How Motherboards Are Made: A Gigabyte Factory Tour

[Looney]

I thought this was an interesting read:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1722&page=1

 

[Abix]

Leet.

 

[snerdini]

Very cool!

 

[Jeff7]

Interesting stuff; those assembly line jobs have got to suck. Put the DIMM socket in. Put the DIMM socket in. Put the DIMM socket in.....ok, I'm bored. How many more today? 6997*?!? Oy vey.








* 6997 assumes 4 seconds per DIMM socket, over 7.5 hours, minus the three already installed.

 

[BW86]

pretty cool

 

[quakefiend420]

interesting...good find OP

 

[TRUMPHENT]

Wave soldering!

 

[Baked]

So that's how they pack and ship the chipset and GPU... in reels. Awesome.

 

[suse920]

automated testing platforms... cool

 

[Texun]

I saw something like this before at another site but with video, and those machines are wicked fast. It looked like a sewing machine running over the board. Pretty neat.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Texun
I saw something like this before at another site but with video, and those machines are wicked fast. It looked like a sewing machine running over the board. Pretty neat.

Bet it sucks when one of them is misaligned; 200 boards are botched before anyone knows something's wrong. :Q



I'm getting some solar cells cheap because they're rejects from the company - most just have very minor defects and still work well. But some of the problems they have with their automation....once a conveyor belt was simply set to run too fast. So, instead of getting picked up by a vacuum arm and carried to the next processing area, the cells were just falling right off the end of the belt. Oops. Automation is great, when it works.

 

[boshuter]

Automation is great, when it works.

Automation is great.... it's the idiots setting it up that usually cause the problems.

 

[D1gger]

Cool, thanks for the link. When I worked for IBM, I had the good fortune to take my customers on a couple of "technology tours" where we would get the opportunity to speak with product developers as well as take a tour of the manufacturing plant. One of the sites we visited we watched them make processors for the S/390 in a clean room (we were outside watching through a window). I always made the sale after the customer saw what went into the systems.

 

[VirtualLarry]

That's wild. It really impressed me that Gigabyte appears to test each and every mobo coming off the line, that kind of surprised me a bit. (Epecially if that do that even for their value-series boards.) I might just make my next major board purchase a Gigabyte because of that. They do cost more, but better build-quality and testing like that is likely the reason why - the mobo industry is so competitive, that blatant price-gouging by mfgs would never fly. The "Bad Apple" thing was kind of funny too.

 

[BentValve]

Originally posted by: boshuter

Automation is great, when it works.

Automation is great.... it's the idiots setting it up that usually cause the problems.

Except there are a few guys who actually know what is going on, the guys that re-work the failed motherboards by hand.
This is the guy I wish I could chat with @ tech support.
http://www.pcstats.com/articleimages/200502/GigabyteFactory_test.jpg