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How to Build a Mainboard: ECS Production Tour

Posted by timothy on Mon Jun 20, 2005 02:33 PM
from the sheep-dip-is-the-last-step dept.
Technology Hardware
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.'"
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  • Every man's dream.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20 2005, @02:35PM (#12865896)
    The final production testing is done by skilled female technicians who have the ability to test two at a time, in tandem.

  • Fun in the Factory! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rueger (210566) * on Monday June 20 2005, @02:36PM (#12865910) Homepage
    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.

    • How grand.

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

    • 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! (Score:2, Informative)

      by 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

    • I've been to Shenzhen. . . (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sialagogue (246874) <sialagogueNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday June 20 2005, @05:26PM (#12867401)

      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.

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

  • two at a time! (Score:5, Funny)

    by hosecoat (877680) on Monday June 20 2005, @02:37PM (#12865913) Homepage
    females...two at a time.... theres a video?

  • First (offtopic) post (Score:3, Informative)

    by It doesn't come easy (695416) * on Monday June 20 2005, @02:39PM (#12865932) Journal
    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...

  • A girl tested it? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ruud Althuizen (835426) on Monday June 20 2005, @02:39PM (#12865935)
    So you are saying that a GIRL has tested and touched my mobo? I am never going to get rid of this one.

  • uh... (Score:4, Funny)

    by BortQ (468164) on Monday June 20 2005, @02:41PM (#12865958) Homepage Journal
    Because what mainboard article would be complete without being jealous of the female technician's hardware...

  • ECS K7S5A (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mrm677 (456727) on Monday June 20 2005, @02:44PM (#12865990)
    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!

    • 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 are
    • 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.
    • "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.

  • Gone to the gutter (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Quill_28 (553921) on Monday June 20 2005, @02:44PM (#12865999) Journal
    >skilled female technicians who have the ability to >test two at a time, in tandem.

    Trolling for vulgar comments I say.

  • ECS = cheapass boards (Score:5, Informative)

    by Enigma_Man (756516) on Monday June 20 2005, @02:46PM (#12866017) Homepage
    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

  • Ummmm . . .ECS? (Score:4, Funny)

    by erikharrison (633719) on Monday June 20 2005, @02:49PM (#12866046)
    Since it ECS, shouldn't it be how *not* to make a mainboard?
  • 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."
    • 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?

    • Be fair (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MmmmAqua (613624)
      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 s
  • 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 intri

  • Don't bother reading the article (Score:4, Funny)

    by Jugalator (259273) on Monday June 20 2005, @02:56PM (#12866130) Journal
    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.

  • ECS and PCChips (Score:5, Informative)

    by eventhorizon5 (533026) <ryan.tliquest@net> on Monday June 20 2005, @03:01PM (#12866174) Homepage
    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 [redhill.net.au]
    http://www.rainbow-software.org/hardware.html [rainbow-software.org]

    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 [redhill.net.au]
    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

  • Building Your Own Wire-wrapped PC Board... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by creimer (824291) on Monday June 20 2005, @03:02PM (#12866186) Homepage
    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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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,
  • 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
  • ...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 [mirrordot.org]
  • 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!

    • 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.
    • TFA says 3% of the boards are tested.
    • 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.
      • 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

      • 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.

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