[HN Gopher] What Happened to Abit Motherboards
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What Happened to Abit Motherboards
Author : zdw
Score : 61 points
Date : 2025-12-30 14:58 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dfarq.homeip.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (dfarq.homeip.net)
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| You could over-clock the Celeron and get even more performance.
| Both the slot-1 and ZIF style...
| riffic wrote:
| 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.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Just by the release MSRP:
|
| 2x Celeron 366 MHz @ $123 each -
| 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_proc...
|
| And that's assuming that performance scales linearly with clock
| frequency (which it doesn't).
| ckozlowski wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| giobox wrote:
| The P3s often cost more than the MSRP at retail too back in
| the day, as they were supply constrained in period for
| various reasons, which heavily contributed to the popularity
| of BP6 builds with enthusiasts. Intel really struggled to
| ramp up P3 production.
| ckozlowski wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| One thing I've noticed is that the phrase "CPU hog" has
| faded from common usage
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Very interesting observation. Multicore systems have been
| fairly standard for the last 10+ years, and while you
| occasionally notice a misbehaving process hog an entire
| core, it never visibly impacts system performance because
| there are still several other idle cores, so you don't
| notice said "hogs."
|
| It's much rarer to see misbehaving multithreaded
| processes hog all of the cores. Perhaps most processes
| are not robustly multithreaded, even in 2025. Or perhaps
| multithreading is a sufficiently complex engineering
| barrier that highly parallelized processes rarely
| misbehave, since they are developed to a higher standard.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >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.
|
| This had an interesting side effect: Celerons of that era
| overclocked extremely well (stable 300 -> 500MHz+), due to
| the smaller and simpler on-die L2 cache relative to the
| Pentiums of the era, whose L2 cache was much larger but had
| to be off-die (and less amenable to overclocking) as a
| result.
|
| An overclocked dual Celeron could easily outperform the
| highest-end Pentiums of the era on clock-sensitive, cache-
| insensitive applications, especially those designed to take
| advantage of parallelism.
| garciasn wrote:
| Yeah; mine ran very stable at 466 for >decade. It was
| impressive.
|
| You could attempt to head toward ~700 but I never could
| keep it stable there.
| jandrese wrote:
| That was a bit of a two edged sword as the heavily
| overclocked Celerons would benchmark extremely well, but be
| somewhat disappointing in actual applications due to the
| lack of cache space. It was right at the start of the era
| where cache misses became the defining factor in real world
| performance. CPUs ran ahead of DRAM and it has never caught
| back up, even as per-core CPU performance plateaued.
| deltoidmaximus wrote:
| IIRC Celeron cache being on die was actually faster as it
| was on die, this was mitigated on the Pentiums by there
| being more of it. It seemed like in games the faster cache
| performed better.
|
| Another thing that helped the Celeron overclocking craze is
| Intel seemed to damage the brand badly out of the gate. The
| original Celerons had no cache at all, performed terribly
| and took a beating in PC reviews. So even though the A
| variants were much better this still had a stink on them.
|
| The thing that probably helped the Celeron the most with
| overclocking though was they gimped them by only giving
| them a 66mhz front side bus speed. Since you had to
| increase this number to push the locked multiplier CPU
| speed up this was an advantage if you were going to
| overclock as you could buy a capable motherboard and run it
| at stable 100mhz. Whereas you'd have a lot more system wide
| problems trying to push a Pentium's 100mhz bus higher.
| rconti wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Many, but not all. There were Coppermine derivatives
| eventually: https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Celeron/TYPE-
| Celeron%20(Coppe...
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What CPU had double the performance of a (top-of-the-line)
| PII CPU at the time?
| throwway120385 wrote:
| On the Slot 1 version of that processor you could disable
| the multiplier lock by cutting one of the pins on the slot.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| They may have sought to discourage overclocking by locking
| the multiplier, but...
|
| People pretty routinely nearly doubled the clocks on Celeron
| 300As, anyway. :)
| vasac wrote:
| The legend was that Celeron 300A CPUs packaged in Malaysia
| were more overclockable than those packaged in Costa Rica.
| I specifically hunted down a Malaysian one, and it happily
| ran at 450 MHz for years.
| rconti wrote:
| I remember that as well. The details elude me, but I seem
| to recall my 300A was running at 464.25mhz on an ABit B7.
| deltoidmaximus wrote:
| And then they left the overclocking back door wide open by
| giving the celerons a 66mhz FSB.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| This is a specifically strange article, niche on niche is putting
| it lightly.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Big disagree. ABIT were the kings of build-your-own-PC in the
| 90's up through the early 2000's
| Apreche wrote:
| BX6 r2.0, the motherboard of the first PC I built myself, and
| still the favorite I ever had to work with.
| karmakaze wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| ISA slots were definitely rather rare on motherboards by the
| time you got to the Pentium 4 era, so that's cool that you
| managed to find one that also offered DMA, since I believe
| Sound Blaster cards needed that to properly function.
|
| I think I would have done the same with my AWE64 Gold if that
| was still an option for me in the early 2000s.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Having googled it a bit now, it's fully possible I have my
| wires crossed, since I know that P4 machine had the SiS 645
| chipset which of course had built in audio.
|
| I definitely used the Sound Blaster with my 486DX100, and I
| recalled migrating it to at least one other machine after
| that; it was nice for the joystick port and also the better
| wavetable synth on classic games.
| rasz wrote:
| I posit the opposite. Super Socket 7 motherboards were a
| terrible choice aimed at suckers trapped by sunk cost fallacy.
|
| >along with an agp slot
|
| Non working AGP slot, or rather working until you tried to play
| 3d games with 3D accelerator actually using AGP features, then
| you got crashes no matter the chipset (VIA, ALI). Solution was
| switching to x1 mode, disabling sideband signaling or just
| swapping to a 3dfx card.
|
| 1998 with the release of Intel Celeron killed any possible K6
| advantage https://akiba-
| pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/981226/p_cpu.ht... ~120 yen to
| $1
|
| Celeron 300A MHz 10,440 ~$90
|
| K6-2/300 10,850 ~100
|
| https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/981226/newitem....
|
| ZIDA BXi98-ATX (440BX,ATX,AGP1,PCI4,PCI/ISA1,ISA1,DIMM3) 15,800
| ~$140
|
| FIC PA2013 (MVP3,ATX,2MB,AGP1,PCI3,PCI/ISA1,ISA1,DIMM3) 2MB
| cache 13,800 ~$130
|
| >amd k6 550 cpu
|
| thats year 2000
|
| >The only set of cpus not compatible were the slot and socket
| 370 cpus. But they were pretty expensive anyway
|
| You are comparing bottom of the barrel AMD CPUs with top spec
| Pentium 3s. Correct comparison should be against Celerons.
| January 2000 prices https://akiba-
| pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000617/p_cpu....
|
| K6-III/450 14,550 $140
|
| K6-III/400 8,980 $85
|
| Celeron 300A $57
|
| 300A@450MHz beats K6-III/450@550MHz in every possible
| benchmark.
|
| by June 17 2000 https://akiba-
| pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000617/p_cpu....
|
| Celeron 533A 10,570 $100
|
| Celeron 366MHz 7,700 $73
|
| Duron 600MHz 9,990 $95
|
| K6-III/450 24,800 $236 !??!!?
|
| K6-III/400 14,800 $140
|
| K6-2/550 7,949 $76
|
| K6-2/533 5,970 $57
|
| K6-2/500 5,350 $50
|
| $76 K6-2/550 is slower than $73 Celeron 366, not to mention
| pulverized in benchmarks if you happened to find Celeron
| capable of 100MHz fsb.
|
| Old slow ram makes K6 setup even slower. You would think the
| benefit were much cheaper motherboards, but even that wasnt the
| case. SS7 boards started at ~$75 while Abit BE6-2 was $90 and
| cheapest 440BX ones (P2XBL) $65. K6-2/550 3DNow! (100MHz Bus)
| $90 vs Celeron 500 $93 https://archive.org/details/computer-
| shopper-2000-07/page/n3...
|
| Slot1 made much more sense, only release of K7 made AMD
| competitive again with Duron on the low end and Athlon way
| ahead of P3.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Abit, there's a name I havent heard in a long long time...
| protimewaster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| DFI LanParty was the hot shit in the overclocking community
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I had a DFI LanParty with socket 939, an Athlon 3000+
| Venice clocked 1GHz over stock, and 512MB of DDR-600. Big
| baller.
| zorobo wrote:
| 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)
| then NPTL (native Posix threading lib).
|
| Mine was not very stable under even moderate overclocking though!
|
| Good times!
| whalesalad wrote:
| 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!
| hysan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
|
| 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).
| instagib wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 (except brass
| finish)
| gigatexal wrote:
| I loved abit motherboards back in the day... sad to see the
| company die.
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(page generated 2025-12-30 23:01 UTC)