announced that they weren't going to dive into the Athlon motherboard market just yet With the number of problems that Gigabyte, Microstar and FIC were having with producing Athlon motherboards, chances are that we wouldn't have seen a product of stellar quality had one been released back then.
So ABIT, along with the rest of the motherboard industry waited around for the perfect time (if one was ever to pop up) to produce an Athlon motherboard. And like the rest of the motherboard industry, the announcement of VIA's KX133 chipset marked the beginning of ABIT's interest in the Athlon market. One of the major concerns ABIT had toward producing an Athlon motherboard was that they did not feel that they could maintain high enough profit margins while producing a motherboard based on a 6-layer PCB design. ABIT's entire motherboard line is based upon 4-layer PCB designs, which are more cost effective and easier to produce than the more expensive and potentially more reliable 6-layer designs, so asking them to move to a 6-layer design in order to support what was, at the time, an unproven processor platform was absurd.