abit Interview with Harry Yen

I am sure many of you are no stranger to the name ABIT and the great products they make. Many of you know them for their great motherboards as well as graphics cards. I recently met a representative from ABIT. His name is Harry Yen. Harry is the Technical and Marketing Specialist for ABIT. I am sure you have seen him in the MML2 article here at DH. Harry showed me around at the MML2 and has stayed in touch with me ever since. He is a great guy and really loves what he does. I want to thank him for taking the time to do this interview here at Driverheaven.

Todd: Hello Harry, thank you for doing this interview with me and welcome to Driverheaven!

Harry: Hey Todd, it's a pleasure to do an interview with Driverheaven and thanks for your time.

Todd: Would you please tell us how long you have been with ABIT? Along with what are you job responsibilities?

Harry: Time flies fast! I have been with ABIT for a little of over 4 years now! I was first hired in as a Technical Support employee for ABIT and I switched to Marketing about 2 years ago. My job responsibilities are dealing with a lot of popular hardware reviews in the US, working with vendors like NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and memory partners to make sure all the high performance memory brands are compatible with our products and sponsored LAN events.

Todd: As many people know you guys are very focused on the overclocker with your motherboards and graphics cards. What brought on the decision to target this type of consumer and how has it gone so far in your opinion?

Harry: It really came about because it turned out that ABIT boards were so well designed and fast compared to most of the other mainboard makers that we started to stand out among the enthusiast and D.I.Y. crowd. When people were starting to build their own supped up and tricked out systems they started to appreciate ABIT, then look for and now expect ABIT.

Todd: What are some of ABIT's newest features that help the guys who want to overclock?

Harry: ABIT has been trying very hard to stay on top of the enthusiast' market. By listening to our R&D team and involving them in every step of board design, ABIT has introduced ABIT Engineered features. These ABIT Engineered features are a direct result of implementing features the engineers have personally designed for performance and stability into all ABIT motherboards. With the invention of Softmenu to help users to adjust parameters without using the jumpers, the world's first Dual Celeron motherboard, our R&D are still trying to improve our products everyday. Some of the new features we have implemented on our motherboards lately including Tweak Guard, which automatically resets BIOS when a failed overclock shuts down your system. Therefore you never have to open your case in order to clear the CMOS again. 4 Phase power solution provides more stable and uninterruptible power to your CPU and it will result in stronger overclocks as well.

Todd: Besides great overclockability I see your motherboards have some other nice features could you explain these to our members?

Harry: Layout and quality components are things that stand out for ABIT boards now. We use some of the most expensive and reliable capacitors on our motherboards. Our R&D engineers are overclockers themselves, and we get a lot of e-mail from people telling us what they’d like to see. We listen closely to that. Finally, we have the industry's first online end to end RMA service, you cant beat that!

Todd: I know you guys are very excited about the IC7-G, Tell our member out your newest board?

Harry: The IC7-G is another high-end, top performing motherboard from ABIT. The board is equipped with 4 Channels of SATA Raid controllers, 4 channels of Dual Channel DDR memory, an adapter to convert IDE hard drive to run off SATA controller, and of course the most user friendly SoftMenu III to let the users to overclock IC7-G to the extreme!! Oh yeah and we include a very nice looking ABIT case badge in the package as well.

Todd: Everyone knows about the great motherboard for Amd CPU's, the NF7-S rev 2.0. What can we expect as the next great AMD motherboard you at ABIT will have out?

Harry: The NF7-S v2.0 is definitely the best overclocking motherboard on the market right now. With 4 phase power solution and 5 bit FID, the users have the full mutliplier options from 5 to 22!! The next big thing for AMD is Athlon 64, and we will have a lot of surprises for our fans!

Todd: What new CPU's and chipsets will the new ABIT motherboards support Intel wise and AMD wise?

Harry: Right now we have VIA, NVIDIA and Intel the top 3 chipset manufactures in the works for our future Intel and AMD lines.

Todd: Your new graphics cards are showcasing a new feature you guys have called OTES. What is OTES?

Harry: OTES stands for Outside Thermal Exhaust System. ABIT is the only video card manufacturer to provide OTES solution for the user. Basically the GPU on the video card is covered by 100% copper heatsink and there is a plastic cover on top of it. After the system starts up and the fan starts spinning, there is an exaust fan on the PCI slot which will blow all the HOT air out of your chassis. So the OTES solution not only cools down your video card, it also cools down your system as well!! With the latest VGA Cards, the trend has been to add more fans. 2 or even 3 fans on the face of the card and yet another on the back. This setup is laughable. By using 2 or 3 fans on the face, a result is that the GPU has no fan directly above it. The GPU does not shoot the heat out from its side, it comes straight out. OTES uses the largest fan of VGA cards and it is centered directly above the GPU and memory for effective cooling. Also, a larger fan is much quieter than a smaller fan that is working harder. And 1 big fan is much, much quieter than 3 small fans. Don't even get me started on a system of 3 fans on the fave, but only 2 of them work, with the 3rd being a backup for when one of the first 2 fans stops working!

Todd: what kind of performance gains has OTES shown to have on your cards?

Harry: The OTES provides the BEST cooling you can get at a reasonable cost. The card is still running at stock speed, but you will be able to overclock a LOT higher when compared with stock cooling. The life for the card will be much longer as well because it runs cool all the time.

Todd: Besides motherboards and graphics cards what other areas are ABIT focused on as well?

Harry: I am not supposed to talk about this.. but we will be building MiniPC's as well. Talking about some Overclocking Mini PCs from ABIT!!! I am sorry this is all the information I can give you at this time but make sure you keep your eyes open!

Todd: You know I have to ask this, so is there anything you can give us a sneak peek of?

Harry: Haha, you know we love Driverheaven. You are already on my list for the NEW ABIT 5900 OTES card!

Todd: Man that is very cool! I want to ask you in your own opinion what makes ABIT the choice motherboard?

Harry: Our slogan for IC7-G is Built by overclockers for overclockers. We have always listened to our customers, especially the overclockers in order to provide them the best features, stable hardware and the most user friendly tweaking utilities. We even have our own forum at http://forum.abit-usa.com where we run a poll every couple weeks, give away a motherboard and collect ideas from our customers in order to improve our products in the future.

Todd: Any last thoughts you would like to leave our members with?

Harry: I really appreciate DriverHeaven for giving me this chance for an interview and their support!

I would like to thank my friend Harry Yen of ABIT. It was my pleasure to interview him and I thank him for taking the time out of his busy schedule to do it! You all know of the great products ABIT makes as many of yourself use them. They are the overclockers choice!