The thing that jumped out to me was the mention of the engineer jumping ship to DFI. Despite DFI still existing, they stopped making consumer stuff back in 2012, and it seems like they somehow disappeared from the consumer mindset even more than Abit did.
I recall that there was a while during the Athlon 64 era that DFI was the gaming board to get. But I feel like I hear references to Abit more often than DFI.
I think my old Opteron machine with a DFI board is kicking around somewhere still.
The DFI LanParty UT Ultra-D (Socket A) is my favorite motherboard of all time. It was basically purpose built for overclocking. I got to a stable 250Mhz (500Mhz DDR) on that board and ran it stable like that for years, though I did put an active heatsink/cooler on the northbridge.
I recall that there was a while during the Athlon 64 era that DFI was the gaming board to get. But I feel like I hear references to Abit more often than DFI.
I think my old Opteron machine with a DFI board is kicking around somewhere still.