Hardware manufacturers you miss?

[E-Bear]

next thing your be saying is 3DFX is nvidia blah blah Cause they bought them out.

Please Remember companys merge/buy out compeditors

I do understand that but the fact is that I had many HP and Compaq computers that had interchangeable parts thats why I was telling it. I even had some Compaq with HP motherboards in it and im talking about the weird ones not the regular atx or matx. I'm still owning and using these computers and in my opinion they were solid enough to make good htpc now.

 

[qubit]

HIS

Yeah I mean they are still around making cards and such, but they have been so marginalized over the last 10 years, that they might as well not exist. The presence is almost non-existent. And the products aren't anything worth talking about for a long time now.

Hey, I think my 2900 Pro is a HIS. Been 12 years now...

 

[Fouquin]

DFi

DFI

DFI

DFI....

DFI

I know it's not much consolation, but DFI still exists and still makes motherboards. They migrated entirely to embedded/industrial markets.

There's always that slim chance that they could break into the home computer market again with a badass board. Maybe one day.

 

[RCoon]

Gainward Golden Sample GPUs

 

[dj-electric]

I know it's not much consolation, but DFI still exists and still makes motherboards. They migrated entirely to embedded/industrial markets.

There's always that slim chance that they could break into the home computer market again with a badass board. Maybe one day.

We know that, but they seem to give up. Can't blame them, this market is cruel.
Maybe they can do what SuperMicro does, and make mostly server stuff while still having consumer channels.

Maybe we should blast DFI in social media to try and make a comeback to enthusiast products.

 

[Ferrum Master]

3dfx for sure.

It had the voodoo magic feel.

 

[silentbogo]

I know it's not much consolation, but DFI still exists and still makes motherboards. They migrated entirely to embedded/industrial markets.

I think they are mostly working with a corporate segment now, cause they have some nice embedded boards which I wanted to get my hands on, but nowhere to be found in retail.
Can't even find prices, only quotes. A dozen of ALF51 boards would be a killer for my needs if the price is right (tiny, dual NIC, decent CPU almost on par with Pentium Silver N5000).

 

[Rahnak]

DFI Lanparty board with round UV IDE cables. Those were the days.

 

[heky]

Gainward Golden Sample GPUs

Lol...these still exist. I had a Gainward Gtx 1070 Golden Sample and a Gainward Gtx 1080 Golden Sample.

 

[RCoon]

Lol...these still exist. I had a Gainward Gtx 1070 Golden Sample and a Gainward Gtx 1080 Golden Sample.

I don't think I've seen them advertised anywhere here since the GTX 5xx series

 

[BarbaricSoul]

PC Power and Cooling before OCZ.

Always wanted one of their power supplies but couldn't afford one at the time.

I have a Turbo Cool 860 still going strong in my i7 860 system

 

[ShurikN]

I don't think I've seen them advertised anywhere here since the GTX 5xx series

I don't think I've heard any a single mention of the company for at least 6 years, until today.

 

[qubit]

I know it's not much consolation, but DFI still exists and still makes motherboards. They migrated entirely to embedded/industrial markets.

There's always that slim chance that they could break into the home computer market again with a badass board. Maybe one day.

Yeah, I remember they got out of the enthusiast PC business at around the time I built my Sandy Bridge rig in late 2011. I was all ready to buy one of their legendary mobos, but it was no go. I was really disappointed.

 

[Keullo-e]

Abit of course, their Athlon boards were just epic. Also ATI before they got bought by AMD, though I still like Radeon cards.

Maxtor(Best HDD manufacturer EVER!!!)

Sarcasm, I assume? I miss Samsung HDDs myself.

 

[TheLostSwede]

ABIT sure is missed, their second life as Universal abit was not the same company and not nearly as good. ABIT made some truly unique products and weren't afraid to take chances and come up with solutions that no-one else were even close to at the time.

AOpen also had a few interesting boards, they weren't always the best, but they did again try to be different, with features like tube amps, although this was way too early, as the onboard audio was pretty crap back in those days.

Aureal, the first real competition to Creative Labs, which sadly died quicker than they should've. Unfortunately they partnered with everyone or anyone and there were at lot of poor quality cards as well.

Palo Alto Products, made some of the best PC cases ever, especially internally. The motherboards were mounted with a single screw. Only review I can find these days is the PA-600, which wasn't their best case https://www.anandtech.com/show/372 although there are a couple of pictures of the PA-810 here https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1015981 a case I was lucky enough to own for a few years. Sadly they never made any new models after these.

USRobotics, but I guess no-one really uses modems any more, although it's a company that truly failed to keep up with times.

I'm sure there are others, but it's so long ago...

Brands I don't miss, PC Chips, WinChip, FIC (although they're kind of sort of still around), Conner (some of the most unreliable hard drives ever), ExcelStor (also really terrible hard drives), Pine (the original company behind XFX), Sparkle, both with dreadful graphics cards and equally dreadful logos. I'm sure there are others here too...

 

[newtekie1]

BFG for sure.

 

[silentbogo]

USRobotics, but I guess no-one really uses modems any more, although it's a company that truly failed to keep up with times.

The last one I had was their 14400kbod modem. I had no complaints about hardware, but their drivers were garbage. Not only there was no out-of-the-box support on XP (or older), but also their native drivers would cause some major issues. Mine would suddenly get stuck in tone mode and refuse to send ATDP commands (back then we still had old pulse-dial system in my town) until I reinstall the driver. Tone dial was fine. Had to find a third-party driver from another modem, which made it kinda work, but with occasional disconnects.

 

[VulkanBros]

EpoX and Abit

(and Matrox Mystique - even when Matrox still exists) The Mystique coupled with a 3DFx Vodoo card where dynamite.......

 

[LiveOrDie]

Commodore International

 

[jsfitz54]

One I don't miss, Tandy. ("Trash 80's")

 

[Sasqui]

ABIT because they made amazing motherboards and I loved my old ABIT boards.

Ditto on Abit! Chaintech made good boards for a while... a long time ago.

One I don't miss, Tandy. ("Trash 80's")

Hey I have one of those. Complete with cassette tape data recorder My goto for writing BASIC programs.

 

[Bones]

I'd love to find a trash 80 - Used to mess with those and using BASIC was actually kinda fun, esp writing programs for those.

We know that, but they seem to give up. Can't blame them, this market is cruel.
Maybe they can do what SuperMicro does, and make mostly server stuff while still having consumer channels.

Maybe we should blast DFI in social media to try and make a comeback to enthusiast products.

That's largely what happened to Soyo - Because they got roped into an exclusive contract with VIA they coudn't compete with the others when the NF2 chipset came out and the NF2 chipset blew away anything VIA had.
Poor timing and just rotten luck, they carried on for awhile but after KT800 they bailed on making boards period and invested their resources into things good for their bottom line. As said back in the day they along with Abit were known for overclocking/tweaking and were the ones you'd look for back then.

Soyo was a quality board to get, still have a K7V Dragon Plus! KT266A board here I bought brandnew and it can still clock the snot out of anything I put in it for what it is, plus all the features it had too.
Not to mention an owners manual that was well over 100 pages thick (An actual book) with very detailed instructions and such, Soyo took what they were doing seriously and it showed in what they had and did.
Speaking of quality I only recently had to replace a few caps in it after all these years, the rest still looks good and it was working even with the old ones - Replaced them before the inevitable happened since they had started swelling up just last year.

Speaking of DFI, I'd LOVE to see DFI come back and do something again.
Have several I've picked up over time and glad I did, unless you're lucky nowadays finding one in good shape for a reasonable price is getting harder and harder to do.

 

[dirtyferret]

PC Power & Cooling
Antec pre-2011
ATI
BFG

 

[FreedomEclipse]

HIS

Yeah I mean they are still around making cards and such, but they have been so marginalized over the last 10 years, that they might as well not exist. The presence is almost non-existent. And the products aren't anything worth talking about for a long time now.

IMO they are still big in China/Taiwan. But thats a given seeing as they are actually based in Hong Kong. I see a lot of their cards on the shelves everytime I visit Hong Kong. Competition is still pretty cut throat there as there are loads of brands that exist only in Asian markets and nowhere else.

I think part of the problem being that AMD keep rebadging their cards over and over again and they dont really have that big of a selection of graphic cards the same way as ATi used to because AMD has APUs that cover the lower end of the market meaning that they didnt really have to make low end GPUs anymore like they did in the past. Nvidia on the other hand doesnt make CPUs so has to have products that cover every price range to get the sales in.

Their cards are still being sold here in the UK though but retailers dont really seem to stock their cards in big numbers because HIS only do AMD cards and everyone rushes to buy Nvidia cards

 

[qubit]

Hey I have one of those. Complete with cassette tape data recorder My goto for writing BASIC programs.

If you want to be awesomed out with a fantastic BASIC on a classic computer, you can't get better than the Acorn Archimedes (32-bit RISC) range from 1987 onwards. It's so gloriously structured and powerful that it can cause nerdgasm. Then Acorn went one better with the Risc PC in 1994 that was basically a greatly enhanced Archimedes.

It all started with the BBC Micro in 1981, with the original structured BASIC, of course.

On a modern PC, something like Visual BASIC or similar is the way to go.