8 ms·

What Happened to Abit Motherboards

144 points by zdw 10mo ago

Apreche 10mo ago
BX6 r2.0, the motherboard of the first PC I built myself, and still the favorite I ever had to work with.
yjftsjthsd-h 10mo ago
> The Abit BP6 was legendary with enthusiasts because it let them make a dual CPU system with cheap Celeron CPUs. And 2 celerons were cheaper than a CPU with double the performance?
- SirFatty 10mo ago
  You could over-clock the Celeron and get even more performance. Both the slot-1 and ZIF style...
- riffic 10mo ago
  they may have been, yes. back in those days, a CPU with multiple cores were meant for the server or enterprise workstation market and priced accordingly. Celerons were consumer-grade budget kit.
  - einr 10mo ago
    There were zero multi-core x86 CPUs, server or otherwise, back in those days.
- ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
  Just by the release MSRP: 2x Celeron 366 MHz @ $123 each - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_processo... 1x Pentium III 733 MHz @ $776 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_III_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_III_proc... And that's assuming that performance scales linearly with clock frequency (which it doesn't).
  - ckozlowski 10mo ago
    Thanks for looking up the numbers! That would be quite the "budget" SMP build. The 366MHz "Mendocino" was based on the prior Pentium II core I believe. So quite the disparity in single-threaded workloads.
  - phil21 10mo ago
    The Celeron 300A was the one most folks would go after for this. I don't recall the exact retail pricing at the time, but they were more or less guaranteed to overclock to 450mhz and be fully stable. Typically retail pricing could be had at discount to the published wholesale pricing within a couple months of release due to how quickly the market moved back then. These were competing with PII processors in 1998, and for folks who wanted to go dual CPU it was the way to go. There was a whole cottage industry of folks modding these CPUs as a small side hustle for people who were not comfortable with soldering onto CPU pins if you wanted to put these into a SMP system. Performance really did mostly scale linearly with clock speed back then - but for a single CPU. The dual CPU setups were not nearly as efficient due to software not being as multi-threaded as it is today. The big win were folks with two monitors (rare!) who could run apps on their second monitor while playing games on the first. Typically you would only see frame-rate increases with CPU clock - and of course the very start of the serious 3D accelerator (3dfx, nvidia, ATI) scene back then. It was certainly the golden age of enthusiast computing - especially for gaming.
    - ndiddy 10mo ago
      > There was a whole cottage industry of folks modding these CPUs as a small side hustle for people who were not comfortable with soldering onto CPU pins if you wanted to put these into a SMP system. When Intel switched from Slot 1 to Socket 370, there was a market for "slocket" adapters that allowed Slot 1 motherboards to take Socket 370 CPUs. The best of these adapters worked out a way to re-enable SMP on Celerons by tweaking the pin layout to disable the lock Intel had added. What made the BP6 so popular is that it was a native dual-slot Socket 370 motherboard that had this modification built in so it could use unmodified dual Celerons out of the box. > Performance really did mostly scale linearly with clock speed back then - but for a single CPU. The dual CPU setups were not nearly as efficient due to software not being as multi-threaded as it is today. The big win were folks with two monitors (rare!) who could run apps on their second monitor while playing games on the first. Typically you would only see frame-rate increases with CPU clock - and of course the very start of the serious 3D accelerator (3dfx, nvidia, ATI) scene back then. Even if you only had one monitor, multitasking was FAR better on a dual-CPU machine than on a single CPU system. For example, if you were extracting a ZIP file, one CPU would get pegged at 100% but the system was still responsive due to the second CPU not having any utilization. If you use a dual-Celeron BP6 system, it's a much nicer and more modern feeling experience than using a single-PII system even with the faster CPU with more cache.
- ckozlowski 10mo ago
  Yes, because there weren't really CPUs then that had double the performance. Celeron CPUs were usually CPUs that shared the same core architecture as the current Pentium standard, but often had a lower core clock speed, lower core memory speed, and/or had smaller L2 caches. Workloads have different constraints however, and simply doubling cache, clock speed, or memory bandwidth doesn't necessarily double performance, especially when running more than one application at once. Keep in mind, this is Windows 98 /NT/2000 era here. Symmetric multi-processing (SMP) could be of huge benefit however, far more than simple doubling any of the above factors. Running two threads at once was unheard of on the desktop. These were usually reserved for higher-binned parts, like full-fledged Pentium workstations and Xeons (usually the latter.) But Abit's board gave users a taste of that capability on a comparative budget. Were two cheaper than a single fast CPU? Probably not in all cases (depends on speeds). But Abit's board gave users an option in between a single fast Pentium and a orders of magnitude more professional workstation: A pair of cheaper CPUs for desktop SMP. And that was in reach of more people. In short, two Celerons were probably more expensive than a single fast Pentium, but having SMP meant being able to run certain workloads faster or more workloads at once at a time when any other SMP system would have cost tons.
  - rconti 10mo ago
    Going from a single CPU to a dual CPU would, in theory, double performance _at best_. In other words, only under workloads that supported multithreading perfectly. But in the real world, the perceived performance improvement was more than doubling. The responsiveness of your machine might seem 10 or 100x improved, because suddenly that blocking process is no longer blocking the new process you're trying to launch, or your user interface, or whatever.
    - keyringlight 10mo ago
      One thing I've noticed is that the phrase "CPU hog" has faded from common usage
      - MontyCarloHall 10mo ago
- rconti 10mo ago
  For some reason you left off the part that explains that the Celeron had a PII core. > Socket 370 era Celeron processors had a Pentium II core, but Intel disabled the ability to change the multiplier to discourage overclocking
  - ckozlowski 10mo ago
    Many, but not all. There were Coppermine derivatives eventually: https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/TYPE-Celeron%20(Coppermine).html https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/TYPE-Celeron%20(Coppe...
  - yjftsjthsd-h 10mo ago
    Not "for some reason"; I didn't see it as relevant. If anything, it being a PII-lite with overclocking disabled makes it seem like a worse option? What am I missing here?
    - rconti 10mo ago
      What CPU had double the performance of a (top-of-the-line) PII CPU at the time?
    - throwway120385 10mo ago
      On the Slot 1 version of that processor you could disable the multiplier lock by cutting one of the pins on the slot.
    - tpm 10mo ago
      IIRC even with a locked multiplier you could overclock the CPU by increasing the base (fsb) frequency. So you would change the fsb freq from 66 to 100 MHz and this way get a 450 MHz CPU from a 300MHz one.
    - lproven 10mo ago
      > What am I missing here? The whole point, really. Sorry, but you are. In the Pentium / PII era, CPU speed was the product of 2 factors: front side bus speed and clock multiplier. The original P5 and the 2nd gen P54 ran at FSB speed: 60 MHz or 66 MHz. The later Pentiums ran at an integer multiple: Pentium 120 = 60 MHz * 2 P 133 = 66 * 2 The PII ran at larger multipliers. I bought a PII 450 MHz on a Gigabyte motherboard that fit in my Baby-AT case, rather than the then-common ATX case. 450 = 100 MHz FSB * 4.5 That cost. Slower PIIs had a much slower 66 MHz FSB. PII 300 = 66 * 4.5 The Celeron had a locked multiplier but you could change the FSB. So, take a 300 MHz chip (running at a locked 4.5x the FSB) but put it on a much faster 100 MHz FSB at the same multiplier and you got a 450 MHz chip, and because it had a much smaller but on-die L2 cache, it was more likely to be stable. These Celerons came on a Slot 1 convertor and that needed to be modified to enable SMP operation. Pics: https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Intel_Celeron_300A https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Intel_Celeron_300A The famous BP6 motherboard ignored that setting and forced the uniprocessor-only Celeron to run in dual processor and overclocked it as well. So for 2 budget sub-£150 CPUs, rated for 300 MHz on a sluggish 66MHz FSB and one CPU only, you got a dual-processor 100MHz FSB machine with the raw single-core performance of something like a £500 processor. I never had one but you bet I heard about them and strongly considered it.
SV_BubbleTime 10mo ago
This is a specifically strange article, niche on niche is putting it lightly.
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  Anyone in PC building during that era knew about Abit. Not really niche for a technical audience, but definitely nostalgic in a way that won’t make sense to anyone who wasn’t into PCs during that era.
- CursedSilicon 10mo ago
  Big disagree. ABIT were the kings of build-your-own-PC in the 90's up through the early 2000's
  - SV_BubbleTime 10mo ago
    Right, so how is that different than what I said? How is a small motherboard manufacturer 25 years after minor popularity in a sub-community not niche of niche?
    - KiwiJohnno 10mo ago
      Hard disagree. Hacker news is IMO a niche community anyway, and I'd say the crossover between people who built their own PCs 25 years ago, during the golden years of overclocking and hacker news readers is pretty huge actually. If you don't think this sort of article is a good fit here I don't think you are really in the target demographic anyway.
karmakaze 10mo ago
Interesting read. I had the Abit BP6 and it was a killer in performance/price. The problem I had with it wasn't the capacitors but rather that the PCB itself was a bit thin to support 2x CPUs/fans. Another cool thing was that the BP6 supported Ultra DMA/66 (aka ATA/66) and it did so by adding a second controller so you had twice as many buses. Looking a pic of it now, it really was a Franken-machine with AGP, PCI, ISA busses too.
- itomato 10mo ago
  Yes, mine bowed eventually even though I put non conductive closed cell foam under the cpu areas. Still, I made good on my promise to never return to single core machines.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
AnotherGoodName 10mo ago
The super socket 7 motherboards were amazing. They were backwards compatible with socket 5 (you had to set the motherboard jumpers voltages though). Some of these boards had both sdram and edo ram slots along with an agp slot, pci slots and an isa slot. So you had an era where motherboads could take a P-75 or an amd k6 550 cpu. They could take ram scavanged from an old 486 (edo ram) or you could put in faster ram. You could run a pci grapchics card if it’s all you had or you could run an agp card. I used my old 486s isa soundblaster awe in that board for a long long time since pci was of no benefit for a soundcard. The only set of cpus not compatible were the slot and socket 370 cpus. But they were pretty expensive anyway and it was fun to be able to frankenstein computers so much back in the day.
- mikestorrent 10mo ago
  I did love that era, in terms of it providing a young frugal person with the opportunity to buy upgrades piecemeal. It felt like there was more generational overlap, as you describe, so it was possible to just go out and buy a new CPU, or a new graphics card, for a few hundred carefully saved dollars of birthday and christmas money, and get a sizeable upgrade in performance. That era is over, especially with the current pricing crunch. What I am hoping for is that this leads to a resurgence for all those used computers out there... plenty of great machines from the last decade that should have no problem being competent workstations for 90% of people's needs for the next decade onward if treated well. This is where open standards and open source truly shine.
  - jandrese 10mo ago
    It was an era where there was actual competition in the motherboard space as different vendors tried to outdo each other with their northbridge and southbridge and especially the connection between them. Computer magazines at the time actually benchmarked motherboards. Then Intel and AMD slammed the door shut on that market by moving the important functionality into the chip and now nobody cares about the motherboard very much.
- mikepurvis 10mo ago
  Pretty sure I had a Pentium 4 mobo that was kind of like that in 2002-2003 timeframe. Was still rocking my old ISA Sound Blaster 16 (the big ass one with the connector for a CD-ROM drive) alongside a Radeon 7500 in the AGP slot. It wasn't much but I could run Alice, Max Payne, GTA 3, Dungeon Siege on there, all at like mid settings, so I was a pretty happy camper for a high school kid putting paper route money into my own PC.
voidfunc 10mo ago
Abit, there's a name I havent heard in a long long time...
- protimewaster 10mo ago
  The thing that jumped out to me was the mention of the engineer jumping ship to DFI. Despite DFI still existing, they stopped making consumer stuff back in 2012, and it seems like they somehow disappeared from the consumer mindset even more than Abit did. I recall that there was a while during the Athlon 64 era that DFI was the gaming board to get. But I feel like I hear references to Abit more often than DFI. I think my old Opteron machine with a DFI board is kicking around somewhere still.
  - whalesalad 10mo ago
    DFI LanParty was the hot shit in the overclocking community
    - unethical_ban 10mo ago
      I had a DFI LanParty with socket 939, an Athlon 3000+ Venice clocked 1GHz over stock, and 512MB of DDR-600. Big baller.
    - freeAgent 10mo ago
      The DFI LanParty UT Ultra-D (Socket A) is my favorite motherboard of all time. It was basically purpose built for overclocking. I got to a stable 250Mhz (500Mhz DDR) on that board and ran it stable like that for years, though I did put an active heatsink/cooler on the northbridge.
zorobo 10mo ago
Ah, I kept that BP6 for 10 years before selling it. It meant I could write multithreaded concurrent software and run it at home with LinuxThreads (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxThreads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxThreads) then NPTL (native Posix threading lib). Mine was not very stable under even moderate overclocking though! Good times!
whalesalad 10mo ago
A friend of mine won an Athlon XP in a forum contest, I think it was Extreme Systems or Extreme Overclocking. He ended up pairing it with an Abit NF7-S, which I recall being a legendary board at the time. He brought it over to my place and we would LAN Unreal Tournament 2003. Those were the days!
- yowlingcat 10mo ago
  Ah, I remember scheming about buying an NF7-S + an Athlon XP Barton and unlocking it, combining it with a geforce 4 ti4200 and overclocking both but not even having enough of the pocket change to pull that off. By the time I was far enough along to have some of that in school, I picked up an A64 and a top of the line Geforce 5 from a black friday sale and had a great time gaming and coding. Ironically, all the scheming I did about overclocking ended up being very unnecessary and I found it borderline impossible to actually stress the upper limits of the machine's muscle with day to day workloads and so all the research I put into overclocking was not really practically necessary, that it was freeing to not have to even think about the machine and instead focus on the work I wanted to do with the software I was using and building. Surely a lesson that continues to pay dividends, albeit from simpler times...
hysan 10mo ago
This brings me back. My first DIY PC used an Abit motherboard. It was a great computer and was still functional after 5 years before I upgraded. I never knew about the poor quality capacitors. I guess I lucked out.
neilv 10mo ago
When I used the Abit BP6 in a Linux box build, I did it as a one-Celeron budget PC with expandability, and put some notes on the Web at the time: https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/ That page includes pricing info for each component, and how I bought it. For example: > Abit BP6 Dual PPGA Socket-370 motherboard, UDMA-66, 2 ISA, 5 PCI, AGP 2X, 3 168-pin PC100 ECC, max. 1GB RAM. Retail version. (Essential Computing $120 + $14.25 UPS Ground + $3.60 insurance = $137.95) > Intel Celeron 500 Retail version, with warranty and CPU fan and heat sink. (Egghead $135.99 + free UPS Ground = $135.99) The box was my workstation, and for a time also a public Web server on ADSL. I never actually added a second Celeron (cost money, and I still wasn't feeling CPU pressure) nor the UDMA-66 (reported to be less reliable).
- pimlottc 10mo ago
  Ah, the pre-Amazon days of checking dozens of online retailers for the best prices. And seeking out the ones with specific batches of CPUs known to overlock well…
instagib 10mo ago
I had a lot of good luck with Abit motherboards. They did a 3day burn in before shipping. I like they show schematics in their materials and still have a sticker from an old celeron build. I booted it up recently and it still works.
magicalhippo 10mo ago
The Abit BP6 taught me so much about multithreaded programming. Programs that previously worked fine crashed instantly due to incorrect locking. It really forced me to think differently about concurrent programs. After that I never found multithreaded programming particularly difficult. Challenging at times yes, but thanks to my newfound mental model not difficult. I had those brass-looking cylindrical coolers[1] from Zalman, and the two of them next to each other was quite distinctive. Had the motherboard for many years as a homelab server. I bought a few more Abit boards after that, but the capacitor plague made me switch to Asus IIRC, and then they folded. But the BP6 will forever be with me as a incredibly cool motherboard that did something unique in the consumer space. [1]: https://www.cablesonline.com/soc370airrou.html https://www.cablesonline.com/soc370airrou.html (except brass finish)
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- serf 10mo ago
  lots of cool 'engineering art' around heat-sinks and exchangers, for sure. Check out some of these shapes [0] , i'd love to have one on a shelf as a talking piece. The coolermaster cpu sink i'm using now is big, but not particularly pretty. 0: https://toffeex.com/heat-exchangers https://toffeex.com/heat-exchangers , https://toffeex.com/heat-sinks https://toffeex.com/heat-sinks
- userbinator 10mo ago
  I had those brass-looking cylindrical coolers[1] from Zalman, and the two of them next to each other was quite distinctive. Like this? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Abit_dual_celeron_pc_motherboard.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Abit_dua...
  - magicalhippo 10mo ago
    Exactly like that, yes! Ran the Celerons overclocked, as one did, and supposedly those were superior in thermals vs noise. Not that I had any reference.
gigatexal 10mo ago
I loved abit motherboards back in the day... sad to see the company die.
oll3 10mo ago
Brings back memories of late nights trying to reverse engineer the Abit uGuru chip. Triggered by not being able to read the sensors in Linux while trying to overclock my computer into being less of a shit computer. Reverse engineering was successful but the computer never got any better. Still, fun and educating times it was!
firebot 10mo ago
My first, last and only Abit was the KR7a-RAID. Along with a phenomenal Athlon XP and that sweet DDR. Good memories.
RachelF 10mo ago
In the late 1990's many HP workstations used Abit motherboards. I remember being surprised that HP did not make the boards themselves.
trollied 10mo ago
They were amazing. I had a dual socket board. I do wonder what they'd be up to now if they still existed... 4 socket ryzen boards, 2kw? lol
aggregator-ios 10mo ago
Interesting read. I had the KR7A-133R motherboard as it won Anandtech's gold award for the best 4 bank DIMM support. It was $200 IIRC and was one the more expensive boards. Paired it with an Athlon XP 1800+ and Radeon 8500. Funny enough the AMD naming at the time was to reflect how Athlon's lower clock speed (1.5GHz) was a competitor to Intel CPU's (1.8GHz). Asus was a strong competitor even then and I remember buying one just a few years before the Abit board that supported SD-RAM as well as DDR as a way to ease the transition for consumers. It was a good time when IRC, AIM, and physical electronics shopping was still a thing. The only big tech presence that techies hated was Microsoft. Sigh. EDIT: Their website is still around! https://www.abit.com.tw/page/en/motherboard/motherboard_detail.php?pMODEL_NAME=KR7A-133R&fMTYPE=Socket+A https://www.abit.com.tw/page/en/motherboard/motherboard_deta...
byb 10mo ago
What a story. This brings back memories and ties directly into my life. In fall of 1999, I built my first PC with an Abit BE6 to use with an Intel Pentium 3 'Coppermine' 500 MHz. I was a fifteen year old kid working at pizzeria in the midwest making minimum wage to feed my computer hobby. At the time I was reading hardocp, and compiled a list of "good" BX motherboards to try and find at computer show that was organized on a semi-regular basis at the local fairgrounds. This event saw numerous mom&pop computer stores travel from hours away to sell custom PCs, software, and hardware. I remember having a bit of buyer's remorse because I actually wanted the BE6-II which featured the ability to change the front side bus in 1 MHz steps, while the older BE6, only had a set of fixed multiplers and PCI dividers. My 500 MHz coppemine (5 x 100 MHz) didn't post at 750 MHz (5 x 150 MHz) and was unstable above 667 MHz (5 x 133 MHz). This overclock still 'saved' me a considerable amount of money by allowing me to purchase the cheapest part and squeeze performance out of it. That computer hobby led me down a path of studying computer engineering and my eventual departure (escape) from the Midwest. Years later, in 2015 I moved to Taipei, and remember walking around Neihu seeing all the headquarters of the computer part manufacturers I used in my childhood (Liteon, ECS, Nvidia). I didn't realize that Abit's former headquarters on 陽光街 is right next to many of the places I've been living and working next to for the past decade. Another memory from that time was buying 128 MB of SD-RAM from Crucial (Micron). I remember being a little pissed because the price had gone up 50% due to the 921 earthquake, which killed thousands and left many homeless, and knocked the fabs offline which led to a supply shortage.
- adamw2k 10mo ago
  So much to relate to here. Midwest, HardOCP (and their folding team), local store was MicroXPress (Indianapolis), just sub Staples for the pizza gig. Also vividly recall buying my first Bigfoot HDD, which I think was multiple GB, thinking I'd never have use for any more storage...
svakak 10mo ago
Ah, Abit, the maker of Only Famous Motherboard as CRD woud call it in this long, but interesting, video. https://youtu.be/UE-k4hYHIDE https://youtu.be/UE-k4hYHIDE
hakfoo 10mo ago
An Abit AV8 was my first "Good" new motherboard. I came into some money and decided to build a then-new Socket 939 setup, with a 3200+. I recall they had one BIOS release that bricked boards, which I missed by not downloading it the first day of availability. The board was eventually destroyed by a sketchy PSU which killed the AGP slot and the Geforce 6800LE that was in it. Later I tried an IP35-E, but had problems (two different memory sets failed) so I returned it for the Gigabyte P35-DS3L I actually wanted but was out of stock at the time.
Zardoz84 10mo ago
I had good memories of AOpen motherboards in the Super 7 socket times. I keep stored a AOpen Ak-77 board...
bayindirh 10mo ago
Their Ultra series motherborads were legendary for the time. Namely AN7-Ultra for AthlonXP and AN8-Ultra for AMD64. Besides being able to overclock anything to its absolute limits, they have repurposed a keyboard microcontroller to monitor temperatures, fans and voltages on the board (aka uGuru), providing unparalleled flexibility and reliability when no other company was able to provide at that time, and after them. Setting fan curves for temperature response was great and allowed me to run AthlonXP at 2200Mhz (200x11@1T) without excessive noise for normal tasks. Their AN8 Ultra provided a rock solid foundation for my AMD64 system, too. None of my capacitors have leaked/bulged despite using systems under relatively heavy load.

144 points by zdw 10mo ago

BX6 r2.0, the motherboard of the first PC I built myself, and still the favorite I ever had to work with.

> The Abit BP6 was legendary with enthusiasts because it let them make a dual CPU system with cheap Celeron CPUs. And 2 celerons were cheaper than a CPU with double the performance?

SirFatty 10mo ago
You could over-clock the Celeron and get even more performance. Both the slot-1 and ZIF style...
riffic 10mo ago
they may have been, yes. back in those days, a CPU with multiple cores were meant for the server or enterprise workstation market and priced accordingly. Celerons were consumer-grade budget kit.
- einr 10mo ago
  There were zero multi-core x86 CPUs, server or otherwise, back in those days.
ThrowawayR2 10mo ago
Just by the release MSRP: 2x Celeron 366 MHz @ $123 each - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_processo... 1x Pentium III 733 MHz @ $776 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_III_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_III_proc... And that's assuming that performance scales linearly with clock frequency (which it doesn't).
- ckozlowski 10mo ago
  Thanks for looking up the numbers! That would be quite the "budget" SMP build. The 366MHz "Mendocino" was based on the prior Pentium II core I believe. So quite the disparity in single-threaded workloads.
- phil21 10mo ago
  The Celeron 300A was the one most folks would go after for this. I don't recall the exact retail pricing at the time, but they were more or less guaranteed to overclock to 450mhz and be fully stable. Typically retail pricing could be had at discount to the published wholesale pricing within a couple months of release due to how quickly the market moved back then. These were competing with PII processors in 1998, and for folks who wanted to go dual CPU it was the way to go. There was a whole cottage industry of folks modding these CPUs as a small side hustle for people who were not comfortable with soldering onto CPU pins if you wanted to put these into a SMP system. Performance really did mostly scale linearly with clock speed back then - but for a single CPU. The dual CPU setups were not nearly as efficient due to software not being as multi-threaded as it is today. The big win were folks with two monitors (rare!) who could run apps on their second monitor while playing games on the first. Typically you would only see frame-rate increases with CPU clock - and of course the very start of the serious 3D accelerator (3dfx, nvidia, ATI) scene back then. It was certainly the golden age of enthusiast computing - especially for gaming.
  - ndiddy 10mo ago
    > There was a whole cottage industry of folks modding these CPUs as a small side hustle for people who were not comfortable with soldering onto CPU pins if you wanted to put these into a SMP system. When Intel switched from Slot 1 to Socket 370, there was a market for "slocket" adapters that allowed Slot 1 motherboards to take Socket 370 CPUs. The best of these adapters worked out a way to re-enable SMP on Celerons by tweaking the pin layout to disable the lock Intel had added. What made the BP6 so popular is that it was a native dual-slot Socket 370 motherboard that had this modification built in so it could use unmodified dual Celerons out of the box. > Performance really did mostly scale linearly with clock speed back then - but for a single CPU. The dual CPU setups were not nearly as efficient due to software not being as multi-threaded as it is today. The big win were folks with two monitors (rare!) who could run apps on their second monitor while playing games on the first. Typically you would only see frame-rate increases with CPU clock - and of course the very start of the serious 3D accelerator (3dfx, nvidia, ATI) scene back then. Even if you only had one monitor, multitasking was FAR better on a dual-CPU machine than on a single CPU system. For example, if you were extracting a ZIP file, one CPU would get pegged at 100% but the system was still responsive due to the second CPU not having any utilization. If you use a dual-Celeron BP6 system, it's a much nicer and more modern feeling experience than using a single-PII system even with the faster CPU with more cache.
ckozlowski 10mo ago
Yes, because there weren't really CPUs then that had double the performance. Celeron CPUs were usually CPUs that shared the same core architecture as the current Pentium standard, but often had a lower core clock speed, lower core memory speed, and/or had smaller L2 caches. Workloads have different constraints however, and simply doubling cache, clock speed, or memory bandwidth doesn't necessarily double performance, especially when running more than one application at once. Keep in mind, this is Windows 98 /NT/2000 era here. Symmetric multi-processing (SMP) could be of huge benefit however, far more than simple doubling any of the above factors. Running two threads at once was unheard of on the desktop. These were usually reserved for higher-binned parts, like full-fledged Pentium workstations and Xeons (usually the latter.) But Abit's board gave users a taste of that capability on a comparative budget. Were two cheaper than a single fast CPU? Probably not in all cases (depends on speeds). But Abit's board gave users an option in between a single fast Pentium and a orders of magnitude more professional workstation: A pair of cheaper CPUs for desktop SMP. And that was in reach of more people. In short, two Celerons were probably more expensive than a single fast Pentium, but having SMP meant being able to run certain workloads faster or more workloads at once at a time when any other SMP system would have cost tons.
- rconti 10mo ago
  Going from a single CPU to a dual CPU would, in theory, double performance _at best_. In other words, only under workloads that supported multithreading perfectly. But in the real world, the perceived performance improvement was more than doubling. The responsiveness of your machine might seem 10 or 100x improved, because suddenly that blocking process is no longer blocking the new process you're trying to launch, or your user interface, or whatever.
  - keyringlight 10mo ago
    One thing I've noticed is that the phrase "CPU hog" has faded from common usage
    - MontyCarloHall 10mo ago
rconti 10mo ago
For some reason you left off the part that explains that the Celeron had a PII core. > Socket 370 era Celeron processors had a Pentium II core, but Intel disabled the ability to change the multiplier to discourage overclocking
- ckozlowski 10mo ago
  Many, but not all. There were Coppermine derivatives eventually: https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/TYPE-Celeron%20(Coppermine).html https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/TYPE-Celeron%20(Coppe...
- yjftsjthsd-h 10mo ago
  Not "for some reason"; I didn't see it as relevant. If anything, it being a PII-lite with overclocking disabled makes it seem like a worse option? What am I missing here?
  - rconti 10mo ago
    What CPU had double the performance of a (top-of-the-line) PII CPU at the time?
  - throwway120385 10mo ago
    On the Slot 1 version of that processor you could disable the multiplier lock by cutting one of the pins on the slot.
  - tpm 10mo ago
    IIRC even with a locked multiplier you could overclock the CPU by increasing the base (fsb) frequency. So you would change the fsb freq from 66 to 100 MHz and this way get a 450 MHz CPU from a 300MHz one.
  - lproven 10mo ago
    > What am I missing here? The whole point, really. Sorry, but you are. In the Pentium / PII era, CPU speed was the product of 2 factors: front side bus speed and clock multiplier. The original P5 and the 2nd gen P54 ran at FSB speed: 60 MHz or 66 MHz. The later Pentiums ran at an integer multiple: Pentium 120 = 60 MHz * 2 P 133 = 66 * 2 The PII ran at larger multipliers. I bought a PII 450 MHz on a Gigabyte motherboard that fit in my Baby-AT case, rather than the then-common ATX case. 450 = 100 MHz FSB * 4.5 That cost. Slower PIIs had a much slower 66 MHz FSB. PII 300 = 66 * 4.5 The Celeron had a locked multiplier but you could change the FSB. So, take a 300 MHz chip (running at a locked 4.5x the FSB) but put it on a much faster 100 MHz FSB at the same multiplier and you got a 450 MHz chip, and because it had a much smaller but on-die L2 cache, it was more likely to be stable. These Celerons came on a Slot 1 convertor and that needed to be modified to enable SMP operation. Pics: https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Intel_Celeron_300A https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Intel_Celeron_300A The famous BP6 motherboard ignored that setting and forced the uniprocessor-only Celeron to run in dual processor and overclocked it as well. So for 2 budget sub-£150 CPUs, rated for 300 MHz on a sluggish 66MHz FSB and one CPU only, you got a dual-processor 100MHz FSB machine with the raw single-core performance of something like a £500 processor. I never had one but you bet I heard about them and strongly considered it.

SV_BubbleTime 10mo ago

This is a specifically strange article, niche on niche is putting it lightly.

Aurornis 10mo ago
Anyone in PC building during that era knew about Abit. Not really niche for a technical audience, but definitely nostalgic in a way that won’t make sense to anyone who wasn’t into PCs during that era.
CursedSilicon 10mo ago
Big disagree. ABIT were the kings of build-your-own-PC in the 90's up through the early 2000's
- SV_BubbleTime 10mo ago
  Right, so how is that different than what I said? How is a small motherboard manufacturer 25 years after minor popularity in a sub-community not niche of niche?
  - KiwiJohnno 10mo ago
    Hard disagree. Hacker news is IMO a niche community anyway, and I'd say the crossover between people who built their own PCs 25 years ago, during the golden years of overclocking and hacker news readers is pretty huge actually. If you don't think this sort of article is a good fit here I don't think you are really in the target demographic anyway.

karmakaze 10mo ago

Interesting read. I had the Abit BP6 and it was a killer in performance/price. The problem I had with it wasn't the capacitors but rather that the PCB itself was a bit thin to support 2x CPUs/fans. Another cool thing was that the BP6 supported Ultra DMA/66 (aka ATA/66) and it did so by adding a second controller so you had twice as many buses. Looking a pic of it now, it really was a Franken-machine with AGP, PCI, ISA busses too.

itomato 10mo ago
Yes, mine bowed eventually even though I put non conductive closed cell foam under the cpu areas. Still, I made good on my promise to never return to single core machines.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]

AnotherGoodName 10mo ago

The super socket 7 motherboards were amazing. They were backwards compatible with socket 5 (you had to set the motherboard jumpers voltages though). Some of these boards had both sdram and edo ram slots along with an agp slot, pci slots and an isa slot. So you had an era where motherboads could take a P-75 or an amd k6 550 cpu. They could take ram scavanged from an old 486 (edo ram) or you could put in faster ram. You could run a pci grapchics card if it’s all you had or you could run an agp card. I used my old 486s isa soundblaster awe in that board for a long long time since pci was of no benefit for a soundcard. The only set of cpus not compatible were the slot and socket 370 cpus. But they were pretty expensive anyway and it was fun to be able to frankenstein computers so much back in the day.

mikestorrent 10mo ago
I did love that era, in terms of it providing a young frugal person with the opportunity to buy upgrades piecemeal. It felt like there was more generational overlap, as you describe, so it was possible to just go out and buy a new CPU, or a new graphics card, for a few hundred carefully saved dollars of birthday and christmas money, and get a sizeable upgrade in performance. That era is over, especially with the current pricing crunch. What I am hoping for is that this leads to a resurgence for all those used computers out there... plenty of great machines from the last decade that should have no problem being competent workstations for 90% of people's needs for the next decade onward if treated well. This is where open standards and open source truly shine.
- jandrese 10mo ago
  It was an era where there was actual competition in the motherboard space as different vendors tried to outdo each other with their northbridge and southbridge and especially the connection between them. Computer magazines at the time actually benchmarked motherboards. Then Intel and AMD slammed the door shut on that market by moving the important functionality into the chip and now nobody cares about the motherboard very much.
mikepurvis 10mo ago
Pretty sure I had a Pentium 4 mobo that was kind of like that in 2002-2003 timeframe. Was still rocking my old ISA Sound Blaster 16 (the big ass one with the connector for a CD-ROM drive) alongside a Radeon 7500 in the AGP slot. It wasn't much but I could run Alice, Max Payne, GTA 3, Dungeon Siege on there, all at like mid settings, so I was a pretty happy camper for a high school kid putting paper route money into my own PC.

voidfunc 10mo ago

Abit, there's a name I havent heard in a long long time...

protimewaster 10mo ago
The thing that jumped out to me was the mention of the engineer jumping ship to DFI. Despite DFI still existing, they stopped making consumer stuff back in 2012, and it seems like they somehow disappeared from the consumer mindset even more than Abit did. I recall that there was a while during the Athlon 64 era that DFI was the gaming board to get. But I feel like I hear references to Abit more often than DFI. I think my old Opteron machine with a DFI board is kicking around somewhere still.
- whalesalad 10mo ago
  DFI LanParty was the hot shit in the overclocking community
  - unethical_ban 10mo ago
    I had a DFI LanParty with socket 939, an Athlon 3000+ Venice clocked 1GHz over stock, and 512MB of DDR-600. Big baller.
  - freeAgent 10mo ago
    The DFI LanParty UT Ultra-D (Socket A) is my favorite motherboard of all time. It was basically purpose built for overclocking. I got to a stable 250Mhz (500Mhz DDR) on that board and ran it stable like that for years, though I did put an active heatsink/cooler on the northbridge.

zorobo 10mo ago

Ah, I kept that BP6 for 10 years before selling it. It meant I could write multithreaded concurrent software and run it at home with LinuxThreads (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxThreads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxThreads) then NPTL (native Posix threading lib). Mine was not very stable under even moderate overclocking though! Good times!

whalesalad 10mo ago

A friend of mine won an Athlon XP in a forum contest, I think it was Extreme Systems or Extreme Overclocking. He ended up pairing it with an Abit NF7-S, which I recall being a legendary board at the time. He brought it over to my place and we would LAN Unreal Tournament 2003. Those were the days!

yowlingcat 10mo ago
Ah, I remember scheming about buying an NF7-S + an Athlon XP Barton and unlocking it, combining it with a geforce 4 ti4200 and overclocking both but not even having enough of the pocket change to pull that off. By the time I was far enough along to have some of that in school, I picked up an A64 and a top of the line Geforce 5 from a black friday sale and had a great time gaming and coding. Ironically, all the scheming I did about overclocking ended up being very unnecessary and I found it borderline impossible to actually stress the upper limits of the machine's muscle with day to day workloads and so all the research I put into overclocking was not really practically necessary, that it was freeing to not have to even think about the machine and instead focus on the work I wanted to do with the software I was using and building. Surely a lesson that continues to pay dividends, albeit from simpler times...

hysan 10mo ago

This brings me back. My first DIY PC used an Abit motherboard. It was a great computer and was still functional after 5 years before I upgraded. I never knew about the poor quality capacitors. I guess I lucked out.

neilv 10mo ago

When I used the Abit BP6 in a Linux box build, I did it as a one-Celeron budget PC with expandability, and put some notes on the Web at the time: https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/ https://www.neilvandyke.org/cheap-pc-2000/ That page includes pricing info for each component, and how I bought it. For example: > Abit BP6 Dual PPGA Socket-370 motherboard, UDMA-66, 2 ISA, 5 PCI, AGP 2X, 3 168-pin PC100 ECC, max. 1GB RAM. Retail version. (Essential Computing $120 + $14.25 UPS Ground + $3.60 insurance = $137.95) > Intel Celeron 500 Retail version, with warranty and CPU fan and heat sink. (Egghead $135.99 + free UPS Ground = $135.99) The box was my workstation, and for a time also a public Web server on ADSL. I never actually added a second Celeron (cost money, and I still wasn't feeling CPU pressure) nor the UDMA-66 (reported to be less reliable).

pimlottc 10mo ago
Ah, the pre-Amazon days of checking dozens of online retailers for the best prices. And seeking out the ones with specific batches of CPUs known to overlock well…

instagib 10mo ago

I had a lot of good luck with Abit motherboards. They did a 3day burn in before shipping. I like they show schematics in their materials and still have a sticker from an old celeron build. I booted it up recently and it still works.

magicalhippo 10mo ago

The Abit BP6 taught me so much about multithreaded programming. Programs that previously worked fine crashed instantly due to incorrect locking. It really forced me to think differently about concurrent programs. After that I never found multithreaded programming particularly difficult. Challenging at times yes, but thanks to my newfound mental model not difficult. I had those brass-looking cylindrical coolers[1] from Zalman, and the two of them next to each other was quite distinctive. Had the motherboard for many years as a homelab server. I bought a few more Abit boards after that, but the capacitor plague made me switch to Asus IIRC, and then they folded. But the BP6 will forever be with me as a incredibly cool motherboard that did something unique in the consumer space. [1]: https://www.cablesonline.com/soc370airrou.html https://www.cablesonline.com/soc370airrou.html (except brass finish)

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
serf 10mo ago
lots of cool 'engineering art' around heat-sinks and exchangers, for sure. Check out some of these shapes [0] , i'd love to have one on a shelf as a talking piece. The coolermaster cpu sink i'm using now is big, but not particularly pretty. 0: https://toffeex.com/heat-exchangers https://toffeex.com/heat-exchangers , https://toffeex.com/heat-sinks https://toffeex.com/heat-sinks
userbinator 10mo ago
I had those brass-looking cylindrical coolers[1] from Zalman, and the two of them next to each other was quite distinctive. Like this? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Abit_dual_celeron_pc_motherboard.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Abit_dua...
- magicalhippo 10mo ago
  Exactly like that, yes! Ran the Celerons overclocked, as one did, and supposedly those were superior in thermals vs noise. Not that I had any reference.

gigatexal 10mo ago

I loved abit motherboards back in the day... sad to see the company die.

oll3 10mo ago

Brings back memories of late nights trying to reverse engineer the Abit uGuru chip. Triggered by not being able to read the sensors in Linux while trying to overclock my computer into being less of a shit computer. Reverse engineering was successful but the computer never got any better. Still, fun and educating times it was!

firebot 10mo ago

My first, last and only Abit was the KR7a-RAID. Along with a phenomenal Athlon XP and that sweet DDR. Good memories.

RachelF 10mo ago

In the late 1990's many HP workstations used Abit motherboards. I remember being surprised that HP did not make the boards themselves.

trollied 10mo ago

They were amazing. I had a dual socket board. I do wonder what they'd be up to now if they still existed... 4 socket ryzen boards, 2kw? lol

aggregator-ios 10mo ago

Interesting read. I had the KR7A-133R motherboard as it won Anandtech's gold award for the best 4 bank DIMM support. It was $200 IIRC and was one the more expensive boards. Paired it with an Athlon XP 1800+ and Radeon 8500. Funny enough the AMD naming at the time was to reflect how Athlon's lower clock speed (1.5GHz) was a competitor to Intel CPU's (1.8GHz). Asus was a strong competitor even then and I remember buying one just a few years before the Abit board that supported SD-RAM as well as DDR as a way to ease the transition for consumers. It was a good time when IRC, AIM, and physical electronics shopping was still a thing. The only big tech presence that techies hated was Microsoft. Sigh. EDIT: Their website is still around! https://www.abit.com.tw/page/en/motherboard/motherboard_detail.php?pMODEL_NAME=KR7A-133R&fMTYPE=Socket+A https://www.abit.com.tw/page/en/motherboard/motherboard_deta...

byb 10mo ago

What a story. This brings back memories and ties directly into my life. In fall of 1999, I built my first PC with an Abit BE6 to use with an Intel Pentium 3 'Coppermine' 500 MHz. I was a fifteen year old kid working at pizzeria in the midwest making minimum wage to feed my computer hobby. At the time I was reading hardocp, and compiled a list of "good" BX motherboards to try and find at computer show that was organized on a semi-regular basis at the local fairgrounds. This event saw numerous mom&pop computer stores travel from hours away to sell custom PCs, software, and hardware. I remember having a bit of buyer's remorse because I actually wanted the BE6-II which featured the ability to change the front side bus in 1 MHz steps, while the older BE6, only had a set of fixed multiplers and PCI dividers. My 500 MHz coppemine (5 x 100 MHz) didn't post at 750 MHz (5 x 150 MHz) and was unstable above 667 MHz (5 x 133 MHz). This overclock still 'saved' me a considerable amount of money by allowing me to purchase the cheapest part and squeeze performance out of it. That computer hobby led me down a path of studying computer engineering and my eventual departure (escape) from the Midwest. Years later, in 2015 I moved to Taipei, and remember walking around Neihu seeing all the headquarters of the computer part manufacturers I used in my childhood (Liteon, ECS, Nvidia). I didn't realize that Abit's former headquarters on 陽光街 is right next to many of the places I've been living and working next to for the past decade. Another memory from that time was buying 128 MB of SD-RAM from Crucial (Micron). I remember being a little pissed because the price had gone up 50% due to the 921 earthquake, which killed thousands and left many homeless, and knocked the fabs offline which led to a supply shortage.

adamw2k 10mo ago
So much to relate to here. Midwest, HardOCP (and their folding team), local store was MicroXPress (Indianapolis), just sub Staples for the pizza gig. Also vividly recall buying my first Bigfoot HDD, which I think was multiple GB, thinking I'd never have use for any more storage...

svakak 10mo ago

Ah, Abit, the maker of Only Famous Motherboard as CRD woud call it in this long, but interesting, video. https://youtu.be/UE-k4hYHIDE https://youtu.be/UE-k4hYHIDE

hakfoo 10mo ago

An Abit AV8 was my first "Good" new motherboard. I came into some money and decided to build a then-new Socket 939 setup, with a 3200+. I recall they had one BIOS release that bricked boards, which I missed by not downloading it the first day of availability. The board was eventually destroyed by a sketchy PSU which killed the AGP slot and the Geforce 6800LE that was in it. Later I tried an IP35-E, but had problems (two different memory sets failed) so I returned it for the Gigabyte P35-DS3L I actually wanted but was out of stock at the time.

Zardoz84 10mo ago

I had good memories of AOpen motherboards in the Super 7 socket times. I keep stored a AOpen Ak-77 board...

bayindirh 10mo ago

Their Ultra series motherborads were legendary for the time. Namely AN7-Ultra for AthlonXP and AN8-Ultra for AMD64. Besides being able to overclock anything to its absolute limits, they have repurposed a keyboard microcontroller to monitor temperatures, fans and voltages on the board (aka uGuru), providing unparalleled flexibility and reliability when no other company was able to provide at that time, and after them. Setting fan curves for temperature response was great and allowed me to run AthlonXP at 2200Mhz (200x11@1T) without excessive noise for normal tasks. Their AN8 Ultra provided a rock solid foundation for my AMD64 system, too. None of my capacitors have leaked/bulged despite using systems under relatively heavy load.