Inside the Gigabyte Nan-Ping Factory

THIS YEAR we were in Taiwan / Taipei to attend the Computex 2009 exhibition. Gigabyte Technology has a total of four manufacturing plants, and one of them is located roughly 45 minutes outside that big city called Taipei.

To seize the moment and opportunity, we figured it would be a good idea to visit them and have a look inside that massive building of theirs.

The factory is called the Nan-Ping factory and open as Gigabyte is, we were allowed to photograph the entire production process so we can show you what is happening inside, while that motherboard or VGA card is being built.

Employing over 1,200 people, the Nan-Ping facility has a capacity of making 250,000 motherboards per month. It can make 50,000 graphics cards a month and, on the server side of things, 5,000 parts. Quite a capacity.

In this article we'll follow a motherboard and VGA production line inside that factory to get a glimpse of 'how stuff is made', a unique insight of what's actually done prior to you purchasing a product.

Upon arrival well... a factory is a factory I guess and it looks like just that. With the Mexican flu still active Gigabyte measured our temperatures. If they were above 37.5 degrees C we would not be allowed to enter the building. Also all people participating in this factory tour had to wear air-masks to prevent infecting their employees.

Next to that we had to wear massively sexy and fashionable footwear as well in the form of these blue slip-on covers you wear over your shoes. And since I'm size 45 (metric), trust me... that was the first challenge of the day :)

But with all attendees dressed up like Bozo the clown, let's head on over to the next page where we'll start up the Gigabyte Nan-Ping factory tour 2009.

So before we begin, we have a lot of photos to cover and I did not want to skimp on file-size and quality. Due to the massive size of the photos (in KB) we will have to spread out the article with a maximum of four photos per page shown. But trust me... it'll be worth it.