And that, as they say, is that
I told you it was fairly logical how a mainboard comes to exist, starting with the PCB production, but hopefully it's been good to see how the largest PC mainboard manufacturer on the planet gets the job done. What I didn't convey to you was the sheer scale of the operation. You got digicam shots of parts of machines, production lines and testing hardware. All of that stuff exists in large multiples, thousands of staff and robots working together round the clock to pump out the 3,000,000ft² of PCB and the resulting 2,000,000 mainboards they create a month.Biloda's on-site staff certainly get the PCB job done, with ECSM's workers taking Biloda's formidable output and turning it into the kind of hardware that's impressed recently. So when we left Biloda, I asked ECS if I could snag a bare PCB or two for some photographs for my readers, so you can see what a production PCB looks like before it gets sent to somewhere like Building 26. They duly obliged, giving me Socket 754 Athlon 64 and LGA775 Pentium 4 PCBs for you to have a good look at.
Bare PCBs in picture
What struck me the most, and what inspired a forthcoming competition, is how smooth the PCBs are when they're bare. They're smooth enough to use an optical mouse on, put it that way. So I've decided to have one of the PCBs professionally laminated with a very thin transparent coating, top and bottom, just to smooth over the mounting holes, and I'll give it away as a mousing surface to a lucky reader who can answer a yet-to-be-thought-up question relating to the article and the manufacture of mainboards. Anyway, here's a few shots of both the Intel i865 mainboard (with LGA775 socket) and the AMD Athlon 64 K8M800.Both are ECS products, in ECS's standard purple, and are in full production today. The boards are fully working, pulled from the top of a working stack ready to go to ECSM for completion, so if you had the required patience, steady hands and static free working enviroment, you could use it to build a functioning product. Or you could just let ECSM do it for you!
