ECS Factory Tour 2007 – Making a Motherboard

Final Testing & Packaging

If the board has passed all testing so far it will be built in a test system that is on the line and fired up with a hard drive operating Windows XP. Every function is tested individually after all the board drivers are installed to make sure that all features on the board are working correctly. Even audio files are played to make sure the audio connections are working right. Notice they fill all four memory banks full and use four SATA hard drives, which is the max for this board.

After the board has passed all testing it goes through one last visual inspection with a template before any final stickers are applied and the board is put into retail packaging.

Once the motherboards are completed they are then packed in larger boxes, placed on wood pallets and ready to be shipped around the world!

We’d like to thank ECS Elitegroup for the invitation to see their factories in China as they have given us the ability to show our readers how things are done and to educate us on the entire process. The next time we write an ECS motherboard article we will be able to know each and every stage that board went through when we sit down to publish an article and that is invaluable.

The strict inspections and assembly procedures at ECS means high success rates when it came to motherboard testing. We never did see a board fail and any given step during our day long visit to the factories, which is a good thing. It looks like the quality of ECS products has greatly improved over the past several years. An example of this is this board with the failure rates. Out of the hundreds of boards that this single line has made in seven hours just nine boards have failed and it could have been for something minor that re-work could easily fix!

Also be sure to check out the article from Hardware Logic to get another point of view from the same tour! A few sites from the United States got the chance to take the tour, but just HL and LR have posted their article online!