Last week, we reported from the Computex trade show, visiting the booths of various companies. But we’ve got another photo report from Taiwan. We also managed to get into a Gigabyte factory, where the company produces motherboards and graphics cards, and we’re bringing you a gallery of photos from there. Contrary to popular belief, not all hardware manufacturing takes place in China – many components are made in Taiwan.
The factory our colleague visited is located in the city of Nan-Ping.
A small demo was set up for the tour, showing off motherboards and graphics cards produced at the factory. The blue server board for two processors appears to be called MSB3-PE0, and it’s possible that it’s not yet officially released (it’s not listed at the company’s website). The four large Broadcom chips under the heatsinks should be PCI Express 5.0 switches (PEX89104).
Among the graphics cards are also fresh models from the GeForce RTX 5000 generation. You can even spot the PCB of a low-profile GeForce RTX 5060, which we highlighted in our report from the Gigabyte booth.
A wild Radeon RX 9060 XT appears…
But take note of the graphics card in the top-right corner of the first lot of PCBs – this is likely the first publicly shown PCB of the Radeon RX 9060 XT, which, technically speaking, may still be under NDA. So enjoy this privileged look at the exposed Navi 44 chip (the card will go on sale June 5, with reviews a day earlier).
Its design matches AMD’s official renderings, and its identity is further pointed at by the unusual three display connectors. This should be the PCB for the Gaming version of the card, or more specifically, the Gaming OC model with three fans (the cooler will significantly overhang the PCB, with a pass-through window under the last fan).
Let’s be honest – do you use any protection against static electricity when working with computer components, or do you just touch your house heating radiator or pipe? In the factory, workers wear antistatic clothing, shoes, caps, and are grounded via an antistatic wrist straps (you’ll notice it being connected to ground wires in the following photos).
SMT process
The first stage in the production of motherboards and graphics cards is the placement of SMD components (Surface Mount Devices), such as BGA chips. This is done in a more high-tech manner on SMT (Surface Mount Technology) lines.
This is one of the robots placing the SMD components:
The moving “arm” works quite fast.
Alongside the robotic placement and soldering of components, this line also performs inspections of the parts, checks the quality of the solder balls on components (to prevent defective placements), and other inspections.
The quality control process nowadays includes AI systems as well.
Monitoring console.
Soldering through-hole components, the manual work, and final assembly
After going through the SMT line, the PCB already carries some components, but some the more coarse ones still need to be added. This part of the process is more traditional and manual. Your motherboard will still be handled by good old human hands during manufacturing.
Here, you can see connectors and other components that use “through-hole” soldering to the PCB being added – the first step is to place them in position, dry-fit for now.
The boards then pass through a wave soldering machine, which solders everything in one go. This process runs continuously as the boards move along the belt.
After coming out of the oven, the populated PCBs pass a cooling unit – simple, but apparently sufficient.
Various manual steps are performed on the boards. As you can see, soldering definitely isn’t just a man’s kind of work.
CMOS / RTC batteries are installed manually, here in the cable-attached form commonly used in Mini-ITX boards.
Trays of components to be installed on the boards: backplates that reinforce the board under the processor from the rear, and aluminum heatsinks for the power delivery components (a.k.a. VRM).
Here’s a challenge – can you guess what the following components are? Spoiler: They’re custom connectors used for attaching Wi-Fi antennas, now found on Gigabyte boards. More precisely, it’s an entire wireless module – included inside is an M.2 card.
Here they are peeking out from completed boards.
And here, the boards undergo automated testing. This step includes checking that the MAC address assigned to the network card is actually unique, besides other steps.
Photos from the line where graphics cards are assembled.
This should be the station for testing graphics cards. The card is placed in a “drawer” and inserted for automated testing.
To wrap up, here’s a nice little feature they have at the factory entrance: a model of the building made from various components from graphics cards and motherboards. Judging by the copper heatsink forming the central ornament (and the colorful PCIe slots), this piece likely dates back to the later half of 2000s. Nowadays, most of the material would probably be just black…
Sources: Self
Photo: Jozef Dudáš
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
⠀
⠀
