Introduction

Today we spend several hours at the Universal ABIT Co. (Ltd) HQ here in Taipei, Taiwan. We spent time looking at some of their new products, which will be released later this year. We have some exclusive first looks at ABIT's new line of upcoming AMD AM2 processor based motherboards as well as their new Intel 975X motherboard, which will be released in the next week or two. What you will see here today will be a good indication of the types of products you will see being displayed at Computex Taipei next month, which we will also be covering from the show floor.

ABIT's upcoming AM2 motherboards are pretty much complete and ready to go. ABIT will release their "Fatal1ty" AN9 32X motherboard in June and boards should be shipping at the same time. On the other hand, ABIT are still working hard on Intel Conroe based motherboards. From what we have learned so far, Intel won't be releasing any new high-end chipsets till the end of the year and the Conroe processor will use the 975X and 965 chipset. Keep in mind Conroe processors will not work on your current 975X based motherboard due to the power requirement changes of the new CPU which claim to use 40% less power but provide 40% more performance clock for clock.

It would be a safe guess to say that ABIT is also looking at getting into the consumer market space with products such as notebooks and computer speakers - you may even have ABIT car electronics equipment in your vehicle in the near future. Big things are about to happen at ABIT with not just motherboards but many other product segments. While ABIT have no plans to get back into manufacturing graphics cards, there will be plenty of other types of products to keep the crew at ABIT busy.

ABIT's new brand identity

As many of you will know, on March 21st of this year ABIT announced to the public that they were purchased by USI (Universal Scientific Industrial Co. Ltd.) who come to the companies rescue after some misfortunes and troubling times in the past. ABIT assures us things are better than ever and USI are able to provide them with the necessary financial backing to come back bigger and better than ever before, however time remains to see if this comes to fruition. The vibe of the employees inside the ABIT building seems very positive and the impression we got seems to be that everyone is very keen to make a come back and push out some special new product - or maybe they are trained well on how to act around media (just kidding!).

After a little twisting of the arm, we convinced ABIT to exclusively share their new brand logo with us. Here is a quick look at what you can expect.

ABIT is expected to make an official announcement of the new brand identity during Computex.