Earlier today Guru3D visited the Nan-Ping factor from Gigabyte in Taiwan. We received the full tour from PCB design, SMD soldiering of components, assembly up to the end ... packaging. This is one of these places where yours truly as press typically never has a chance to report about. Normally taking photo's in a factory of this magnitude is forbidden as well. Massive props to Gigabyte for opening up their shop for us and allowing us in here, and most of all ... allowing us to photograph everything we wanted.
Somewhere in June we'll post a full article on this incredible visit to the factory. It's amazing to see how the components we test and review on a daily, basis and you guys purchase are actually made. We did an awesome high-quality photo-shoot.
For now I'd already like to share a few photo's with you guys.
Here we are already in the later stages of a finished PCB, as you can see the PCIe, DIMM and for that manner any separate component on the PCB is hand fitted by employees.
Here we are at a second production line, the VGA card line, I can assure you, Gigabyte makes the cards themselves :)
In the complete article we'll zoom in a little, but these are GeForce 9800 GT / GTS 250 cards in production, with 1 GB of memory. Yeah I quickly bent over the product line and sneaked some photo's close-up in here for the photo-shoot.
And sure .. the previous photo showed one card, but this line poops out roughly a card every 4-5 seconds. It's fascinating to see.
So as you guys know, ATI has problems getting high volume of the Radeon 4770 ASIC due to yield issues on the 40nm node. However, a production line had just finished .. we know for sure that Gigabyte apparently had a nice large batch to slap on their PCB, here are some residuals of that, which I consider to be stone cold proof ;)
Anyway, we took roughly a hundred photo's in the Gigabyte factory. Later on in the month we'll post an article on the full production line, which I can say already, is very impressive. As such we like to thank Gigabyte for this invite.
