Where did ABIT go wrong and why are MSI still going

Reality|Bites

Reality|Bites

Reality|Bites

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Joined
5 Apr 2006
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I really miss the old days of building PC's if was more fun back then, buying the cheaper AMD boards and CPU's for less than a P4 combined, Corsair with their DDR1 PC3200 BH5 chips etc.

Have I just got old or what's changed in the market that's not getting me excited about anything anymore?
Just seen it all? all the marketing BS told 20 years ago still getting used today...still chasing that dragon that can't be caught?

The most fun I've had was with the ABIT NF7-S and the mobile AXP 2500+ along with a GF4 Ti4400 ( ATI Radeon 9700 times)

I'm just bored thinking back.
 
I can remember when MSI or Micro-Star International as they used to be were seen as a poor, budget brand, much like LG used to be when they started out as Goldstar or Lucky Goldstar as well.
 
I'm just sour from my experience with MSI...three motherboards in a row....and they were out lol. Well my first MSI motherboard was ok with my Athlon xp1900+ (KT ARU or something or other)
Then I went with the Athlon64 2600+ maybe with an MSI some name Platinum board and and to reset the bios everyday to get it to boot, got sick of that and bough the same board again and it was fine for a month or so and then same thing...
New Athlon64 boards came out and I went for MSI again with the fancy copper one piece heatpipe heatsink for NB and SB...same story fine for a bit then had to reset the bios to boot.
 
Tons of companies gone that used to be popular names on tech forums.

Epox, Abit, DFI, BFG, Hercules, lord knows how many I'm missing.

I think Hercules and DFI are still going at least albeit in different markets.
 
I still have an old nforce4 Epox motherboard going strong, great overclockers and reliable, especially after most motherboard companies fixed those bad leaky capacitors that went around the world from that capacitor factory.
 
I had the last abit motherboard that was made, abit IP35 Pro and it was a fantastic board,, it was as stable as a rock.
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Abit used cloyster companies to shield embezzlemnt and cook the books. I've got a little MSI fan with the micro-star international logo. Sadly, if you don't have prominent solid branding, you fall victim to every other easily produced counterpart pretty quickly when past uncertain user error accounts for a great amount of complaints.

It's worth noting they released this right before that, so claims of marketing purity for any company is pretty farfetched https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813127022

I'm using an MSI z370 since it actually had the HPET option unhidden still. It's okay, I don't have anything too wild anyway, but it does 5.1ghz fine on an 8700k allcore. I don't know how many still do have the toggle, and pretty sure intel bullied everyone into removing it. That's the excuse asrock gave me when I dropped their boards for that reason and asked for a BIOS since it literally showed the option on the website and in the manual but they got advised pre-launch. zzz

I don't mind gaming bs as much as 'military-grade'. Every veteran laughs at that ****. All the board lines feel identical since z170 though, for every brand. Nothing has any quirks or reason to go for something different.
 
I remember all the NF4 DFI Lanparty boards having their chipset fans fail, and replacing them with a little aftermarket vga cooler. For boards that were priced around £150, which was bloody expensive for a mainboard back then, you would have to be buying one of the ultra prestige boards today and you still wouldn't have as much in the box as came with the Lanparty. It had a goddam PC carrying strap in the box, so you could put your tower on your back for transport :D A shame it wasn't big enough for my extra large tower, but still awesome.

I think quite a few previously high-end brands have watered down their range and tried to compete at the low end too. They also come up with a brand, dedicate it to the top end stuff or a particular product for a few years and then start putting their name on all sorts of products regardless, so that prestige marque doesn't mean anything anymore. I suppose no-one wants to be seen buying a low end part for their gaming rig, so they brand and package the low end stuff up a bit and still make sure it looks swanky and has RGB lighting. It seems to me there is space in the market for more quality with less bling.
 
Got to agree with OP. I miss the days of the NF7 v2 and the XP 2500.
The socket 754 days were good too, had a few different boards. Epox were awesome for that platform.
Nowadays, everything is good, but it doesn’t seem exciting.
 
NF7 was an awesome board. Funnily enough it's the only board I've had, including the 2 I currently have, that I remember the code for.
 
The Abit NF7-S was phenomenal - think I've still got it in the loft somewhere sat in a blue Chieftec Dragron!

At uni I managed to get a dual Athlon MP 1200 system on a Tyan board with an Nvidia nforce chipset (I think!) - was so fast at the time, had some WD raptors in that box I think, some proper SCSI u320 drives, and an incredibly useless 5.25 Sony minidisc drive.

Modern boards are a bit dull - though I've found the X399 boards to be nice to mess about with. Only stuff that I find really interesting these days is the workstation/HEDT type stuff.


While we're remembering the good old days... I really liked the Iomega Zip drives (or Sony LS120 if you were a bit alternative!), were really good at the time as CD/DVD writing was a pain until the drives/software with buffer underun protection (burn proof?) became cheaper. Even then Zip 250 was really useful for years and much more reliable than the early USB sticks.

And Sun Sparc machines and SGI workstations... awesome bits of kit!
 
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