How to Build a Mainboard: ECS Production Tour

Unts writes "Ever wondered how they put a mainboard together? HEXUS.net has taken a tour of ECS's production facilities, following a mainboard from PCB creation, right through to burn-in testing. From the article: 'The final production testing is done by skilled female technicians who have the ability to test two at a time, in tandem. They've got some test hardware that I'm jealous of (fast-removal memory modules, CPU heatsinks that don't need full attachment, PCI and PCI Express logic testers, etc.) and can have a mainboard fully functionally tested in a matter of minutes.'"

Comments

Every man's dream....

[Anonymous Coward]

The final production testing is done by skilled female technicians who have the ability to test two at a time, in tandem.

Re:Every man's dream....

[Austerity Empowers]

I so don't want to know why it skilled female technicians are uniquely able to do this job.

Re:Every man's dream....

[RapmasterT]

I so don't want to know why it skilled female technicians are uniquely able to do this job.

my guess is the unskilled ones kept screwing it up.

Re:Every man's dream....

[egypt_jimbob]

And they've got some test hardware that I'm jealous of

huh-huh... huh... hardware...

Re:Every man's dream....

[Anonymous Coward]

Some jobs are more easily done by small thin females because of smaller and much thinner fingers.

This is sort of an old tradition. Look up the threading of core memory for example.

Re:Every man's dream....

[zippthorne]

Seems a little repetative. Almost redundant. Kind of like saying the same thing in more than one way.

Re:Every man's dream....

[neomajic]

I thought all these boards were made by bots...FemBots!

Re:Every man's dream....

[Afrosheen]

Well, that explains why 50% of the ECS boards I've owned have failed.

Like they say, jack of all trades, master of none. If you're working on two boards at once, unless you have 2 brains, 4 eyes and 4 arms, you're gonna fuck something up.

wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

DE JA VU, anybody ? Wasn't there another story just like this about GigaByte lately?

Re:wtf?

[birge]

No, fool. That article was about motherboards. This one's about mainboards.

Re:wtf?

[VolcomPimp]

No no... This one is how NOT to build a mainboard. ECS sucks balls.

Re:wtf?

[Lesson No. 25]

DEJA VU, anybody? Wasn't there another story . . .

Fun in the Factory!

[rueger]

From TFA:

"So next time you purchase a mainboard, think about the guys and gals that put them together, since it's not completely automated... Volume counts and the people are pushed a lot harder that I thought they'd be, to keep that volume up."

Would that be the people who are housed on-site "with ECS providing everything you need to live and work in pretty much the same place" and who apparently never leave the workplace because "work and play are rarely separated, since it's a fair run in to ShenZhen city and you live directly on-site next to the factories"?

Gee Whiz Wally, isn't it nice that they allow their workers an "on-site restaurant and relaxation area, well kept garden for spending free time in, (and an) employee-built library"?

How grand.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[Anonymous Coward]

They're Asians! They like working and living in conditions similar to pre-industrial revolution times! it's FUN for them!

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[Shakrai]

How grand.

I stopped reading when I saw "mainboard" instead of "motherboard". C'mon people! Is this California or something?

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[mister_llah]

It's a very cyberpunk sort of thing, I think... the big zaibatsu providing everything you need from birth to death... very William Gibson.

Kind of funny/scary/unusual, if you ask me...

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[imsabbel]

Sounds like a flowery description for a concentration camp...

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing that you don't know that a lot of factories offer nothing but dormitories.

Offering libraries, gardens, sport facilities, dining rooms, etc. are signs of progressive ownership.

When your workers are often fresh from the countryside, where are they going to live? When they can't afford automobiles, how are they going to get to the library? Where the factory is in the middle of an industrial zone, would you rather provide for their meals or would you rather they buy staples from a mobile street vendor at inflated prices?

I'm sorry that you have no conception of the reality on the ground of the factories that make most of your consumer goods. Probably this is related to why, in 20 years, you yourself may not have a job.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[LWATCDR]

Actually it sounds exactly like the "Relocation Camps in the East" that Nazi Germany showed in their films.
Kinda of creepy if you ask me.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[RajivSLK]

How grand.

Oh, shut up you fat bloated American pig. There are three billion, yes three billion people on this planet who live on less than $2 a day. Given the rates of starvation disease and suffering in the world the workers at ecs live a relatively good life. Not everyone has the luxury of being born rich in a country full of starbucks latte sipping, SUV driving fatties. And don't say you earned it because you didn't do a damn thing. Most people on this planet work far harder than you do.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[poot_rootbeer]

Gee Whiz Wally, isn't it nice that they allow their workers an "on-site restaurant and relaxation area, well kept garden for spending free time in, (and an) employee-built library"?

How many of US have workplaces that provide those kinds of amenities, though? The big perks in MY office include all the free bad coffee I can drink and a concrete stoop out back where you can go to smoke your cigarettes.

Yeah, obviously they do those things in order to make the workers more productive. But I'd wager as a side effect, the workers become HAPPIER, too.
Fair tradeoff?

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[greed]

Well, it's probably because motherboard is not easy to translate and keep the nuance; you're going to wind up with mainboard anyway.

Could be worse. Could be IBM-speak and they're talking about the "system planar", "memory planar" or "I/O planar".

Though I have heard talk of "midplanes" around some Macintosh machines; so looks like IBMeze is included free with a PowerPC.

Once you start calling your disk drives "DASD" or "hard files", you might as well give up. (Though "portafiles" were kind of cute--imagine a full-height 5.25" SCSI HDD in a hot-plug type enclosure... well, it would have been called hot-plug if it was 5 or 10 years later.)

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[Desert Raven]

How many of US have workplaces that provide those kinds of amenities, though?

Probably none any more.

But they used to. Just look back to the late 19th century and early 20th century. Hershey Pennsylvania comes to mind as one of the nicer "company towns". It wasn't at all unusual in that time to have a company build entire towns to support their factories.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[LionMage]

The idea of a company providing everything for workers from the cradle to the grave predates William Gibson by about a century. Gibson didn't create anything new in his vision of the future -- he just recycled old ideas from the Industrial Revolution and updated them for a different age.

Seriously, haven't you ever heard the phrase "slave to the company store?" Or am I just showing my age?

Anyway, this sort of thing occurs a lot. Many mining and railroad companies in the United States in the late 19th century had similar practices. To this day, many companies around the world that employ "sweat shop labor," as we in the West now call it, provide similar amenities to their workers, rather than actually paying these people enough that they can better themselves.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[Cylix]

Let me guess...

ECS Management?

Yet another friendly pat on the back management gives everyday.

Let the postive workflow begin!

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[geekoid]

perhaps, but I can take a break and go pee when I have to, as well as work reasonablt hours and enjoy a life away from work. ALso, I am not beholden to my boss to pay my rent. And I can own a home.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[geekoid]

SO beacuse we are American, we can't point out injustices being done to other people? becasue we want everybody to have a life that doesn't mean working 16 hours a day just to survive you lash out qt us?

you know what? fuck you.

People like you do nothing to hwlp these people, and seem to be content knowing that they are barly more then gender repressed slaves.

And do you even DARE to tell me I haven't worked hard and haven't done a dan thing, cause that is a lie.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[Anonymous Coward]

They had an "employee-built" library at Shawshank. :-)

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[mister_llah]

Yes, southern reconstruction, gold digging, all that jolly good stuff...

I understand its not "new"... perhaps you don't understand the Gibson reference?

1.) ECS is a technology company (not saying there aren't tech sweat shops, our chips and lovely things aren't made by rich men)

2.) These sweat shops PROBABLY don't provide relaxing gardens, next to the factory housing, and various amenities...

3.) It being a Gibson reference is still a bit off, too, there is no "company birth" and "company funeral"... but you will note I didn't say "THIS IS GIBSON'S ORIGINAL IDEA" or "THIS IS AN EXACT COPY OF THE EXCLUSIVE IDEA MADE BY WILLIAM GIBSON!" ... so cut me some slack here, chummer.

Side note:
Unless your a vampire or some other form of immortal being, I doubt "showing your age" by knowing about these things is really possible...

[unless you mean by 'showing your age', you mean you're a teenager who just took these things in history class, that is possible too, perhaps I am taking your statement incorrectly? Sorry if I misread you, old bean]

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[Darth Liberus]

I like how us "starbucks latte sipping, SUV driving fatties" get sneered at for being appalled at the worker's conditions... apparently we should be grateful they're not eating gruel and getting beaten with a stick if they underperform. Darn us evil Americans! Always thinking other people should have the same standard of living that we do!

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[Ailicec]

If and when there are three billion people in "America", there will probably be high rates of starvation, disease, and suffering there, too. I'd like to see populations at reasonable levels so we can be fat and bloated, and it won't matter too much. Meanwhile, I suppose living and working conditions like these may be the best society can offer when there are too many people and too few resources to go around.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[TheGratefulNet]

full of starbucks latte sipping, SUV driving fatties

methinks you should also avoid caffeine, mate.

wow, such hostility. chill..

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Devil is in the details.

What matters is not whethere the onsite supermarket suplies basic food to the workers but whether they do it at the same price as in the nearest city.

It dosn't matter if workers live onsite and use the library etc... that are provided on the compound. What matters is do they still get to save 30% of total earnings betwean age 25 and 35 without much stress. THAT is the mesure of good pay.

I work for a tech support company in Jamaica. It's a branch of a multinational giant by the same name. (I won't state it here for the usual reasons). Enginears are required to drive our personal cars on the job. In return we are paid a monthly car upkeap and a per mile subsidy for these trips. Our monthly upkeep is 1/2 what is paid by most of our competitors. We don't complian because they pay the insurance on our cars.

This means that we are better off since we get to poket more of the monthly car upkeep and the company is better off because of the huge gap betwean the per viehcle price to insure 1 car as uposed to 50.

The same thing probebly hapens there. I.e. In the city it costs $10 per botle for milk. At company supermarket it costs $8. That supermarket is still making a profit. The workers are better off too because the pay is high (reletive to the rest of that contry) to begin with.

You are pore when cureble deseases kill you, when you cannot educate your children to a higher level than yourself. You are pore if when you get to 64 you start counting the days to retierment because of the extra free time, not wondering how you are going to by food from now on.

If your workers stop being pore because of your employment practises, you are a good employer and provided a good job.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[Perl-Pusher]

If I only had mod points! That is exactly the problem! People cry about poverty, global warming etc. Well just maybe the world can't support billions of people! In countries that have $2 a week salaries, it would probably be wise not to have 15 frickin kids! I have a co-worker from India he is the youngest of 18 siblings. He says he was lucky, that doesn't still live there. Fourteen of his siblings do and are poor, yet better of than most where they live. China has had to take draconian measures to stop population growth. They refused to see the problem until it was way too late. But there are still many countries where over 6 kids is the norm.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[Anonymous Coward]

More tasty quotes

ECS can track board production times down to the second, monitoring how long each step of the process takes. If someone is a bit slow at their station, the computer system will say so, and they can be encouraged to go a bit faster after their next break. Also, if a set of boards starts to fail the testing process, they can tell exactly which one of the many production lines in Building 26 was responsible and if needed, track down the exact employee that was responsible for the section of the mainboard that's failing the test.

You were 0.2 seconds slower per board than last week, NO BREAK FOR YOU!!!

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[cp.tar]

SO beacuse we are American, we can't point out injustices being done to other people? becasue we want everybody to have a life that doesn't mean working 16 hours a day just to survive you lash out qt us?

I'm so going to get modded down for participating in this flame... but here goes.

I must say that I do find that a bit hypocritical.

You will undoubtedly ask why.
Quite simple, really: your lifestyle depends on people who work 16 hours a day in those sweatshops.
For those people - with whom you sympathise so great a deal - to have a better standard of living, only one thing is needed: money.
If they were better paid, they wouldn't have to work so much.
However, if they were paid better, there would be no reason for your companies to move their production to such countries; the companies do it not for some humane or humanitarian reason, but for profit: spend as little as possible while making it, earn as much as possible while selling it.

Or, in a summarised version for /.-ers:
1. Move production to und(erd)eveloped countries.
2. Pay the workers cheap.
3. Sell the product expensive.
4. Profit!!!

So, if those workers were paid better (for example, just as well as they would be paid in the US), the companies would decide to save up on transport costs and move production back to the US.

For example, I live in Croatia, where our ever brilliant governments sold the Croatian telecomunications monopolist to Deutsche Telekom.
They bought the shares, raised the prices, exploited their monopolistic position just as microsoft does and made us, the users, pay them back the money they'd spent for buying the company. I definitely cannot think of another reason for aDSL to be about five times more expensive in Croatia than in Germany, especially as it is provided by the same company; they really deserve the name Teuer-Com [teuer meaning expensive in German]
This is a typical capitalistic behaviour - and i'm not trolling: look at the name of the doctrine and you'll see what's in its centre. Profit.

So no, you can't point out injustices being done to other people as long as it is you doing the injustice. I'd even quote you a quote from the Bible, but I'm not that familiar with the English translation.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not lashing out at you personally. I have got nothing against you; you probably work hard and pay your taxes and buy the insanely expensive stuff just because some corporate managers have to make a lot of money.

Here in Croatia, the capitalistic system is on a rampage. It has got so bad that some people claim that slaves in Ancient Rome (not to mention Ancient Greece, especially Athens) had much better lives: they worked hard, but they knew they'd have a home to sleep in and some food and clothes. In capitalism, workers just have to work; nobody cares whether they'll have enough for a decent living.

/rant
Carry on, nothing to see here...

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm so going to get modded down for participating in this flame... but here goes." Hey. I'd mod you up if I had the points, and I'm a "fat bloated American pig".

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[Anonymous Coward]

Without California I believe you would be calling it an .... abacus.

You can thank us later.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[LionMage]

Yeah, saw your apology which you posted as a reply to this, so I'm going to take this rant with a grain of salt.

I fully understood the Gibson reference. Thanks for suggesting that I'm too dim to have gotten it. I read Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic (the Gibson novella, not the novelization of the atrocious movie by the same name).

To respond to your points:

1. Who cares if ECS is a technology company? A sweat shop is a sweat shop, regardless of what industry it services.
2. Not all sweat shops provide amenities like relaxing gardens next to factory housing, true. However, that doesn't mean that ECS is not a sweat shop just because they provide nice amenities. Evil really does wear a pleasant face sometimes. I would suggest that any company which has "factory housing" is suspect. I consider the practice dehumanizing.
3. You didn't say it was Gibson's original idea, but you did say "This is a very cyberpunk thing," which implies it's somehow a new idea. You talk about Gibson's concept of a zaibatsu, etc. The reality is, this is nothing new; these things have been with us since the Industrial Revolution. Some of us find truth in yet another aphorism: Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. (Speaking of which, it's interesting that you think I'm somehow riffing on Southern Reconstruction when in fact that has little to do with anything I'm talking about. The idea of cradle-to-grave company involvement in the lives of its workers got its start before the Civil War.)

As for your side note... you do realize that some people (like myself) grew up in a time and place where we learned about "slavery to the company store," etc., from listening to our parents and grandparents, not from a dry history book. Not quite the same as living through it yourself, but it's a hell of a lot more palpable when you talk to someone firsthand who did. Of course, my parents had me late in life, so between that and having access to three prior generations of relatives, I have a pretty different perspective from many of my peers. But I would still venture to say that I'm above the median age for Slashdot, and I doubt most people closer to that age would have the kind of perspective that I do.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[RollingThunder]

Do you not understand that when you don't make very much money, your children are your retirement plan?

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, shut up you fat bloated American pig.

Where exactly did the parent say he was American? Oh thats right, he DIDN'T, you stupid predjudicial tard. Since you obviously not American, why don't you take your predjudicial bullshit and go back to whatever 3rd world hole you came from then.

Most people on this planet work far harder than you do.

Unlikely, but then a self righteous dumbass like yourself certainly doesn't work hard, since you obviously spend your time trolling on slashdot.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[MemoryAid]

Just to start, I don't understand the Gibson reference, as I haven't read it, but the company town is still alive and well, to some extent in the US military. Most military bases above a minumum size (unspecified here) have housing for active military personnel. Usually, there is a real town nearby with amenities that could support those people, so they aren't really slaves to the company store. However, it is a bit unnerving that your landlord could call your boss to have legal action taken against you for failing to mow your lawn (admittedly extreme and probably rare).

On a more extreme level, there are locations overseas and on the seas (ships), where there is no alternative to military housing. On the plus side, though, there are thoroughly-written laws that guide both parties in those situations (not to be confused with well-written laws).

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[MemoryAid]

I take issue with some of the terminology you use:

1. Compound adjectives should be hyphenated: SUV-driving-fatties

2. Trademarks should be capitalized: Starbucks-latte-sipping (there should also be the little registered trademark "circle r" thingy after Starbucks, but I'm not here to nitpick in the middle of a flame war.

For everyone else out there... uh, sorry.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[MechaStreisand]

Do you not understand that that's a selfish, shortsighted way to think and act that makes people who do that part of the problem?

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[syousef]

Yes, nice attitude. "Since 3 billion people live on $2 a day, everyone should."

How about getting these people out of the poor house and paying them what they deserve. If you have to work your butt off for long hours just so you can eat, what kind of life is that? Makes me feel sick even as I type on this computer.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[SacredNaCl]

ECS can track board production times down to the second, monitoring how long each step of the process takes. If someone is a bit slow at their station, the computer system will say so, and they can be encouraged to go a bit faster after their next break. Also, if a set of boards starts to fail the testing process, they can tell exactly which one of the many production lines in Building 26 was responsible and if needed, track down the exact employee that was responsible for the section of the mainboard that's failing the test.

You were 0.2 seconds slower per board than last week, NO BREAK FOR YOU!!!

That is exactly the system that is in place by much of the garment industry and Nike, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that in the electronics industry in Mexico (or China, or South/Central America). The production is factored to the tenth of a second for each operation, and everyone lives in the company town (more accurately described as a dorm).

The conditions are better than we had company towns in the USA, but that is only because they have indoor plumbing, eletrcity, and other things that simply didn't exist for most of the population when the USA had company towns.

The pope was right, capitalism will destroy itself (and everyone else) if you don't temper it with morals.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[RollingThunder]

You talk like those people have any other options between:

- making sure they have multiple children who survive to adulthood and can take care of them when they get old
- they starve to death in their old age

That's it. Life in many parts of the world is still very brutal.

Re:Fun in the Factory!

[mink]

I remember early HP netservers that had "Hot Swap" HDD bays. A sales guy came into the tech area and yanked one out to show how it worked and it promptly fried out the entire SCSI subsystem. From that point forward we concluded that to HP "Hot Swap" meant the drive was still warm when you took it out.

Repeat?

[ahecht]

I could've sworn I've seen this link here before.

Re:Repeat?

[SubTexel]

Yep. Also at Tomshardware about a year ago...

two at a time!

[hosecoat]

females...two at a time.... theres a video?

Re:two at a time!

[mpontes]

It's not just two at a time, each girl does two *mother*boards at a time. So we must assume it's hot MILF lesbian action!

Who said being part of the working class sucks?

Re:two at a time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Asian hotties that hardware test new motherboards....

If you're a geek, you just blew your load!!!

First (offtopic) post

[It doesn't come easy]

I'm sure everyone who has read the article noticed a gaggle of double-underlined words. These are (of course) one of the new ways to imbed more advertising into the web page. The technology is sold by Vibrant Media as a smart link between the work underlined and a pop-up ad for a contextual sales pitch (they call it contextual keyword advertising). The description from their web site "IntelliTXT(tm) is a pay-for-performance ad unit that delivers the advertiser's message via contextually-relevant keywords within article-based content." The ad that pops up is controlled by the webmaster (i.e. the technology isn't smart enough to figure the context out on its own yet). It's become a game of sorts just to point at the linked text and see how well the ad matches the context of the article. Some are OK, some are a bit iffy, some are downright funny. Case in point, "hardware" underlined on the second to the last page pops up an ad for kitchen cabinet hardware...not what I would call too relevant to an article about computer motherboards. Just thought I'd comment, in case you are paying for these kinds of ads. OK, back to the show...

Re:First (offtopic) post

[mogrify]

There's also a Greasemonkey script to kill them off entirely.

Re:First (offtopic) post

[mpontes]

I blocked IntelliTXT ads a long time ago with the script blocking feature of Adblock. It's so annoying, when you see links in an article, you expect them to be relevant links, not ads. It comes down to the point that people start ignoring the sites you link to in a IntelliTXT'D article, since they all look the same.

Re:First (offtopic) post

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate this crap. I used to visit a site called CSNation, but since they have implemented underlines text advertisements, the page loads as you would expect, but then becomes unusable for the few seconds the page takes to specify terms to be underlined.

Re:First (offtopic) post

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you very much for that idea, I had just assumed the script was server side.

Re:First (offtopic) post

[Anonymous Coward]

That site costs money to host. If you don't like the ads, don't go to it. Stop being a leech.

Re:First (offtopic) post

[brontus3927]

The site costs a lot of money, but ads and intellitxt cost bandwidth and CPU time on the server. Blocking them from running saves the site resources so it can support more users for less money.

Re:First (offtopic) post

[mpontes]

I block ads that are annoying the same way that I get off my seat and go do something else when the ads are on TV. While I normally don't go to sites with annoying ads as a matter of principle, even if I am blocking them, I am in my full right to not allow my browser to execute tons of useless Javascript that will slow down my computer like hell. Last time I checked, it's up to me, the viewer, that decides how I'm going to see something. What would you do if I telnetted to port 80 and just looked at the raw data while parsing it in my head?

Some webmasters need to learn the WWW isn't a TV station or a Newspaper. If you don't want me to look at your precious site, pull the server plug. You don't own anything here, you can't force Internet Inc. to only distribute browsers that won't allow ad blocking. The Internet is an Internet of computers, which we are all part of. If you site, on the other side of the node, has a feature I despize, you can't force me to look at it. You can deny me access and close the connection, but you can't force me to stand something I hate. Sadly, it seems some people see the WWW as a "big TV with a keyboard", and it's only because some people think that way that I get comments like those.

Ads are your only way of revenue? Use inobtrusive ads and I won't block you, heck, I might even click on them. Remember, while TV corporations are the "Company" and the viewers are the "Customer", here (unless you're my ISP or own the backbone my packets go through) we're all the same. I can get the same stuff your site is offering me a thousand different ways. I won't tolerate Javascript crap, though. The only reason why I don't browse with Javascript off altogether is because some sites use them in links. (shame on them!)

Re:First (offtopic) post

[Dogtanian]

Remember, while TV corporations are the "Company" and the viewers are the "Customer"

Bzzt! Sorry, wrong answer!

As far as the majority of TV stations go (moreso in the US), the correct answer was "the *advertisers* are the customer". The viewers are in fact the product being delivered to advertisers; programmes are not the product, they are simply a necessary lure to draw viewers to the adverts.

There may be exceptions on certain subscription stations, but even in cases where you are paying, you may wish to question how far the adverts (if there are any) are subsidising the cost. Obviously, the BBC in the UK is another notable exception.

Re:First (offtopic) post

[Anonymous Coward]

Umh, the site gets money only if I click on the ads, I'm not going to click on the ads, so I'm saving both time and bandwith (and not just mine) by blocking ads. The only ads I make sure not to block are google's, since they are separate, lightweight and no topic.

Re:First (offtopic) post

[Anonymous Coward]

An enormous reply, which totally misses the point. If you don't like the Javascript on the site, you don't go to it. Unless you have an archaic computer, Javascript won't give you any noticable slow down anyway.

Don't pretend you leave any adverts on whatsoever. You admitted to using adblock in your previous post, and after that little rant I seriously doubt you have enabled any advertising at all.

Anything that intrudes outside of the window/tab that you are viewing the site with is fair game, for example pop-ups or audio, considering that it leaves the boundary of the website itself. Depriving a site of revenue which it deserves to pay for the bandwidth you use, just so that you don't have to put up with a very minor inconvenience is, without doubt, being a leech.

Re:First (offtopic) post

[spauldo]

You know, I hear that argument all the time, and invariably my response is "so what?".

I can selectively download webpages, choosing to omit ads, and whoever says I can't can bite it.

99% of people on the net don't block normal ads (not counting popups here). I don't block most of them, but when I do, I don't feel sorry at all, because the measely traffic I generate is more than subsidized by those who do. The uninformed and apathetic masses piss me off in so many ways, so I might as well use them as ad downloading fodder to support the sites I like to read.

You own content and don't like it? Tough. You have other options. Place it behind a password and charge people to see it, develop a proprietary protocol and require a special viewer to see it, or move to another form of media. TV is fine. I haven't owned a TV in years because I don't feel the meager content on it is worth the annoying ads that are taking up more and more time. You won't have to worry about me watching your content without seeing the ads.

Besides, adblock generally works as a blacklist. You can't "turn ads off" altogether. You block by globbing.

Re:First (offtopic) post

[NaDrew]

I'm sure everyone who has read the article noticed a gaggle of double-underlined words.

Nope, didn't notice a thing.

A girl tested it?

[Ruud Althuizen]

So you are saying that a GIRL has tested and touched my mobo? I am never going to get rid of this one.

Re:A girl tested it?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Actually, when I was in high-speed PCB assembly, we referred to them as "Carbon Units" .

they actually test them?

[digitalride]

Judging from the number of bad motherboards I've gotten from DFI and Gigabyte, I'm surprised motherboard makers test them at all. It seems they leave the testing up to the system builder. I've been searching to find the best motherboard maker in terms of reliability, but all of the reviews are mixed. It might be time to give ECS a try. Anyone have other suggestions for a reliable motherboard brand?

Re:they actually test them?

[Lead Butthead]

Judging from the number of bad motherboards I've gotten from DFI and Gigabyte, I'm surprised motherboard makers test them at all.

I think they mean that they SAMPLE board from batch to batch. If a board "randomly selected" from a batch is tested good, the entire batch is considered good; not an uncommon practice.

Re:they actually test them?

[Zutfen]

I was thinking the same thing.

I have had horrendous experiences with ASUS and Gigabyte, and have been trying to figure out what company's mobos to use. If ECS actually tests each board prior to shipping it, it would make sense then to reason there would be less D.O.A. boards and less RMA'ing needed.

Saving me time and money? I'll take three!

Re:they actually test them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is good in it's own right.

You really don't want them to test all of the boards anyway.

Put it this way... if by chance you foobar a brand new board then do you really want to pay for a replacement? Heavens no! You call up and say your brand new motherboard does not work at all!

Wala... free replacement!

Re:they actually test them?

[mrbcs]

Asus. Period. I sell nothing else. I've had one returned on warranty due to customer screw up in 5 years. Ecs are cheap and often fail after a couple years.

Re:they actually test them?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an ECS board. It sucks. I'll never buy another.

Re:they actually test them?

[unts]

TFA says 3% of the boards are tested.

Re:they actually test them?

[Anonymous Coward]

You get what you pay for and ECS = PC Chips = Cheapest board you can buy.

Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't. PC Chips also makes a lot of motherboards for major PC manufacturers, so they aren't all junk. Just a lot of them are.

If you're going for quality, though, Gigabyte isn't bad and Asus is better.

Re:they actually test them?

[jridley]

Tyan? I haven't tried them, but friends swear by them.

I personally use ASUS and ABIT, and have not had any trouble, but I've only built about a dozen systems in the last 10 years. I never overclock, I don't need the fastest machine, I just want stability.

Re:they actually test them?

[brontus3927]

ASUS makes rock solid boards. Of the dozen or so I've used the only one that has ever been anything but stable was the very first board I ever used in the very early days before I realized you had to use those stand-offs to keep from shorting out the board on the case. And even then, it still ran, just never quite right.

Now if your looking for a low-cost board, ASRock is bar-none. I've heard rumours that they are the value-brand for ASUS, and I certainly believe that. I've built a handfull of systems with ASRock boards, and have had no problems. They have on-board graphics, audio, LAN, and usually a modem riser.

Re:they actually test them?

[scooby_mich]

Definately don't get an ECS motherboard, if you ask me. I had one fail on my before. Blown capacitor. From my experience, along with many friend of mine that build and support pc's. I would go with ASUS, ABIT, or Gigabyte...

Re:they actually test them?

[birge]

So, only 3% of us have actually had our boards touched by a woman. That sounds about right.

Re:they actually test them?

[revmoo]

Don't bother with ECS, I've been through a couple of their motherboards, they are no more reliable than any other low-end motherboard manufacturer, this is based on my personal experience.

Re:they actually test them?

[geekoid]

"...and Gigabyte,..."

really? I ahve never had a problem with them..ever. I have probably tried every Mobo vendor out there.

Pont in fact, I have had pentium 400MHz running on one since the 400 was new.
ECS has a horrible reputation, and Fry's uses them as the bait in their bait and switch scam.

Re:they actually test them?

[psm321]

I'm logging in for the first time in a long time just to post this...

I've had nothing but trouble with ASUS boards. On the other hand, both Gigabyte and DFI have been great for me.

Re:they actually test them?

[tomstdenis]

Standards compliance. The problem with ECS is they don't have them.

Like many others I've had numerous ASUS boards [on both sides of the Intel/AMD camps] and the most significant problem I've had [outside of things that are my fault] was a BIOS reflashing that failed because the shipping BIOS with my A7V [1004 if you're wondering] was faulty.

ASUS boards rarely if ever have problems with newer tech such as new PCI/AGP cards and often at most a BIOS update is all that is required.

Tom

Re:they actually test them?

[Bishop]

At two million boards a month (about 1 a second) they do not test every board. Especially a functional test as shown in the pictures. Functional tests are very expensive. Even visual testing is expensive. The Hexus guys were probably shown a prototype run. Before a board goes into full production they will run several batches of boards to detect and correct any last minute production issues.

Re:they actually test them?

[damsa]

ECS is not very good, from my small batch of systems I built. There is a problem with bios corruption and Cmos battery issues. But you get one for free if you buy a processor from Frys. I have a broken ECS board. Shipping for RMA would cost more than just buying another processor at Frys and getting another free board.

Re:they actually test them?

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news, 68% of men claim their mobo was tested by a woman.

Re:they actually test them?

[jacksonj04]

I see a lot of this, there are some people who have used several ASUS boards with no problems, and others who seem to have loads of issues.

Perhaps different fab sites? Older chipsets on some of them?

I'm in the UK, and all 7 of the ASUS mobos I've used in the past 4 years have been solid, even when i've done daft things like dropped screws onto the tracks whilst they were running.

Where are you and what kind of boards were you running?

Re:they actually test them?

[swatoa]

My ECS K7S5A hasn't given me any trouble, and I've had it for almost 5 years. Contrast that fact with 2 PSUs (Antec TRUE380s - never buying that company's junk again), an IBM HDD, and a no name crap stick of memory that have kicked the bucket - all a part of the same desktop machine.

Re:they actually test them?

[ergean]

Stay with DFI - middle and up range infinity/lan party. They make more then decent boards.
The problem with them - if you don't know what you're doing you can hunt a stupid change in bios for a very long time. Some of the options (especially NIC related seting) don't revert when you load the default settings, so your best choise is the Clear CMOS jumper. I have seen good motherboards from DFI run like crap only because the users changed something in bios and didn't remember.
Had horrible experience with Gigabyte, don't know why they really suck at stability now and seem to have problems with the video cards.

Re:they actually test them?

[toddestan]

I've had nothing but problems with both Asus and Gigabyte. I'm now of the opinion that paying the premium for a higher end brand is just throwing your money away. Might as well just buy yourself a PCChips board and save yourself some money. Though I have had some luck with midrange brands like Soltek.

Incidently, I also have 2 ECS Super 7 boards from 1998 that are still going strong.

Re:they actually test them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, recommendations please.

Especially for OEMs that test their mainboards
with the processor overclocked!

Re:they actually test them?

[psm321]

I'm in the US... The motherboard that I personally had was the one that comes with the Asus Pundit. My friend, however, also had a couple Asus boards go bad on him (some came that way). I don't know the model of those offhand (I can find that if you really care)

Re:they actually test them?

[Squirrley]

No no no, TFA says that 3% are "burnt in", all of them get tested, only 3% of them get stress-tested for 24 hours.

Re:they actually test them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone have other suggestions for a reliable motherboard brand?

Yeah. Almost anybody but ECS.

Re:they actually test them?

[spauldo]

ECS boards are part of the ECS/Amptron/PC Chips group. They're well known for high RMA rates and faulty components. They're cheap for a reason.

In general, unless you're dealing with a large number of builds, it doesn't really matter. If you buy five boards, you'll be just as likely to find a bad PC Chips board as a bad ASUS or AOpen board.

The difference comes in where you're dealing with large numbers of machines, such as if you're an IT shop that builds its own workstations or a computer shop selling white boxes. In those cases, you want to spend a little more on a board with low RMA rates. My old computer shop got burned using Amptron boards - after a little research, we found a nice cheap AOpen board that would suit our needs perfectly and had a much lower RMA rate.

Same with Seagate drives - at the time, a survey I found showed Seagate as having the lowest RMA rate in their drives, so we paid the extra $5-10 for Seagate drives. Nowdays from what I've seen Maxtor's improved as far as reliability goes, but last I saw (which was a while back) their warrantee wasn't as good.

So, unless you're building a lot of machines, don't worry too much about brand and concern yourself more with the feature set. If you're building a lot, then it pays to do a little research beforehand.

Re:they actually test them?

[spauldo]

I've never used them in large quantities, but I bought the first tiger board that supported a dual athlon setup (it was the second tyan board that did, but the thunder model was $650 for the board alone).

It's done well, but there were problems with the BIOS that took them a while to fix. The early revisions had problems with interrupt handling on the PCI bus, causing any ethernet card or the builtin ethernet port to stop functioning, among other issues - upgrading the BIOS fixed that. Also, the onboard USB had a design flaw, and to this day I can't get USB to work reliably on this thing using the card they shipped with the motherboard (they also shipped a backplate with the USB port covered).

Of course, Tyan was the first board to support dual athlons, so that sort of thing is to be expected.

Heavenly

[Foolomon]

Two females and lots of hardware: a geek's dream.

uh...

[BortQ]

Because what mainboard article would be complete without being jealous of the female technician's hardware...

Sex?

[Anonymous Coward]

The final production testing is done by skilled female technicians who have the ability to test two at a time, in tandem.

Why does gender matter?

Re:Sex?

[erikharrison]

Because it's cheap Chinese labor, and women tend to work in the factories.

Re:Sex?

[schon]

Why does gender matter?

So that when the article is published on /., millions of geeks will click through just see if there's a picture. :o)

Re:Sex?

[HarvardFrankenstein]

It's a psychological thing. The key phrase is at the end, "...who have the ability to test two at a time." Male brains are physiologicially incapable of processing more than one thought at a time. That is why when a man is driving, as in actually concentrating on it, his ability to have a conversation diminishes - he's simply not capable of doing both.

Female brains, on the other hand, are capable of processing more than one thought at a time (I'm not sure if it's only two, it might be more). The female brain essentially has hyperthreading.

I'm not really sure why they would need to be able to test two at the same time, but then again, I also didn't RTFA because my firewall at work blocked it for some reason.

Re:Sex?

[Anonymous Coward]

And when did you join the church of scientology? you seem to know about science as much as they do. I can certainly think about two things at at the same time, and I'm male (actually, I can't stop it, only once I could single thread, because I was ill, it felt weird). Oh, but I run linux, that's it.

Re:Sex?

[HarvardFrankenstein]

"Psychology," not Scientology. Try picking up a textbook. It's a fact.

Re:Sex?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, psychology. I'm in my forth year of a psychology major and minor, and you are full of bullshit. Sex differences for attention and divided attention are insignificant.

ECS K7S5A

[mrm677]

ECS are great boards if you can deal with kinks. For example, I had random freezes after I upgraded from an Athlon 900MHz to a Athlon XP 1800. I found a site that outlined how to solve the problem by soldering on an additional resistor to adjust the voltage of one of the supply lines to the CPU. Scary procedure, but it worked like a charm!

Re:ECS K7S5A

[simcop2387]

i too have one of these boards, haven't had problems like that... but i have had problems with heat that i can't seem to explain other than faulty motherboard or faulty cpu (Athlon XP 1800 also). the ECS boards are far from perfect but i've never had one that was completely unusable (i just got a better fan one made to run an XP3200 i think it was), although i have had one physically break on the plastic fan clips on the cpu socket, fan broke them (poor design of the fan not the motherboard) and fell right off while using it and fried the whole damn thing, nice smell burnt silicon is.

Re:ECS K7S5A

[stinerman]

I also have one of those, but it is labeled as a PC-Chips M830LR.

As far as being great boards, I'd have to disagree. Boards aren't supposed to have "kinks" in them. And most likely, you probably killed the warranty on your board by using the soldering technique. Although, that doesn't really matter.

AFAIK, no one at ECS/PC-Chips will even acknowlege that there is anything wrong with that model, much less let you RMA it for a working replacement. I'd say that bad products and shitty customer service aren't exactly what most people are looking for in a motherboard.

Re:ECS K7S5A

[KenBot_314]

And thats what you call a great board????

Any board that requires soldering knowledge for it to work AS ADVERTISED is not what I consider good.

Re:ECS K7S5A

[Temsi]

I'd rather pay for a used Asus than be given a new ECS for free.

Never had anything but problems with ECS. They're a total waste of time and resources IMHO.

There is a difference between cheap and inexpensive, and ECS is cheap.

Re:ECS K7S5A

[digidave]

"solve the problem by soldering on an additional resistor to adjust the voltage of one of the supply lines to the CPU"

That's not a "kink", that's faulty engineering. A kink would be needing to press the delete key twice to get to the bios config.

And ECS are not great boards in any reasonable use of the phrase.

Re:ECS K7S5A

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's still a matter of getting what you pay for, I've had a K7S5A for more than 3 years now and while it does occasionally restart itself, it was only $35 new and was actually more stable than the biostar board it replaced. My main computer has a soltek sl-75drv5 that i recently noticed has leaky caps unfortunately, they sent me new ones (its out of warranty by a few years) but i havent taken the board actually out yet to see if my soldering skills are enough for this (likely not) but the leaky capacitor thing affected almost everyone. now that I think about it, I should probably check that ECS for that....

Re:ECS K7S5A

[inkdesign]

I have that board.. HORRIBLE PROBLEMS! It loses the bios settings about once per week, and at about the same frequency requires that I clear the CMOS by opening the case and playing with the jumper to even boot. Even when putting the system together, the power connector had to be cut in half to remove the blank space in the middle for their non-standard design. I will never, ever get an ECS board again.

Re:ECS K7S5A

[revmoo]

I had a K7S5A as well, one of the worst motherboards I've ever used, all sorts of manufacturing defects, et cetera.

Just wanted to chime in about this awful board. Thankfully I doubt it is still in production as it's a pretty aged board by now...

Re:ECS K7S5A

[mbius]

ECS are great boards if you can deal with kinks. For example, I had random freezes after I upgraded from an Athlon 900MHz to a Athlon XP 1800. I found a site that outlined how to solve the problem by soldering on an additional resistor

This is why their competitors use skilled male technicians. Quality control suffers when you're applying make-up and don't pay attention to the conveyer belt.

Re:ECS K7S5A

[Blaskowicz]

It's the PC cases which have a dumb non standard power LED connector!
for 15 we've had a two pin power LED connector (still the same for HDD LED and others) and now we have that useless three pin connector. Don't know why, maybe Intel or whatever decided this to piss me off?

Re:ECS K7S5A

[gotr00t]

I've heard about different responses about the mileage that people get with that board. Apparently, one week when Fry's had a sale with the K7S5A Pro, the next week, half the return line was carrying that exact box.

Though I think that the board itself is pretty reliable (haven't had any huge problems with it in terms of uptime) the many features that it has have some kinks to them. The networking does not work, the primary IDE channel does not work, the onboard audio has a lot of noise, and one of the PCI slots does not function. After replacing the faulty parts with add-in cards, the overall price of the board is on par with one of better quality.

Re:ECS K7S5A

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's a huge problem with that board. That and the NVRAM Check freeze at reboot.

Re:ECS K7S5A

[Aardvark99]

I feel compelled to chime in w/ yet another me too reply...
I have this motherboard as well, and had nothing but trouble with it. It was extremely unstable (system lock ups and reboots) until I bought new DDR memory on a suggestion from a message board to replace the lower end PC133 RAM (from my old system). The whole point of me buying the board was its support for either PC133 SDRAM or DDR SDRAM (I figured I'd upgrade later to DDR - no such luck). It seemed this was common issue.

I've had other issues as well; the experience has sort of turned me off of home-built systems in general (this was like the 3rd or 4th one I've done). I just not worth the cost savings for the headaches if/when things go wrong!

I can't believe someone who had an even worse issue (soldering?!) would consider that board to be "great"!

Re:ECS K7S5A

[NaDrew]

Apparently, one week when Fry's had a sale with the K7S5A Pro, the next week, half the return line was carrying that exact box.

The week after that, of course, all those boxes were back on the shelf sporting the "white sticker of death".

Gone to the gutter

[Quill_28]

>skilled female technicians who have the ability to >test two at a time, in tandem.

Trolling for vulgar comments I say.

dirty minds

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever wondered...taken a tour...done by skilled female...who have the ability to...two at a time, in tandem. They've got some...hardware that I'm jealous of.

ECS = cheapass boards

[Enigma_Man]

I work at a company that deals with motherboards from all makes and models. ECS are fairly notorious around the office for being craptastic. They share a lot of boards with "PC Chips" which are probably one of the most common boards that come in with "random problems" which usually turn out to be hardware failures on the board (bad caps, bad power regulators, or not being able to use fast memory).

-Jesse

Re:ECS = cheapass boards

[Jason1729]

Don't be insultring cheapass.

Cheapass Games has some great products.

Re:ECS = cheapass boards

[Eugene]

PCChips bought ECS a few years back and assume the name. so yeah their stuff is somewhat problmatic and YMMV.

Re:ECS = cheapass boards

[greed]

Yah; that's them.

I had a decent-enough Duron 1800 board from them, one of those all-on-the-board things where you drop it in a case, add a disk, and plug it in to the screen and keyboard.

Worked alright, and I didn't expect much from it, so it was actually a lot better than I expected.

However, after about a year, it developed a thermal fault that trips at fairly low temperatures; run a complex enough program for a while and the board would lock up.

There's an ASUS A7V8X-MX SE in its place now. With an nVidia video card; on-board video can really, really suck even if you aren't doing serious gaming.

Re:ECS = cheapass boards

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear, hear. The only reason I kept my failed ECS mobo is for target practice.

Re:ECS = cheapass boards

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I've had problems with Soyo, Gigabyte, Asus and Abit motherboards. I've had zero problems with my ECS (K7S5A) board. In fact, now that I think about it, that K7S5A - probably the most popular and controversial board, is the only board I've had that has not had a single problem (not counting a Shuttle SFF recently purchased).

Unless this was marked informative for the "PC Chips" tie-in, how can this be so highly rated when all manufacturers have common, well documented problems?

Ummmm . . .ECS?

[erikharrison]

Since it ECS, shouldn't it be how *not* to make a mainboard?

Having replaced much ECS hardware...

[slaker]

Many computer shops carry ECS-brand equipment for lowest-cost PCs. I pull ECS crap out of white box machines all the fucking time, probably three or four times more often than the next most common failed motherboard I deal with (Asus, if anyone cares).

I would therefore respectfully submit that perhaps the title of this article should be changed to reflect this record of poor reliabilty. Something like: "ECS: Don't ever do things the way we do them" or "ECS: We can't help it, we were born like this."

Re:Having replaced much ECS hardware...

[Anonymous Coward]

They have a few gems out there as well. For instance, the K75APro board. I've slapped dozens of these systems together a few years ago and have yet to have a single one fail.

Re:Having replaced much ECS hardware...

[grolschie]

I have to agree. The ECS Group (aka ECS, PC Chips, Asrock, etc) don't know how to make reliable stable hardware. Every ECS/PC Chips board I have worked on, bar none, has had stability issues. Absolute junk. As a matter of fact I maintain a FAQ site for a certain piece of hardware made by these guys that is notorious for stability issues. It gets a reasonable amount of hits and I get many emails from people with major problems with this gear.

When considering a extremely low budget system, please consider Gigabyte or Albatron instead. You will save yourself a nightmare.

Re:Having replaced much ECS hardware...

[slaker]

Albatron has issues of its own - try using one of their boards with an ATI 9600 - but I give them a lot of credit for offering premium Via Envy sound chips, and they ARE reliable.
Gigabyte stuff is a positive joy to work with, when I find it.

Those would probably be my top two as well, along with Biostar, which seems to make the best of the "cheapie" boards at the moment.

Re:Having replaced much ECS hardware...

[SacredNaCl]

I have to agree. The ECS Group (aka ECS, PC Chips, Asrock, etc) don't know how to make reliable stable hardware. At the present time ASRock is a division of AsusTek, IE: ASUS and not made by ECS.

Anyone know who actually makes stuff for Syntax? Or Biostar?

MSI

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used MSI (www.msicomputer.com) boards for my last few builds. Nary a problem in site. I highly recommend them.

Re:MSI

[keeleysam]

me too!

Then you'd think there was an echo

[Anonymous Coward]

When they both tell you to get lost.

Hilarious writing in the introduction

[moonbender]

I never understand why tech sites sometimes feel the need to write not just one but several paragraphs as an introduction. This one contains some real gems: I sat and pondered the same things when Elitegroup Computer Systems, known to most folks that read HEXUS as ECS or Elitegroup, invited me to their PCB and mainboard production facilities in China. I knew instinctively how you'd make a PCB, and then the full mainboard based on a PCB design and layout, but after thinking about it, post-invite, I was intrigued to see the details of production.

Sat and pondered? Instinctive PCB design knowledge? Companies called Elitegroup Computer Systems known to most folks as Elitegroup or ECS? Great stuff. No offense intended. ;)

Don't bother reading the article

[Jugalator]

There's no pictures of them.

Err, I mean of the women, not the mainboards in production!

Not that there's anything wrong with being attracted to the latter.

Re:Don't bother reading the article

[ignatz72]

I was hoping to be the first with the obligatory:

"I've got a mainboard they can test" post.

Damn!

bottom of the barrel...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does ECS still suck nearly as much as say, PC CHIPS?!!!!

How to?

[WeblionX]

Well, that's all nice and wonderful, but I can't seem to find any of those machines on eBay! How else am I supposed to make my own mainboards?!

ECS and PCChips

[eventhorizon5]

Isn't ECS the parent company of PCChips, the company that not only used to sell crap boards with fake cache chips (which even had modified BIOSes that claimed that the cache was real), but even had relabled chipsets and sometimes exploding capacitors? Newer boards by them are also usually flakey, mostly due to the fact that they use the cheapest possible components.

http://www.redhill.net.au/b-bad.html
http://www.rainbow-software.org/hardware.html

One report says that PCChips/ECS is all of these brand names:
PCChips, Amptron, Protac, Aristo, Minstaple, Eurone, Matsonic, ECS, and possibly more.

(I should get a Protac motherboard!!! oh yeah!! lol)

Here's something interesting I just found:
http://www.redhill.net.au/b-02.html
quoted:
------------------
"ECS K7S5A

The SiS 735 chipset is a particularly interesting one. It was first previewed in mid-2001 when the DDR main board market was in the doldrums. The ALI entrant was considered a non-starter, the VIA KT-266 buggy and very late, the well-performed and stable AMD 760 was dear and in short supply, and VIA's SDRAM-only KT-133A was taking all before it. Nvidia's much-touted Nforce was still vapourware. Unless you just didn't care about the cost, a KT-133A was the only rational choice.

Then, from out of nowhere, came the SiS 735: an entrant from a firm that had all but foundered in its sudden rush to build its own fab facilities and cut ties with its former manufacturing partners, a firm that had little left but a reputation, and that a poor one. To everyone's astonishment, the SiS 735 was the clear benchmark leader, and in most respects it still was right up until the transition to 166MHz FSB chipsets began: if we are to disregard the weird all-in-one Nforce, only VIA's second-effort KT266A could beat it. SiS had three hurdles to overcome: the first was demonstrating competitive performance. This they had already done. The second was demonstrating stability and compatibility: this too was within their measure. And the third was getting mainboard makers to adopt it. This was perhaps the hardest task, as mainboard makers are reluctant enough to offend Intel by making VIA and Athlon products, offending both Intel and VIA at the same time requires more than the usual bravery. SiS chose to overcome that reluctance by making the 735 an offer just too good to refuse. It was very cheap. For a high-tech state-of-the-art DDR chipset, it was amazingly cheap.

Elite are surprisingly little-known for a company that is one of the largest mainboard manufacturers of all. They are bigger than ever since their merger with the infamous PC Chips group (the fake cache people) in the late 1990s. They made quite a splash on the overseas markets with this board, one of the very few to use the SiS 735 chipset, and once they overcame a well-publicised BIOS problem, were very successful with it. Here at Red Hill we had been very happy with our KT266A mainboards and had no need to switch, but with the Elite coming in anything up to fifty dollars cheaper than a KT266A, it would be foolish not to try them.

In the flesh, the boards had that familiar PC Chips look about then: they were alarmingly thin and very cheaply made. Our first impression was that there was no way these could be as reliable as our Epox and Soltek KT266As (or our Soltek KT133As, for that matter, for these were a dual mode board that can take SDRAM or DDR), and our past experience with PC Chips associated companies did little to encourage us. Still, we gave a pair of them every chance to show their stuff. We soon found that they were fussy about RAM and incompatible with Athlon Thunderbirds. Not a great start. From there it got a good deal worse: the more we tinkered with them in the workshop the more apparant it became that they were unstable. Quite often they wouldn't even run error-free

Re:ECS and PCChips

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Bummer. I knew ECS was bad, but didn't know about PCChips being bad in terms of reliability.

I had bought a PCChips video capture card last year. The shipping drivers crashed my computer. I had somehow managed to find updated drivers for it, despite no information on their web sites suggesting that they EVER sold a video capture card. I was glad I saved a copy of the update because I never found that driver or newer drivers on their site ever again.

Re:ECS and PCChips

[Chaoticmass]

At work we call ECS "El Cheapo Shit"

Though my first PC I built, when I was not aware of ECS's reputation, was a ECS K7S5A. It actually worked great. So naturally when my friend needed to build a PC a year later, the K7S5A Pro was my first choice.

It blew up in my face, literally. Exploding capacitor.

Re:ECS and PCChips

[psymastr]

Wow. Thanks for posting that. I've been using an ECS L7S7A2 mainboard for about two years now with an Athlon XP 2000+ (overclocked to 2200+) and I don't believe it has ever crashed on me (except for the times I went too high with the overclocking).

The primary reason I bought it was because it was about half the price of other mainboards. It seems I got lucky.

Re:ECS and PCChips

[Lesson No. 25]

I had a PC Chips motherboard (with a Pentium 200 MMX CPU) that I gave to my parents a while back. It had served me well for some years. They didn't need it for anything heavy-duty, so it fit the bill well enough.

Until they broke windows on it. So I put in a NIC (connecting behind my router to high-speed internet) for an easier time backing up, reinstalling, updating, etc. I could not for the life of me get the NIC (or any NIC) to work. Long story short, after much troubleshooting, I am convinced it is the fault of the motherboard. (What kind of semi-modern motherboard can't work with an Intel or Linksys PCI NIC?!)

You know, it was toilsome just to find out who made the motherboard. There were no manufacturer names on the board itself, nor in the user's manual that came with it. (God bless google.)

Due to this round of troubleshooting, and others in the process (of which I don't recall the specifics at the moment), I'll be sure to avoid any PC Chips products now.

Re:ECS and PCChips

[bani]

to be fair, many companies got bit by the exploding capacitor fiasco. Gigabyte, MSI, ABIT, ASUS, and even Intel had them.

Building Your Own Wire-wrapped PC Board...

[__aaclcg7560]

Does any know of any links or books are how to create a PC motherboard using wire-wrap board?

The local university used to require ten years ago that CS/CE students build a 8088 PC wire-wrapped board. The only big problem is that the lowest end Intel processor on the market today is an 80186 processor. I might have to go with a microcontroller design. I know enough electronics to put something together but not enough create or troubleshoot anything.

Re:Building Your Own Wire-wrapped PC Board...

[mako1138]

No way to do that for modern processors, but I've been interested in doing a retro-type computer myself. You could look into a Z80, a simple RISC, or an early Apple. Though you could probably find a 8088 if you look hard enough.

Re:Building Your Own Wire-wrapped PC Board...

[siliconwafer]

I don't recommend it unless you've got a logic analyzer handy, or at minimum an oscilloscope (preferrably both). Wirewrap will be flaky at high frequencies, but I recommend getting an 8086 and running it at say 4MHz. You can throw some SRAM and EEPROM (or Flash) on the board to write a very basic monitor program and do some neat stuff. Make sure you include a UART, PIC, PIT.. and an FPGA or CPLD helps for decode logic and such too.

Re:Building Your Own Wire-wrapped PC Board...

[bob]

The problem is that you're going to have trouble getting over a few MHz with wire-wrap; the timing issues will get enormous. And at a few MHz you'll have trouble running anything much more complex than DOS.

If you want a good first project, though, I'd suggest working with a decent microcontroller. IMHO Atmel's AVR line is a great place to start; they are flash based, programmers and even basic in-circuit emulator functionality can be had for not too much money (search for AVR ICE 200). There's a GCC port, decent books, and lots of online community support.

FWIW, YMMV, etc.

Re:Building Your Own Wire-wrapped PC Board...

[Thud457]

Sorry, but wire-wrap won't support modern bus speeds. (It might be possible to underclock things slow enough to get away with WW, I don't know. This'll get you started... Recently discussed here.

Re:Building Your Own Wire-wrapped PC Board...

[TheGratefulNet]

why use an intel processor?

the old keyboard chip (8051) is very cheap, available and wire-wrappable (ie, the timing isn't critical).

anything modern wouldn't work well, I don't think, due to wire to wire interferance, no ground plane support and lead length/timing issues. this isn't your father's cpu anymore..

Re:Building Your Own Wire-wrapped PC Board...

[Caltheos]

When I was taking CE/EE classes at college, our professor had us create and design an entire SRC computer from scratch starting with RTN Diagrams and working up to a full blown implementation of a processor/memory/io/alu/etc on FPGA boards. A good CE book on Digital Electronics and a VHDL programming language (Ie Altera Max) and you could build on from scratch. If you want to actually do the wire wrapping, you can print off connection lists form the software and handwire it, but that would be a nightmare. Building a motherboard for Motorola 68k processor would probably be a better start for someone interested more in the theory as the pin count is significantly lower and you can still get the chips today.

Re:Building Your Own Wire-wrapped PC Board...

[ediron2]

Ebay is your friend.

Also consider going with PICs, Basic Stamp, SitePlayer (a webserver on a chip), the BugBook books and hardware, 8085-based systems, or some other simplistic frameworks.

A year or so ago, I was lamenting how complicated (and unapproachable) systems had gotten, and a friend proved me wrong when he pointed toward some similar set of suggestions. There are a zillion interesting ways to learn practical/basic digital electronics now, rather than fewer. And the results can be delightfully cheap: simple atmel pic's sell for a buck or 2, can be programmed by some funny homebrew parallel/serial port interfaces that are equally cheap, etc.

And then there's USB, digital A/V, etc.

Depending on what aspect of pc design (memory, buffering, hardware I/O, signals/timing, computation, real-time circuits, homebrew SCADA, animatronic/smart toys, robotics, or whatever), you can either go retro using modern equivalents to old hardware or do enough to learn concepts and then fast-forward to the newer tools.

Re:Building Your Own Wire-wrapped PC Board...

[ph43drus]

The Student Lab Manual for the Art of Electronics has a great design for an MC68008 based computer that you can build on a large breadboard (48 pin DIP package on the processor, discrete CMOS logic for the "chipset" and 8K of RAM, however, it is a simple exercise to add more).

Some of the components can be kind of expensive (the hex displays and the ADC/DACs, most notably), and you'll definitely need a logic probe and an oscilloscope (although, those should be considered required for any project like this).

The University of Washington Physics Department uses AoE as the textbook for their electronics labs, and the advanced one is building the 68008 computer and making it do something (I wrote & built a multi-threaded oscilloscope pong game). I highly suggest the book, it is truly excellent to learn from and as a reference.

Jeff

Re:Building Your Own Wire-wrapped PC Board...

[Technician]

Wirewrap will be flaky at high frequencies,

A quarterwave broadcasting antenna at 3Ghz is less than an inch. A pin on the socket could send all of the signal away only to be picked up in places by other antennas nearby. Wirewrap is for low frequency only. Wirewrap pins are too long for 100 base T ethernet. The stub will provide crosstalk.

Hexus...

[Luciq]

Isn't this the same site that told us Zalman was releasing a super-sized heatsink that would require five power supplies daisy-chained together to power it (well after April 1, mind you)? Someone needs to start screening these Hexus posts.

Re:Hexus...

[unts]

It [Zalman article] was a joke, and it was submitted (be me) under the "It's funny, Laugh" category. :P

Re:Hexus...

[Anonymous Coward]

(be me) ok I'm you.

Re:Hexus...

[Luciq]

Ack - sorry, my fault.

Lucy!

[bravehamster]

The final production testing is done by skilled female technicians who have the ability to test two at a time, in tandem. They've got some test hardware that I'm jealous of (fast-removal memory modules, CPU heatsinks that don't need full attachment, PCI and PCI Express logic testers, etc.) and can have a mainboard fully functionally tested in a matter of minutes.'"

Considering how many failed ECS boards I've had to deal with over the years, methinks they ought to crank the machine down from "Lucy Speed" to "Merely Insane Speed".

failure count vs. failure rate...

[Cryptnotic]

I pull ECS crap out of white box machines all the fucking time, probably three or four times more often than the next most common failed motherboard I deal with (Asus, if anyone cares).

Ahh, but your observed failures number high because the failure rate is high or is it because there are so many more ECS boards than other boards?

Re:failure count vs. failure rate...

[stinerman]

Its the high failure rate.

Google for the K7S5A and learn about all the great problems they have.

Server appears to be burning already...

[Smiffa2001]

...though that HEXUS could deal with it. Must be the mention of girls and hardware in the same sentence.

For those of you unable to go direct to mirrordot.org, heres a clicky:
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/24f2e524c78855855 89e55ce672aa0bc/index.html

Be fair

[MmmmAqua]

If ECS is really producing the volume of boards claimed by the article, then the percentage of boards worldwide which originated at ECS must be fairly large.

So, if you have a company (ECS) that produces 24 million mainboards a year, a different company (say ASUS) that produces 10 million mainboards a year (number pulled out of thin air), and a common burn-in period fail rate of 2% (also pulled out of the air), guess what - you're going to see more failed boards from the larger manufacturer. Because you see a larger amount of boards from them, you tend to think "Hey, these guys are crap", even though their failure rate is the same as the second, smaller, company.

Re:Be fair

[SacredNaCl]

If ECS is really producing the volume of boards claimed by the article, then the percentage of boards worldwide which originated at ECS must be fairly large.

ECS used to make parts for IBM in the 90's. Which explains soo many of the failures in their consumer level stuff. ECS also has other brands it makets under "PC-Chips" is one of them. Many companies like say Mach Speed are largely relabeling outfits (just like you can buy blank ram chips, you can also buy blank other than a serial number motherboards). Many of the majors (HP/Compaq, Dell, Emachine/Gateway) don't make their own boards - they hire another company to make them. Lots of companies fill those needs, companies like: Tri-Gem of Korea(made 90% of Emachines motherboards until recently and probably 70% of HP boards until recently), MSI - shows up frequently in Gateway, Dell, EMachine boxes.

These days you can find even Asus motherboards showing up in the higher end HP's. DFI has a high quality 6 layer line of Micro-ATX boards that they sell to OEMs (with very few markings on the to give them away as to what they really are, and if you order enough of them they will make them however you want).

This isn't 1981 when we had the choice of IBM and Apple doing this stuff in house. Everyone in the game outsources parts. Probably 70% of the power supplies in OEMs are Lian or Forton Source - no matter what they are rebranded. Hell, half of the branded ones for sale to you are probably FSP (ala Sparkle for instance) as well.

ECS boards have never been great at reliability. Most electronics follows the bathtub curve if you were to plot out the failures. You see a high amount of DOA and dead within a couple months and if it survives that it tends to last for years *(7-10) until it hits death due to wear out. ECS's curve looks more like a porcupine.

Several of the white box builders here used them, usually the ones who only compete on price. The cheapest machine they sold almost always had ECS or PCChips boards. Many of them used a card and date system where they wrote the purchase date in several places (sometimes in a code) on the inside of the PC, and often on a sticker on it to deal with their own limited 90 day warranty (if they even offered that much before they disappeared).
So it was not hard to tell how long a system had been in use to get some idea of how soon they were failing. Many companies (like Tiger Direct) also sell "Build your own kits" and we always asked for the paperwork if they had it because some of the items come with warranties that can save them some money in replacing it (Tiger will also look up the info if you ask, so they are very good about helping with warranty claims). Again, had the same pattern, except the kits (and warranty replacements) had unusually high DOA, and dead within a week. You would think the ones that survived that would make it to 2 years, but many of them were failing and much more than other brands (like MSI, SOYO) that also showed up in the cheap white box and build your own kit market.

A failure in 3 months is a warranty issue, 1 year and 3 months out it isn't. Just as well, getting an RMA was miserable with them, even trying to get a BIOS for half of their products was also miserable (as they like to hide relationships and so many white box builders bought an OEM's leftover junk and stuck it in the box. Can't expect support there, its the OEMs problem, not that tracking that down is easy either.) If you are working on a PCChips or ECS board that is actually labeled what it is with the model # on the PCB (or even a sticker) consider yourself lucky. Though you still may not be any better off on most of the support items. Integrated LAN missing from the BIOS on their site but still labeled with "-L" awwww, too bad, sorry sucker! Should have delt with a better company.

Ever open up an LCD? Notice how many of them are actually made by Samsung regardless of what is on the front of it? Open up 10 routers chosen at random (and not made by Cisco) and see

Should read: How NOT to test...

[dark-br]

... becouse at least for me ECS mobos == headache.

It just have all sort of problems you can think of. Go for a Asus or Abit and you will be much happier.

Re:Should read: How NOT to test...

[DarthVeda]

I've had similar problems with Asus motherboards. Though I find Abit and MSI to be particularly reliable.

Fully?

[PipOC]

I don't think "Fully Functional" is the way to describe ANY ECS board.

Female(!) testers..egads.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pandering to /.'ers out-of-control libidos aside, why, precisely, is the tester's gender relevant? Unless women are superior to men at the task or the author is trying to point out some reverse-discrimination, one would think it is irrelevant. Unfortunately, comments like this seem to contain thinly (and poorly) disguised surprise over the fact that women (shock!) can excel at such applications.

Then again, perhaps it was just a harmless description and my sexism detector is acting up again....

Re:Female(!) testers..egads.

[unts]

If you read all of TFA, you'll see that the author comments on how women do these jobs because their smaller hands can (generally) handle the components and perform the necessary tasks such as testing with greater ease.

why to buy non Tier-1 systems

[brontus3927]

From TFA:

Capacity for production is over two million mainboards per month, and ECS regularly make that many. ECS respectfully request that we don't name their customers, since those customers don't even know who else uses ECS for manufacture, but rest assured that it's a veritable who's who in the PC mainboard game, with a couple of vendors on the list that you might be shocked to learn don't produce all their own products.

Based on the horrible crap that comes out of ECS/Elite/PC Chips with their own name on it, I can't think of a better argument to sway people into buying from a small shop or building their own system. I just found a new sales tool, thank you slashdot and hexus!

Re:why to buy non Tier-1 systems

[nomaan]

I purchased an ECS K7S5A mobo in 2000. I'm still using it. I've done a heatsink mod/wire mod on it. I initially was using it with a Duron 1000. Then a AthlonXP 1800+. It is still going strong. Rock solid. I've had no problems with it. At one point in time, I had 3 of these boards in the house in use. Never had a single problem. I have the original revision, and it is showing its age. No USB2.0 (got a pci card to fix that problem).

Re:why to buy non Tier-1 systems

[the arbiter]

Amen. I've got the K7S5A (running since early 2001) and two of the K7VTA3 6 series boards, and all three have been running 24 hours a day, with no problems since the day I bought them. I use good memory, which helps, underclock one (silent PC for audio recording) but the motherboards have been just rock-steady for me.

Re:why to buy non Tier-1 systems

[Hack Jandy]

Hate to burst your bubble, but ECS is a Tier 1. MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS and Foxconn compose of the other 4, and ECS is bigger than two of those.

HJ

Re:why to buy non Tier-1 systems

[Anonymous Coward]

ased on the horrible crap that comes out of ECS/Elite/PC Chips with their own name on it, I can't think of a better argument to sway people into buying from a small shop or building their own system. I just found a new sales tool, thank you slashdot and hexus! Many of of the PCChips and ECS boards I've worked on have been from the Small Shop White Box Builders Who Compete On Price Only $299 Special.

Re:why to buy non Tier-1 systems

[brontus3927]

Err, the point I was trying to make is that I am a small shop white box builder, but I don't compete on price, I compete on quality. I buy motherboards from ASUS and ASRock only, and I then purchase boards with specific chipsets based on reviews and other research. I pick all my parts using this model. I can't compete with the $300 Dell's on price, but I can compete with them on quality. I just tell potential customers the saga of my ex-girlfriend's Dell laptop, which had EVERY SINGLE part replaced over a matter of 2 years.

finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Breasts not on a poll... we definately need more of these... :0

/duck

Gigabyte Factory tour

[the-dark-kangaroo]

A Gigabyte Mobo factory tour was released a while back. It goes into detail about population and soldering of the board. Lots of nice pictures!

Test Hardware

[j_kenpo]

"They've got some test hardware that I'm jealous of"

They have operations that can give you those now...

But seriously, why is it that the gender of the test technicians is brought up?

Re:Test Hardware

[imidan]

TFA made reference to women's fingers being "smaller and defter" or somesuch.

HOW NOT TO BUILD a mainboard

[insanely_mad]

ECS's boards SUCK! truly. I've had 3 of thier boards and they all had serious troubles. lots of driver issues, and problems with the bios settings getting stored, etc. ASUS is the way to go.

Re:HOW NOT TO BUILD a mainboard

[SolusSD]

ya know, its funnny. I knew I could do a quick search for "how not to build.." in the comments for this article and find something. I have had great luck with ECS myself.

Visiting another factories also

[ikkibr]

Here's a tour to the ABIT's Factory http://www.clubedohardware.com.br/artigos/115
And another visit to ECS/PCChips http://www.clubedohardware.com.br/artigos/132
And this one is a visit to Kingmax http://www.clubedohardware.com.br/artigos/1030

And another data point.

[khasim]

I have never had a single problem with any ASUS motherboard. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

I have had problems with 1 of the 3 ECS boards I've used. Also, in Windows on one of them, the on-board NIC was set to "not optimal" and it took a lot of digging to find that.

The ECS motherboards are very pretty to look at, but I still recommend ASUS.

Re:And another data point.

[t35t0r]

I've built two computers, mine and another friend's box. I purchased an asus a7v600 from newegg. This board supports ddr400 but I purchased an athlon xp 2800+ which only supports DDR333 so i purchased a stick of corsair vs512mb333 ram. I couldn't stop the computer from crashing in linux or windows when doing anything intensive, compiling, graphics, prime95, other benchmarks, you name it.

I tested the ram using memtest86, bought another 512 of kingston ram, bought an expensive antec sl400 power supply, and even bought another video card (ati r9600 se) to make sure none of those components were causing the instabilities (the original video card was an nvidia geforce fx 5500).

It ended up being that I had to set the ram speed in the bios to 266 (yes not 333 and not even auto) and that fixed all the problems. Now its very stable, and I've never had a single crash. Yes, I also tested different bios versions on auto and 333 speeds, but all caused crashing.

After all that time & money i put into that box I'm never buying another asus mobo ever again.

My friend on the other hand purchased a gigabyte k8ns-939 for his athlon 64 3200+. It's been rock solid without any problems whatsoever using optimal bios settings.

I'm purchasing gigabyte from now on if I decide to build another desktop system in the future.

Re:And another data point.

[Loki_1929]

"I have had problems with 1 of the 3 ECS boards I've used."

I've had nothing but problems with ECS boards. The P6STM was flaky with any CPU over about 900MHz, but would run fine with slower ones. The K7SEM was very flaky. I even had one of those nearly catch fire at the ATX connector. The customer brought the machine back because it wasn't running and they noticed an odd smell coming from it. The 'odd smell' was the plastic and wire insulation fusing together at the ATX connector. That was the last ECS board I ever used, as I wasn't going to be responsible for burning down someone's house.

I now use Asus exclusively. They're rock-solid boards, with the single exception of the first-run A7V400-MX boards, which had some flaky onboard LAN controllers. Aside from that one glitch, I've yet to find any major problems with their products. Their tech support has always been very good. I get right through, it's someone who speaks English, and it's someone who actually knows what's going on (as opposed to reading off a screen). I truly can't recommend them enough, especially with the inexpensive line-up they have now. I only wish they'd add more boards supporting Opterons so I could use Asus boards when doing servers.

Re:And another data point.

[Chalex]

I have never had a single problem with any ECS motherboard. I think they're awesome for the price.

I had a problem with the one Asus board I owned. It just quit working one day and I had to RMA it. With the ECS boards being half the price, I'd choose them anyday.

One anecdotal story does not data make.

Motherboard is sexist!

[mister_llah]

Motherboard is SEXIST!!!1!!one

[passes out from shock and/or revulsion]

===

Personally, if anyone holds this view, I apologize for making light of it. However, you must ask yourself, what is in a name? A motherboard by any other name would still run as sweet.

*cough*

Re:Motherboard is sexist!

[MemoryAid]

Actually, the sexist part was in the summary:

From the article: 'The final production testing is done by skilled female technicians who have the ability to test two at a time, in tandem.

Is anything added to the story by commenting on irrelevant physical features, such as gender? Is there something in the article, not quoted here, that makes this relevant? It would seem more natural if they were referred to as women, or more appropriate if they were simply skilled technicians.

Eh, nothing new.

[MenTaLguY]

Would feudalism by any other name smell as sweet?

You left off the other side of the equation.

[khasim]

Yep, if ECS made 2.5x as many boards as ASUS, then you'd expect to see 2.5x as many complains.

But you'd also expect to see 2.5x as many "It works great for me so all I buy are ECS boards".

But you don't see that. But you DO see people saying that all they buy are ASUS boards (or Tyan or Gigabit or x).

With that kind of response, there's more to it than simple numbers of boards produced.

Variables

[mister_llah]

That depends, to what extent are the employees being taken advantage of?

What sorts of rights to the workers have, how much are they paid? ... aside from a garden (which may exist only for PR, who knows)... what other amenities exist that don't cost the workers a think?

===

These sorts of things would determine if the situation smelled as sweet as feudalism, or sweeter, or more sour...

Re:Variables

[MenTaLguY]

That's a legitimate question, which I don't know the answer to. I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek really.

Re:Variables

[mister_llah]

I have a nasty habit of answering rhetorical questions :">

Sry old bean

or rather...

[ryusen]

The final production testing is done by two skilled female technicians who test in tandem.

Er, harsh, Llah!

[mister_llah]

Sorry if that seemed harsh... my initial comment was rather innocent, so I was somewhat irked when someone correcting a comment that made no factual claim as to the establishment of precedence, it was just my first thought when I was reading about the amenities...

So, sorry if I was mean...

ECS is trash

[LibrePensador]

My experience with ECS motherboards has been that they are of the worst quality. They used to sell under a variety of other brands that I have now gladly forgotten.

In my experience, ECS motherboards are the most unreliable crap that you could ever buy and they provide bios upgrades for a very, very short time.

Get a real motherboard: Tyan, Supermicro, Intel are brands I know and trust.

Static

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should learn to work on computer equipment safely. I bet all your problems come from you not using anti-static wrist straps and work mats. Why doesn't anyone think this is important anymore?

Re:Static

[Zutfen]

Actually, you're wrong. All my work is done with a wrist strap on, granted no mat, but I work on concrete, not carpet or linolium. So, yeah, way to make blanketed assumption!

Skilled, indeed. Where do I start with this crap?

[nobodyman]

This quote bothers me on a few levels:

The final production testing is done by skilled female technicians who have the ability to test two at a time , in tandem...

• The fact that production testing is done by a human at all, regardless of how "skilled" they may be, is very telling as to the quality of the motherboards. The author does not get this. I made the mistake of of purchasing an ECS motherboard because it was the cheapest. I am on my third motherboard, after returning the first two that died within a week. The third mobo has only 1 working usb port, but I figured another exchange was futile and I was too poor at the time to buy anything better...
  
• 60% of the highly moderated comments are of the "heh heh, they said 'female', heh heh" category. What is this, fucking junior high? Grow up.
  
• Finally, why the need to point out that the testers are female in the first place? Is the implication that we should be surprised that females can do the job, that females have the job, or was the author just a pathetic horndog that has to call females out whenever he sees them? I don't get it.
  
• "...two at a time, in tandem..." Huh? Like there's any other way? I know it's a nitpick but can't this article not suck in some way?
  

I've been to Shenzhen. . .

[Sialagogue]

I have actually been to Shenzhen and toured factories there. Just as there are in other parts of the world, there are a range of factories and a range of working conditions that highly depend on the needs and sense of responsibility of their manangement. Some are better because they have progressive management. Some are better because management has noticed higher productivity from happier workers. Some are better because they are in a product category (like this article) that is in a competitive labor market, and need more than unskilled labor.

Most importantly, however, some are better because they are part of a supply chain that works for a client that requires it. The ultimate destination of the goods is a client that does regular audits of their facilities, and the manufacturing owners know what side their bread is buttered on.

The dormitories in and of themselves are not evidence of a captive workforce. They exist simply because they rely on a highly transient workforce. As with all the other factors, the qualities of these facilities vary considerably as well.

Now for just a few of the points as I see them. "Fat and bloated" do get thrown around a lot in front of "American," but it obscures the main point - we *are* very wealthy by global standards. That wealth has enabled some incredible local excess and some incredible global charity over the years. But as someone who buys from China, my suggestion to people who would like to make a difference in the lives of these Chinese (or Vietnamese, which has been the site of some of the latest incredibly abusive working conditions) is that you at least consider these points:

1. Spare working conditions are not the same as abusive working conditions. Both exist.

2. Low pay for unskilled labor (or low pay in general) is not the same as slavery or even economic slavery. Low pay is widespread, actual slavery is uncommon if not unknown in actual manufacturing, economic slavery is less common in China, more common in other countries.

3. Jobs that suck are better than not eating, and I'm talking about really not eating, where you and your family get thinner and thinner until you die, and your neighbors can't help you because then they'll die, and the goverment can't help you because there are millions more like you.

But most of all:

4. If you want to help, use your biggest asset: your wealth. Who's buying goods manufactured in China? Almost everyone. Do a little research online (you're reading Slashdot, so I know you can) and find out who are taking ethical approaches to their supply chain and who aren't. Do not buy product from companies that divorce themselves from the realities of their manufacturers. Write to them and tell them that you'd pay 5% more in retail price if you knew they were working with their suppliers in China to ensure the long-term improvement of their workforce. Write e-mails to companies who have even minimal standards programs (and they enforce them) and offer words of support.

The reality is that they're all doing it for you. How you buy and how much you're willing to pay guides the whole supply chain, and you can undo it by buying in an ethical manner, making a big noise when you do it, and encouraging others to do it to. The retailers, and then by default the wholesalers, importers, and distributors will have no choice but to listen. And lets face it, isn't the whole point of being fat, bloated, and rich to be able to order people around?

China feels like far away, and sometimes it feels like "them" rather than "us," but once you've been there it's different. Understanding that you can help some people get out of grinding poverty simply by paying 5% more for socks is worth considering.

Re:I've been to Shenzhen. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

one of the most insightful posts I've read on slashdot. mod parent up!

7 ECS mothernboards, never a problem

[Ancient_Hacker]

Not so long ago I got on a Beowulf kick and bought TEN Amptron motherboards (made by ECS, Amptron just added a sticker). The Beowulf idea never got rolling, but I've sinced installed seven of the motherboards in other computer cases. Not a single problem with any of them.

Re:7 ECS mothernboards, never a problem

[jzarling]

I agree with you there - 3 boards never a problem.

Re:7 ECS mothernboards, never a problem

[Ancient_Hacker]

Oh, and their cheapness made for one advantage-- you could have a stealth network: They saved a few sheckels by deriving the on-board ethernet clock from the CPU clock. Which means if you overclock the CPU, the ethernet timing speeds up too! That means you can set up a bunch of these PC's and using relatively dumb network hubs, have a stealth network. Other PC's see these packets as bad packets, as they can't sync to the data. Any PC's running at similar speeds can see the packets. Just like having your own private network. Kewl squared!

Okay, who makes the most reliable MB's?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have had my Gigabyte motherboard expire (bad caps) over a year ago, does anybody know of a good resonable-quality motherboard(s) out there or are we just stuck buy the cheapest and replacing it when it expires every few years? My mouse finally expired last week, but I'v had a hard drive crash (maxtor) after only 2 years of operation (that was a bumer), funny thing, some of my older hard drives work just fine..(fujitsu)

Re:Okay, who makes the most reliable MB's?

[Enigma_Man]

Here's what I've found to last long, in my own experience with a very small sample of data:

Abit motherboards are good. I have a Slot-1 that keeps on chugging. I've got 1 gig of memory on it, and just recently put on one of those Socket 370-to-Slot 1 adapters on it, with a 1.4 GHz PIII. It keeps chugging right along, and runs pretty much anything I want to do, including some really decent games. I used to play Warcraft III when I had my PII-400 on it. It's now my sister's machine.

Maxtor hard drives - In highschool, we had a "slut drive" that we'd pass around with all the latest games on it (before broadband). It rode around unprotected in backpacks, in the weather, in the hot and cold, and I still have it in my computer to this day. I think it's like a ~1.2 gig. It whines a bit, but no bad sectors at all.

-Jesse

feeling guilty

[xonen]

If someone is a bit slow at their station, the computer system will say so, and they can be encouraged to go a bit faster after their next break. Also, if a set of boards starts to fail the testing process, they can tell exactly which one of the many production lines in Building 26 was responsible and if needed, track down the exact employee that was responsible for the section of the mainboard that's failing the test.

i'm feeling guilty about us making mass-consumer electronics in low-wages countries.

ECS mobo process skipped a few steps

[CodeMunch]

In TFA, I didn't see the step where ECS mixes in 9lbs of rat $hit per unit - can someone please send me that link? Tnx.

ECS=CRAP

[teknokracy]

"And now, here is the section of the ECS factory where we add a mysterious defect to one out of every three boards, just to keep QA on their toes. Oh, it looks like they are on lunch break....."

I've had ECS boards die.

[EvilStein]

And trying to contact them for an RMA was such a waste of time that I just ended up buying another one.

Soyo, Asus, ECS.. had boards from them fail at one time or another. The only boards I've *never* had fail are the stock Intel ones, Apple, and Sun. I've never had a hardware failure on a Sun box - ever.
Must have been all of those chickens..

Re:I've had ECS boards die.

[MemoryAid]

About those chickens....

Seriously, do you have a link? Do the chickens test the boards prior to your purchase, or do they help you choose a good one. Perhaps there is some chicken mojo that can preserve boards proximal to properly trained chickens....

Re:I've had ECS boards die.

[spauldo]

No, to keep sun hardware properly functioning you have to routinely wave a dead chicken over it.

As long as you do that, it'll never fail.

Re:Skilled, indeed. Where do I start with this cra

[Anonymous Coward]

When someone pees in your breakfast cereal in the morning, I suggest you take a deep breath and resume your life.

• You get what you pay for. If your mobo sucks so bad, return it and ask for your money back. This is not an unreasonable course of action.
• Since when is this new? It could only have been a better article if the female testers were clones of Natalie Portman and worked in a giant pool of warm grits.
• Finally, did you RTFA? It actually says why the testers are females. There's an actual reason.
• Oh, I did say "finally" on that last point. There is NO fourth item!

Ah!!!

[orionware]

The final production testing is done by skilled female technicians who have the ability to test two at a time, in tandem

No wonder why ECS motherboards suck so bad.

Re:Skilled, indeed. Where do I start with this cra

[nobodyman]

• You get what you pay for. Yeah, I know. My point was that ECS mobos suck. Cost might make it worth your while, but they don't suck less.
  
• Since when is this new?. Fair.
  
• Finally, did you RTFA? It actually says why the testers are females.Yeah, the reason? "the female of the species has smaller, defter fingers." Kinda generalizing, aren't they? No man on earth has small enough hands to work at ECS?
  
• There is no rule #6.
  

Economists surrender

[kylef]

my guess is the unskilled ones kept screwing it up.

Headline: Economists everywhere surrendered when confronted with a new definition of 'skilled worker:'

skilled worker - a worker who doesn't screw things up

I realize this was the point of the OP, but seriously: calling assembly line testers "skilled" because they can test two at once is a bit of a stretch, no? "Skilled" used to mean that you have both training and experience in "special skills" that set you apart from what untrained people could do with some practice. But apparently now "skilled" just means that you've learned how to do anything.

I mean, even using a mop takes some basic instruction so you don't make worse of a mess than when you started. I suppose janitors meet this new definition of "skilled" too.

So who doesn't qualify as being "skilled"? An idiot that can't do the job properly?

Your possibilities are limited.

[YesIAmAScript]

Even a microcontroller will present some problems to you. This is because wire-wrapping really requires DIP (or other through-hole) packages on chips. And even microcontrollers aren't made in through-hole packages that much anymore.

Honestly, nowadays it is more common to buy a reference board with a prototyping area.

AnandTech Did This

[Hack Jandy]

AnandTech did this tour a few years ago I think.

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=1891

HJ

Where is the creation of the connection patterns

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anybody else notice that the article missed the creation of electrical patterns in the PCB? This involves CAM stations translating the electrical design to routing, film production with the pattern, photoresist coating, UV exposure, washing, etching, watching, and after that and not the least AOI - Automatic Optical Inspection of the patterns created. This is where you find shorts, cuts, and line width violations. The AOI machines is usually the most expensive equipment in a PCB plant. And they are much more accurate than the visual inspection the author refers to.

Re:Where is the creation of the connection pattern

[Technician]

Did anybody else notice that the article missed the creation of electrical patterns in the PCB?

Yes. I was wondering why they patterned the solder mask before patterning the metal lines. I read on to find out they simply skipped patterning the metal lines.

Solder mask is the coating that covers the entire board except for the pads where the components get soldered. This has to be done after the metal lines are etched. It's hard to etch the traces under the solder mask if it's done first.

What is the goal of this article?

[Anonymous Coward]

"... keeping the resident workforce happy, with on-site restaurant and relaxation area, well kept garden for spending free time in, employee-built library ..." etc. etc.

Sounds more like propaganda than a real, objective article. Let's just say that this article is a bit too much "china compatible" for me. It's interesting to see how quickly this comment will be modded down.

Nevertheless, getting some insight into the people behind the product is always a good thing.