China is the manufacturing Mecca for a PC nerd like me. So I had the chance to see the magic first-hand I instantly packed a bag and travelled the 6,000-odd miles from the Shire-like West of England to the smog-choked Mordor of Dongguan in China to see simply how the such technical wonders are created. And at the moment I am sharing what I’ve found with you.
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Like many PC players I routinely count on my costly, advanced lump of graphics processing goodness to simply work, giving virtually zero thought to the place it’s come from or the way it obtained right here. But after I was given the possibility to see first-hand the most recent batch of Pascal graphics playing cards being created earlier than my jet-lagged eyeballs, simply the day after they formally launched, I instantly jumped at it.
And yeah, I now have a brand new appreciation for each the engineers who solder, screw and take a look at each single card in addition to the marvellous machines that assist them do it.
There are quite a few producers producing graphics playing cards on your gaming pleasure, however most likely fewer than you may assume. I used to be fortunate sufficient to go to one of many Chinese manufacturing services of an organization you’ve most likely by no means heard of, however have in all chance used one thing they’ve created. PC Partner have been making know-how occur since 1997 once they started life as a motherboard provider.
The following yr they began their contract manufacturing enterprise and have by no means appeared again. Today they manufacture merchandise for a variety of firms comparable to Dell, AMD, Acer, Samsung, Sapphire, LG, Microsoft, in addition to their very own manufacturers, Zotac and Inno3D. And in graphics card phrases meaning they manufacture each Nvidia and AMD playing cards – dig deep sufficient and tribal roots usually sprout from the identical place. PC Partner are, in reality, the most important contract producer of AMD playing cards.
As effectively as graphics playing cards PC Partner additionally manufactures motherboards, mini PCs, flash media merchandise, ATMs and level of sale gadgets. And the numbers are fairly staggering too – PC Partner alone will produce 400,000 graphics playing cards every month and, once you see the method each a type of has to undergo earlier than it reaches our PCs, that quantity turns into much more spectacular.
Each of PC Partner’s graphics card manufacturing traces can create, on common, round four,000 models per day. But every line will not be restricted to at least one single product – whereas they attempt to restrict line adjustments to lower than 5 instances a day it isn’t unprecedented for manufacturing to be switched round that a lot, particularly throughout instances of high-demand.
So extremely streamlined is the method that for related playing cards it could take as little as 5 minutes to modify from one to a different, and in the event that they’re altering from a small card to a bigger one that will nonetheless solely take a most of 15 minutes. That’s an astoundingly fast turnaround within the manufacturing course of from making one utterly totally different card to a different. Though time is cash, so all of it provides up.
The manufacturing unit
The Dongguan manufacturing unit flooring is a tightly regimented area the place the one noise is the fixed grinds, whirs and piston-sighs of the manufacturing tools. There will not be a single human noise to be heard from the various employees populating every of the totally different manufacturing traces on every flooring of the constructing.
Whether that’s a product of the pressured setting the place orders must be fulfilled and failure will not be an choice or purely as a result of there’s a bunch of ignorant journalists wandering round – so attempt to ignore them – I’m not solely certain.
But manufacturing is tightly managed with each side of the manufacturing course of keenly noticed by myriad automated techniques feeding right into a single monitoring hub. Here each dip in manufacturing, each error in manufacturing may be seen and pinpointed and in contrast with earlier days, weeks or months.
Production isn’t all that occurs within the manufacturing unit although, with all types of preparatory testing carried out earlier than a line is able to roll out hundreds of the most recent graphics card. But that’s why I got here and why I discovered myself standing in a fetching blue anti-static coat and matching cap.
The manufacturing course of
The one a part of the method PC Partner don’t do themselves is the creation of the person printed circuit boards (PCBs). They have a design division which comes up with the ultimate layouts, however the precise manufacturing is contracted out to different firms, with the naked boards arriving in bulk, prepared for all of the graphical goodness to be hooked up to them.
Before something is caught onto them although every naked PCB is labelled and set right into a body which can maintain both a pair of boards for longer PCBs or as much as 4 of them for smaller designs. It’s extra environment friendly than particular person manufacturing and means no graphics card enters this world alone.
The first half of the particular course of is the display screen printing of the solder. This thick goo is printed onto the myriad contact factors of every naked PCB for the following elements to be hooked up to. Then my favorite machine ever begins its job.
The decide and place machines are the precision workhorses of the method; their nimble fingers place the tiniest of elements onto every board in a dizzying, hypnotic high-speed dance throughout the PCB.
These machines are fed by reels of tape with all the person elements hooked up to them. A crew of engineers in the beginning of every manufacturing line assemble the person reels to no matter specs are wanted for that individual line.
After all of the littlest elements are caught to the board, the PCB then goes by a course of referred to as reflow soldering, which lastly bakes the unit to make sure they’re all hooked up firmly. Once the boards have cooled they’re then handed by an computerized optical inspection (AOI) machine to 100% assure that every miniscule element is within the right place. If they go, the PCBs are then flipped over to allow them to undergo the identical course of once more for the opposite facet of the board.
This is when the magical second the place the precise GPU will get dropped in occurs; the second when it stops simply being a plain ol’ little bit of printed circuit board with a couple of resistors and reminiscence chips on it and turns into a completely fledged graphics processing monster. For me, that is once they come alive.
But the method continues to be not over. The bigger elements now should be hooked up – the capacitors, energy connections and video ports – and that is additionally the place human beings really want to get entangled. Many of those elements are hooked up by hand, as an alternative of the decide and place machines, earlier than being handed by the wave soldering machines; gadgets with effervescent lakes of molten solder the place the boards are handed throughout them to lastly safe every manually inserted element.
They are all then visually inspected earlier than every board is put by a PCB cleansing machine which makes use of a PH impartial cleansing agent to make sure they’re 100% away from any solder flux residue. This was one of many nastiest components of the method, requiring significantly poisonous chemical substances to scrub the boards successfully, however environmental considerations are beginning to filter into such manufacturing.
Finally the GPU cooler may be hooked up and the ultimate playing cards roll off the manufacturing line… straight into testing.
Every single graphics card that comes off the PC Partner’s manufacturing traces goes by a rigorous GPU testing course of that lasts a full half hour. This is probably the most acquainted a part of the manufacturing unit to me, with open take a look at beds for slotting the playing cards into and totally different testing software program stressing the components to their limits. They even use among the similar testing software program I do within the workplace, such because the tessellation-heavy Heaven four.zero take a look at.
Whether it’s on the computerized optical inspection, visible inspection or GPU testing phases, if a card fails for any purpose it’s then despatched straight into troubleshooting the place the error is positioned. From right here every failed card can be repaired and dropped straight again into the manufacturing line. There’s little wastage and positively no sad-looking bins of b0rked graphics playing cards cluttering up the power.
Finally the playing cards are packed up with their cables, adapters and (most likely never-used) driver CDs earlier than delivery out to the broader world to seek out their means into your gaming rig.
But wait, there’s extra…
Those are the straight mechanics of the manufacturing course of every of our graphics playing cards goes by, however there may be a lot extra that occurs even earlier than the ultimate manufacturing traces can roar into life.
PC Partner additionally home electromagnetic compatibility, thermal and acoustic testing services at their Dongguan web site, permitting them to examine each nuance of a given product’s operational tolerances earlier than they decide to full manufacturing on an costly manufacturing line.
The $1.5m EMC lab is like one thing dragged straight out of Half Life’s take a look at chamberrr. They’re ready for you, Gordon… It’s a sealed room the place gadgets may be examined in full isolation to verify they absolutely adjust to all electromagnetic laws.
It’s additionally right here they take a look at stability of their merchandise; intentionally electrocuting PCs and elements to measure how effectively they’ll take it. I concern these will ultimately grow to be displays of mankind’s enduring cruelty to machines when our robotic overlords lastly take over.
Though the EMC lab will possible be much less of a difficulty than the thermal torture chambers I witnessed contained in the PC Partner manufacturing unit. There are a bunch of various machines pushing tech to its limits, together with thermal shock testers with extremes of temperatures at each ends of the thermometer, long-term, high-temperature stress assessments and environmental temperature testing.
But the actually scary one is the 5 years accelerated life take a look at. It runs for 144 hours at a temperature of 85°C and at 85% humidity with the intention to simulate a 5 yr lifespan of a graphics card. It’s all labored out utilizing a posh algorithm and permits the corporate to assemble knowledge on how a given card will fare down the road. Some of the businesses they manufacture for will even need information on the 10 lifespan, however they would not present us that machine, unwilling as they had been for us to witness the sheer psychological and physiological torment the poor inside should endure.
PC Partner additionally has an anechoic chamber through which to hold their acoustic testing on each graphics playing cards and mini PCs. With an extremely low background noise degree of simply 12-13dB it permits them to measure the vibration noise created by the varied followers and coolers their manufactured gadgets use. And it’s a significantly freaky place to spend any time. Anechoic chambers take in all mirrored sound waves, slicing noise off sharply. You may assume the additional quiet could be fairly enjoyable, however the full change in aural expertise is significantly jarring.
It’s all too straightforward to disregard the immense work that goes into the extremely advanced gear we’ve within the PCs we use only for larks. And it isn’t simply the element choosing robots that undergo all of it both, each graphics card you have ever plugged into your rig has been constructed by many alternative pairs of fingers.
So, your humble graphics card has already been by rather a lot earlier than it even will get into the dusty confines of your PC. Next time it throws a little bit of a wobbly once you’re taking part in Hitman or CoD possibly give it a little bit of a break, eh?
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