I agree with you....that did look pretty bad. I am uncertain how bad some of the soldering jobs have been but that one is the worst I've seen. It could very well be though....(remember, they are shipped out with the covers on, so no one gets to see the actual board). AMD can not check every one of them. But everyone of them is checked to make sure they work.
Just got home from a long day at work.....were I am a (production specialist) =) on the AMD assymbly line. I hoped online to find this remarkable story....and have some light to shed on it.
Just before Christmas last year......me and my friend....who also works on the line, found an interesting discovery. He is in the testing department, where they place the chip on the test bed and run a process to check the processor. Anyway, he accidently ran a 650 check on a 500. To his suprise....it worked! It gave an error on the board that was one of the resistors. He told me of his findings and we began to investigate further..... We checked the part programs that tell how the board is set up and what parts are placed on the board and found that the only difference was that the 500 had an extra resistor. We thought this was pretty cool and didn't really think about it till now. Also, I noticed that someone was mentioning the remains of peeled up labels and some bad looking soldering. Well, we are known to relabel boards at the factory that were labeled wrong for one reason or another, and we also do our own repair to boards that have been run with wrong/without parts. Hope this info is useful to everyone out there.
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I agree with you....that did look pretty bad. I am uncertain how bad some of the soldering jobs have been but that one is the worst I've seen. It could very well be though....(remember, they are shipped out with the covers on, so no one gets to see the actual board). AMD can not check every one of them. But everyone of them is checked to make sure they work.
"Sleep is a poor substitute for caffeine" - Lotus
Just got home from a long day at work.....were I am a (production specialist) =) on the AMD assymbly line. I hoped online to find this remarkable story....and have some light to shed on it.
Just before Christmas last year......me and my friend....who also works on the line, found an interesting discovery. He is in the testing department, where they place the chip on the test bed and run a process to check the processor. Anyway, he accidently ran a 650 check on a 500. To his suprise....it worked! It gave an error on the board that was one of the resistors. He told me of his findings and we began to investigate further..... We checked the part programs that tell how the board is set up and what parts are placed on the board and found that the only difference was that the 500 had an extra resistor. We thought this was pretty cool and didn't really think about it till now. Also, I noticed that someone was mentioning the remains of peeled up labels and some bad looking soldering. Well, we are known to relabel boards at the factory that were labeled wrong for one reason or another, and we also do our own repair to boards that have been run with wrong/without parts. Hope this info is useful to everyone out there.
"Sleep is a poor substitute for caffeine" - Lotus