ABIT Computer AV8 ATX K8t800Pro Dual DDR SATA RA
Great Motherboard specs, Lousy Tech Support
I've been building PCs as a hobby ever since the late 80s and for the past few years have used primarily Abit and Asus boards running AMD processors. Both manufacturers produce a quality motherboard.<br /><br />I purchased an Abit AV8 about three weeks ago and was very impressed by the construction and included features. Imagine my disappointment when I first powered it up, the system passed Power On Self-Test (POST), then started beeping madly and never booted.<br /><br />I double checked everything and tried several tricks to no avail. I then started digging around the Internet for a solution. I finally found the answer on ABITs very excellent support forums.<br /><br />Many other users were having compatibility issues with the older BIOS on the AV8 and Winchester-core (90nm) Athlon64 CPUs. Since the system won't boot, or even display anything, the ONLY way you can resolve the problem is to have ABIT send you another BIOS chip (to be fair, I suppose I could have purchased a 130nm CPU so I could use my 90nm CPU. NOT.).<br /><br />Next, I tried contacting Abit Tech \\"Support\\". The trick is to get them to respond to you. If you send them an email, they tend to ignore it. They've never written back. If you decide that you don't mind paying for a long wait on a long distance call, when they finally do answer the phone, they're very nice and promise to have an engineer call me back. The problem is: the callback never happens.<br /><br />So.<br /><br />Long story short: I finally ended up paying their parts department $21 to ship me a new BIOS chip (which SHOULD have been free assuming I could have gotten Tech \\"Support\\" to respond).<br /><br />Hopefully, their parts department is a bit more responsive and perhaps I'll get to use my new system someday.<br /><br />Bottom Line: If you're using a 90nm CPU with a Winchester or newer core, make sure you have the latest BIOS (which is up to version 20 now) or you'll suffer a similar fate.