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Technology Hardware

How to Build a Mainboard: ECS Production Tour 229

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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How to Build a Mainboard: ECS Production Tour

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  • 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.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • 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*
        • 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.

    • 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...
      • 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 ce
        • 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
          • 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...
      • Would feudalism by any other name smell as sweet?
        • 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...
    • 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
    • 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 sid
      • 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.
      • 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.
    • by Sialagogue ( 246874 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {eugogalais}> 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 could've sworn I've seen this link here before.
  • by hosecoat ( 877680 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @02:37PM (#12865913) Homepage
    females...two at a time.... theres a video?
  • 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...
    • There's also a Greasemonkey script [blogspot.com] to kill them off entirely.
  • 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!

    • Re:ECS K7S5A (Score:3, Insightful)

      by stinerman ( 812158 )
      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.
    • 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

  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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
      • 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.
    • 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 G
      • 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.
  • 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
  • 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 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @03:01PM (#12866174)
    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
    • 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.
  • by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @03:02PM (#12866186)
    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,
    • 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 [homebrewcpu.com] get you started... Recently discussed here. [slashdot.org]
    • 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..

    • Ebay is your friend.

      Also consider going with PICs [btinternet.co.uk], Basic Stamp [parallax.com], SitePlayer [siteplayer.com] (a webserver on a chip), the BugBook [www.isbn.nu] 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 ch
  • 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]
  • ... 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.

  • 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!

  • "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?
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.

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