DFI Rumored to Cease its Consumer Motherboard Production

Well, this is dissapointing. According to rumors, DFI, long praised for its innovation and quality, may be shuttering its enthusiast part production in January, and instead will focus solely on the industrial PC business. This might be just a rumor for now, but given various circumstances hovering around DFI over the past couple of years, it wouldn’t come as a major surprise to me if it happened.

Though it’s not related, beginning back in 2006-ish, the PR situation at DFI was messy. It was hard to get in contact with someone, because by the time someone saw your e-mail, you’d find out that the person you were trying to contact left the company. In a single year, I remember dealing with four different press representatives at the company, and it left a bad taste in my mouth, not to mention uncertainty in the company as a whole.

After all, if DFI didn’t want its boards taken a look at, just how much focus does its enthusiast side have? If you think back to the past couple of years, how many DFI motherboard reviews have you seen? Now think back to 2004 – 2005, or even earlier. At that time, you couldn’t visit a tech site without a review, but today, DFI seems to have majorly shifted its focus. But despite that, it’s continually been innovating, and in many ways, it rarely gets the recognition it deserves.

Charlie at SemiAccurate says that one of the reasons for the removal of DFI’s enthusiast segment is due to the fact that the company tends to get the shaft when it comes to chipset allocation. It’s hard to take that as a surprise, given that the bigger motherboard vendors out there have a total domination, and if you’re a company with a hundred thousand chipsets, you’re likely to sell to your best customers. It’s unfortunate, because it hurts the “little guy”.

That banter aside, let’s hope this rumor proves to be nothing more, or that whatever may be broken can be fixed so that DFI can get on with its business. It was unfortunate to see abit shutter its doors earlier this year, and it’d be just as unfortunate to see DFI go the same route.

You would think that the chipset vendors would have realized that any firm doing innovative things was worth supporting, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case. If all this is true, get your DFI boards while you can. Lets hope someone comes in at the last minute and changes things to prevent another Abit. DFI was one of the last interesting small players out there, and if these rumors are true it will be a shame to see it go away.