They had financial problems and a class action lawsuit against them in early 2000s. The company was sold and then eventually shutdown or folded into the parent.

Those were the times. Unlocking a lot more performance just by tweaking. These days everything is locked down. I suppose this is more efficient.

The last time in felt the same awe, although not by my own handiwork, was when I moved to an M1 MacBook and when I installed Fedora on my desktop. Everything was so fast and silent. Really amazing.

I feel like a lot of the tweaking features popularized by Abit are now available on any "gamer" board from one of the major manufacturers, Intel and AMD now even make chipsets targeted at that segment, and there are a lot more bins for CPUs these days, most of which come "pre-overclocked" even dynamically so with turbo-boost and the like.

The Athlons and Durons of this era had exposed dies, just a few SKUs, no built-in thermal throttling or speed boosting at all, and oversized high-cfm heatsinks and fans felt like a new thing.

More like these days everything is already clocked hard by default. There's basically no point overclocking modern unlocked chips, they are already clocked to 90% of their max speed. Compare that to the above example with 600 vs 900 Mhz (50%! faster)

Some locked chips are clocked pretty slow, but that's normal segmentation :(

What made them mad geniuses? I saw their equipment from time to time in catalogs but was too young to realize they had some kind of special reputation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 is a great example. It was the first motherboard to allow the use of two unmodified Intel Celeron processors in dual Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) configuration. Not only did this cost drastically less than purchasing two CPUs certified for SMP from Intel at the time, Celerons of the era were the first Intel chips with on-chip L2 cache which was clocked at the full speed of the CPU as opposed to the off-chip L2 cache's half-CPU clock on the Pentium II. Abit was also one of the first companies to include jumperless overclocking features in the BIOS.

If you look close, you can even see the blue thermal sensors Abit placed in the center of the CPU sockets (CPUs had no built-in thermal sensor at the time) which greatly eased overclocking.

In short, they made boards that gave you the full range of what was possible, not just what was on the marketing sheet for the CPU.