What opportunities exist to troubleshoot a mobo (test bench?)?

[jaffa]

I just wonder if there exist any kind of device (hardware not software) that can be used when troubleshooting a motherboard, cpu, video adapter or RAM.

It would be nice just to connect one of these components to some wires when experiencing trouble and then the device would diagnoze the component. It would at least save a lot of time compared to the swapping method (particularly when mobos are concerned). If this kind of diagnozing products exists, where can I find it (and at what cost)?

How for example does Asus, MSI and the other big mobo manufacturers make sure that they boards they sell really work when they come of the assembly line?

How does Intel/AMD test their CPUs and the video adapter manufacturers their products?

Any ideas and help would be very appreciated?

 

[deepinya]

Im guessing they use multimeters.

 

[Peter]

Nope. Most of the bigger chips have an inbuilt connection test mode, usually called "JTAG test". This is used to test the soldering and wiring of the board, and weeds out the more usual production oopses.

For an operational test, there's little else you can do but plug the card into a testbed mainboard and actually run it.