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

two at a time!

[hosecoat]

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

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:wtf?

[birge]

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

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

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: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.