I herard this story from 2 of the local specialist stores, and from one interstate store, who almost refused to supply the product I requested.

His reason beinf that he couldnt guarantee waranty should the need arise. I know a few of them do this as they prefer to push the more common and faster moving gear with larger profit margins.

But these ppl I have delt with for some time and havent had bad info from them in the past.

Has anyone on this forum heard or read anything about this ???

Regards

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Abit was the target of a class action lawsuit, which they settled by agreeing to repair the defective MBs. This is a joke as these are obsolete boards. Still, this must have cost them some cash.

Wasnet aware of the class action on abit.

That may expalin the unusual step to go with Fatal and the high profile marketing exposure bit.

Yu are right any action such as that will hurt the cash reserves queit a bit, no doubt.

I know bit about that side of it my self, from real life experience by the organisation I work for LOL.

Can you elaborate a bit on the problem with the mobos ??

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They were sued over the bad capacitors on many of thier MBs. You may not be aware of the details. In the late 1990s someone stole and sold a formula for the electrolyle thatis used inside capacitors. This electrolyte was subsecquently used in literally millions of capacitors. The problem was that the stolen formula was incomplete and the resulting electrolyte was defective. This in turn caused thousands of MBs to fail and this is still occurring. Just todday a poster reported a MB with leaking caps. This issue was industry wide and there will no doubt be more lawsuits. It is a joke. I have a slotA Abit board with bad caps on it. They have agreed to repair the MB and pay shipping both ways. Problem is I don't even have the SlotA processor available anymore. Bought a replacement board and sold the system. I would be happier if they offered me the shipping costs instead. The money grubbing lawyers are the only winners here.

I might add that I also have an MSI MB with bsd caps on it too. As I said this was pretty much industry wide.

What's the model number on your MSI board?

I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid...

The MSI board is an M6340 K7TM Pro. It is a mATX board I abought for a TIVO machine build. Damn thing went out in 3 months. 4 of the 6 big caps are bulged on the tops. Board drove me crazy because Win98 would install but Win2000 wouldn't. Finally Win98 quit posting too.

Thanks for info Hill !!

I knew about the caps problem, and yes you are correct it was industry wide, almost.

I did notice that in recent times Abit has made a specific statement they use Japanese made caps. And I think asus does also, specially on the high end boards. I read this someplace not sure where, but I do remember it.

But I didn't know about the stolen formula bit, that i suspect would be directed at the cheaper ones made outside Japan. I will refrain from stating the names of the countries.

I have never come across the problem myself, but I did have a Gigabyte board fail recently for no reason whatsoever, only one moth into operation. But I did not pay attention to the caps, they looked ok to me but who knows. First ever piece of hardware that has failed on a rig that I built for close to 4 years.

I agree with you its a moronic situation, taking only one manufacturer to court like that, all would be involved. Cos MSI did have a period where their boards were not lasting.

I don't know what the fail rate is but I think abit boards do run a bit faster and have far more scope for tweaking than most others. This alone would add extra strain on the entire board and every component on it. And obvsly the caps not being to the required standard would give out or cause trouble.

As you said your msi board is just one example.

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One of the advertisements I read for Abit's AN8 Fatal1ty (a board I recently bought for myself) said it "features all genuine Japanese capacitors!" I've only run into two boards with leaking caps in the past--they were both EPoX 8RDA's.

On a side note, I experienced random freezes with the AN8 during periods of inactivity until I uninstalled Norton Ghost 9.0. Seems it really didn't get along with my NVRAID stripes. The board itself has been fantastic.

A64 3500+ on Abit AN8

I think I remember that class action settlement, however I've had my NF7-S 2.0 for a while now and there is no apparent tell tale damage(s) here. No doubt the dent from that settlement no matter how little will hurt ABIT because it's boards fan base is primary within the overclock enthusiast circle.

The other major problem also is that, it is much cheaper for manufacturers to take a gamble on those boards by offering a replacement warranty on the ones that go bad than to thoroughly test the board before selling them since they may end up trashing a lot more than will ever replace under warranty.

Do not type anything in this space.

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The lawsuit is for MBs that predated nForce MBoards by years. The MBoard I have is a KA7-100, which is a SLOT A board. This board is about 5 years old. I don't think any of the manufacturers knew about the electrolyte at the time. Only later did they find out. The total manufacturing timeframe is about 1 1/2 years total, I think. The other MBoard I mentioned is a socketA MB.

I am indeed aware newer boards like nForce models were excluded from the settlement. I referenced the NF7-S because the thread author's remark "2 of the local specialist stores, and from one interstate store, who almost refused to supply the product I requested".

Abit boards are not the kind of boards you can just walk-in and pick at any computer hardware outlet, not everyone is familiar or interested in them.

Do not type anything in this space.

tropic !!

I see you got the chip and board I was initially looking at, the only reason I changed my mind was the boards availability, and price.

So i went with the asus board instead, I would be most interested in your views on the an8, especially on the hardware set-up and bios side of things.

Sabertooth !!

Sorry to say your comment is not quiet correct, well not for us here, all stores regardless of size know all about Abit products, not all carry them this is true but they will get them in, by request.

And to date I have not come across any one that hasn't at least read about or used abit at some stage.

Hearing about the class action answers my own question why this store almost refused to supply the product i requested. Under the circumstances I think I can understand his view, but at the same time none of them have bagged Abit as such nor did they give anything away as to the current class action.

The sad part for us here the Abit boards are so expensive that most cant afford to buy them, and they require above average knowledge for set-up. Especially in the area of the bios, from what I have read so far any way. My look at the AN8 bios in the pdf manual I downloaded from abit confirms this thought.

A board which is defntly not for the beginner.

I could have waited the 2 weeks for the AN8 to arrive but the other side of the coin was the price, the asus was almost $265 AU and the Abit was $345 AU lign them up side by side and bang for bucks against features etc, the asus wins hands down, for my purposes any way.

As far the not knowing the construction of a product a manufacturer uses to build his own end product, does not wash with me one little bit. I say this from experience and over 25 years of manufacturing experience, at both production and engineering level.

The only way bad components can get into your own end product, is by not having an adequate quality confirmation process within your own production environment.

I wont take that any further.

My views aside !! I agree with hill abit was not the only one involved, that seems quiet obvious, and to take a class action against one company only is moronic.

Thanks to all for bringing me upto speed on this.

Janos

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The concept behind targeting one company is that the others will then fall into place. It is called divide and conquer. There will be more settlements. Of course the only real winners, as usual, will be the attorneys.

@Janos

I'm not a heavy gamer, and I don't play with overclocking like I used to, but I'm developing a healthy respect for my new motherboard. Here's what my setup looks like at the moment:

AN8 Fatal1ty w/ Winnie 3500+
2 x 512MB Geil GD PC3200 Cas2-3-3-6
Radeon x700 Pro 256MB
2 x 36GB Raptors (striped), Seagate 7200.8 300GB IDE on IDE-to-SATA converter, Seagate 7200.8 400GB SATA, WD2500JB, WD2000JB
Audigy2 ZS
Netgear WG311T
Plextor PX-716A (if you don't have one of these, don't buy one--if you already have one, RMA until you get a winner)
Kingwin IDE drive drawer
Alpha PAL8150M81 w/ Panaflo H1 80mm fan
Antec True550 (still going strong)
Lian Li PC-65

Pros:

Fast & rock solid. Haven't had a freeze or slowdown since I uninstalled Ghost 9.0

The μGuru BIOS setup is nice--you can set 2 voltages for every fan connected to the MB, and it will bump the voltage if your temps climb. Of course you can manually set voltages/timing for pretty much everything on the board, but that's probably an NF4 feature rather than an Abit goody.

Never seen so many boot options in a BIOS before. Finally, a BIOS that defaults to Removable Storage, then Optical Drives, and then HDDs. Always hated having to put that in manually.

Disable unused PCI clock is nice, but I have no idea whether it actually gives me more performance. At least it doesn't cause any problems.

Haven't had to use the digital error LEDs yet, but it's nice to see that in there.

The board has fans and cowlings to cool both the mosfets and RAM. I guess this is a nice feature, but I took the RAM cooling off because it's a pain in the butt when you want to make changes.

The NF4's gigabyte LAN is great. Low CPU utilization, and it compares favorably with my add-in Negear and 3Com gigabit cards.

IDE & SATA port placement is really nice for my case, but that might not be the same for cases with different HDD cage locations. I don't like the floppy port location--you have to remove your lowest PCI card to plug in the cable.

The board is well-made any way you look at it. Also has decent space around the socket for after-market CPU heatsinks. Even though the chipset cooler Abit supplies is copper and doesn't look too cheap, I replaced it with a Vantec Iceberq--I remember how long my NF7-S's northbridge cooler lasted before dying.

Cons:

Price. You could feed a family of four for a month on this board's price tag. Still, I don't feel like an idiot for buying it. I admit I didn't even look at Asus boards when I went shopping--I had such great experiences with the NF7-S rev2 and even the KG7-RAID years ago that I looked at Abit first. The last Asus board I truly loved was my old A7V.

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