Originally posted by: Heidfirst
Notice that those are all older boards though (not to mention that there are such things as reference designs & especially on cheaper lines it may not make commercial sense to deviate much).
Open the BIOS ROM for ABIT's IP-95 in Wordpad, you will find reference to "elitegroup" and "PCCHIPSIP-95". Where do you think reference boards come from? Reference boards are design wins that were submitted to and chosen by the chip vendors. The reward for having one's design selected is exclusivity, at least for a significant period of time (typically not less than 180 days).
Do you think Intel says, 'Congratulations on the reference design win, Foxconn, now we're going to let ASUS manufacture it, too. Thanks!' Nobody would bother with the considerable expense of designing and submitting reference design candidates if the win didn't come with exclusively.
If ABIT has a board design/layout that is identical to an ECS board, there is no merit whatsoever to the supposition it could have been manufactured by anyone other than ECS.
My understanding is that USI do have their own factories.
USI has its own SMT and board assembly lines primarily for industrial, automotive, networking, and other application-specific boards and modules. It contracts-out most standardized large-volume consumer and server motherboards because it simply cannot do these cheaper in its own facilities.
As you correctly note, there is not much commercial sense in using own-design on the low end unless you can sell millions of it. This was a significant reason for ABIT's financial troubles to begin with, trying to use its own designs on the low-to-mid range, when it could only sell a few hundreds of thousands of each design at most. USI is no more capable of manufacturing its own designs on the low-end than ABIT was, not while remaining competitive with ECS and Foxconn.
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