The Making of a Motherboard at ECS

sheiky writes "Hardcoreware.net has posted a look at the manufacturing process of a motherboard at a new ECS factory in Shen Zhen. Unlike most factories, they build boards from the ground up at one location, starting with the PCB all the way to a finished product. They also talk a little bit about the working conditions they witnessed in China."

Comments

Dupe

[Ramble]

Bit-Tech did this over a week ago.

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2006/06/16/ecs_shen_z hen_factory_tours/1.html

ECS at Frys

[Anonymous Coward]

I work a Fry's Electronics. The rurmor at my store is is that ECS is owned by Fry's. I have never seen or heard anything to validate or disprove that, so take it with a grain of salt.
Anywho, regardless of ownership, ECS products are the favorite things to sell at Fry's. From the ECS motherboards to their Great Quality branded computers and notebooks.

As an employee in the service department (and thus, responisble for repairing computers when they fail) I can tell you the anything made by ECS is complete dirt. The GQ computers are not too bad, but I have never seen so many DOA motherboards in my life. We had a customer buy a mobo/cpu combo last week and his board was DOA. We ended up going though SIX (yes "6") more boards before we found one that would actually work.

DO NOT BUY ECS PRODUCTS.

Re:Unions

[thelost]

hardly surprising considering the whole article reads like a paid for advertisement and actually goes into little/no detail about the manufacturing process.

bad boards

[cdn-programmer]

bad boards - how to recognise and avoid them

http://www.redhill.net.au/b/b-bad.html

This section, however, is not about the normal variation in quality and reliability between typical motherboards. It is about plain old-fashioned greed, and the cheap, shonky boards that sometimes result from it. Here then, is a short gallery of the cheap, the nasty, and the outright fraudulent.

To quote for the Red Hill web page:

PC Chips fake cache 486

Let's begin with the most famous of them all: the fake cache 486 boards that PC Chips produced in the mid-Nineties.

---------------

From the PCCHIPS website we find: http://www.pcchips.com.tw/PCCWeb/AboutCOMPANY/Abou tCOMPANY.aspx?MenuID=8&LanID=2

PCCHIPS has been a leading supplier of motherboards and PC peripherals since 1994. We are committed to provide products of superior value and exemplary customer service to our customers worldwide.

http://www.pcchips.com.tw/PCCWeb/Legal.aspx?MenuID =8&LanID=2

The materials ("Materials") contained in this web site are provided by Elitegroup Computer Systems Co., Ltd. ("ECS") ...

I think these quotes speak for themselves.

Re:Chinese work conditions

[frank_adrian314159]

Thanks to this bullshit (read: pension plans) the City of San Diego is for all practical purposes bankrupt.

Uh, excuse me? Last time I heard, the main reason that SD was bankrupt was because the folks in charge of investing the money in the SD public employee pension fund did a piss poor job of investing (mainly by focusing large amounts of money on derivative contracts). Blaming this on the employees is incredibly stupid. Or do you think that employees don't have the right to ask for pensions? Top level execs seem to have no problem doing this (last I heard Jack Welch was getting millions of dollars a year in pension benefits from GE; he's not the only one). But I guess they're entitled.