I work in a small machine shop making tooling for manufacturing. We have a smaller flat stone like that. It is so satisfying when you make a part and it’s just completely flat.
Or, more accurately, if something does break, it doesn't get multiplied 100x over in the entire process. If they're running the line 100x slower, they're more likely to find the bug he creates.
Yup - there was a protective tape around the STOP button on the oven, most likely specifically to avoid Linus shutting down equipment that would take days to restart.
you can see at 9:50 the time on the PC is 10:13A, assuming its in CST (UTC+8, or 2:13 UTC), and the video was released 22:22 (UTC), that would be 20 hours, to finish the rest of the tour, get the footage, edit and upload
It’s so nice to have SMT covered so clearly. I supervise SMT Lines in the USA. I work on Medical, and Defense boards so I can’t simply show the people in my life what it is I manage(it would be a felony haha). I will now be referring them to this video. Awesome job!!!
I used to work at a motherboard placem operating a pasting machine and also doing visual QA after the ovens. It amazes me how much better these facilities have got over the years.
I worked for 12 years in electronics manufacturing. This factory seems to have pretty good pick and place machines but everything else is pretty standard and the shop floor is not that nice. And i'm a bit puzzled why they still wear mask.
@@dtibor5903whats your issue with the shop floor not being "nice"? It could be a lot worse, I work at SMT lines that are way less organized and have way more clutter. The masks are likely to decrease chances of FOD defects, I doubt its a full clean room because this is just class 1 for consumers.
@@clerooth i work in quality for a small electronics aircraft manufacturer. We make life critical electronical actuators and have a huge process for cleanliness. Seems like they are doing a good job. i wonder if the floor is esd safe. Seems like everything else (chairs, desk, equipment) but we have esd floors that cost a small fortune.
This factory tour has the be one of the best ( if not the actually the best) factory tours on the RU-vid, as an industrial electronic technician i trained under a pcb manufacturer ( they are specialized in ipc level 2 & 3 electronics) This tour had it all, from the components getting first visual inspection when it's arrived to the factory, R&D on new products, manual reworking on ICs/ chips to the packaging ( quality control is whole another story ) Using Mantis ( its like a microscope ) to inspect visual deformation in SMD or THT components ( usually that's goes through least 3 inspectors to verify absolute best quality products )
Holy crap, this is incredible. Framework is a G for getting you the opportunity to temporarily reduce production for a GPU manufacturer. Huge props to you guys for sharing this really interesting behind the scenes of the process that creates our computers! ❤
Now I see why Linus went to Computex. I thought Linus avoided traveling for work if he can avoid it but I’m sure u cannot get too bored of factory tours. Very cool to see the process and hope there is a more in depth discussion on the WAN show.
Ha yeah. I had wondered the same… he must have traveled for something more compelling than a few product videos. I also wonder if LTT are looking to bring out PC components of their own and Linus was talking to ODMs or involved in Framework related discussions. I’ve really enjoyed the videos this week. Feels like classic LTT content, energetic and engaging :)
It's remarkable how similar the fabrication process these GPUs are to most other PCB fabs. My previous job was configuring and training PCB fabs on a brand of automatic solder inspection machines, and the production lines are almost identical ! Just scaled down/less fast here and there.
What did you think they were? You must not have worked there for long. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Yes GPUs are PCBs. Any part in your computer that has electricity going through it thats not a cable is a PCB. Without PCBs there are no computers. Its hard to remember who they identify as deep down, but beneath all the plating, cases and large fans, they identify as PCBs too. 😂
This video honestly sold me on PowerColor products lmao I love the transparency in the manufacturing process. Not to mention, the consumer usage testing to ensure the cards will run well for normal usage.
Seriously. For some reason, I was under the impression that PowerColor was some sketchy, low-quality brand. This tour really changed my opinion. I had no idea how significant they were in the industry.
we need more of this type of content and the "solder waterfall" as you put it is known as "wave soldering" and its extremely efficient for large volume stuff as long as your solder application height is near perfectly even across the board.
Acshually, this didn't cost them anything. Every production facility runs at less than 100% capacity and they can increase performance temporarily to fill warehouse and stop production for days, to make needed repair, maintenace and upgrades.
Granite surface places are wild: the lab grade ones are flat to the millionths of inches over several feet. The calibration tools are even wilder detecting stuff smaller than white blood cells.
They are amazing. The reference plates for calibrating HASS CNC mills are so precise that it’s equivalent to the width of a human hair against the height of the Empire State Building.
I visited one of our manufacturers that had one of these types of plates with a big gantry over it with a measuring probe for checking accuracy of the parts they were producing. Not really thinking about it I put my hand against it as I was standing there listening and immediately got told to take my hand off the table. Reason being that the slight change in temperature would throw their measurements off. The whole room was temperature controlled as well.
Is there a reason granite is used for this? More mechanically stable in that it holds measurement better/longer? I understand not using metals with corrosion and the temperature changes it's dimensions
Thanks Linus for the video! I'm also in electronics manufacturing, and this isn't the craziest line that I've seen. Anti theft tags or Sim cards are basically small PCB and the machines are astonishingly fast. The bare PCB comes in a spool which is unwound, solder is placed, then components are baked on, its gets die cut and rollend into a new spool, ready to go. It does at a few miles per hour and lloks like a H R Giger giant cassette player
@@sinesaii lol the pay is ok as far as im concerned. The issue with this kind of electronics is that its high volume, low margin, so it's high risk low reward compared to professional audio or military stuff for example
You know honestly the times that LINUS is legitimately and sincerely excited, and not just doing the salesmanship pitch he's been trained to do since NCIX, not that fake American smile but the legitimate and SINCERE smile, is the times the video is the actual best because the subject is often the best. Like that ancient twinboard SLI GPU with a PCI and a PCI-E connector from some air craft simulator, that was just magical. Or discussing CRT or the very first widescreen monitor that was basically just multiple monitors glued together and weighed as much as a tractor. Those are truly special and let's be honest, we might watch product reviews because we're bored or looking for dull business, but we're here with things like this because we're intrigued and it's tech and it's magical. Like really the most hyped product is the e-waste of yesteryear, the same exact way something with the most shiniest of muh grafix is so utterly forgotten no one even knows it existed because it has no S-O-U-L like games with much worse graphics did like Planescape and Baldur's Gate and Fallout, or Starcraft, and ten years from now people might still remember Darkest Dungeon and Darkwood for that very same reason. Because graphics is ultimately meaningless, it's the soul that counts. Something being so overhyped and shiny and new might be stellar on the sleak triple A polish point but we all openly ridicule triple A shitfests at this point for those reasons, overly high production values which consistently underperform and fail to deliver and that's what the 40 series felt to me. Meanwhile Cyberpunk 2077 actually redeemed itself in my eye, that was one of the most memorable games I played. I mean it was nothing groundbreaking, it had so many areas it could be better, it was never anything like a real RPG and the story itself wasn't like the best in the world, but it always held a special place in my heart. And getting there as some random consumer hardware, like the 8800GT, GTX 1080ti, or to an extent 5700XT and 6800XT and GTX 980, to where we remember it later, this takes effort. People don't talk about the R7 270x. But people don't talk about the RTX 2080ti either. But we DO all clearly remember the LASER DISC episode. That was awesome. I love finding weirdo random old tech. And I love seeing how these things is made.
0:55 Missed opportunity to have the tagine be "Restore to factory settings" or something along those lines. Other than that, awesome, very interested in seeing how things are made like this
This is so cool to watch, and seeing just how many times every single card gets checked in practically each stage of the production process really instills a feeling of "I can buy a GPU from these guys with confidence". One of my favourite videos of the year, easy
I mean it makes sense, beyond factory tested environments, being able to stress test in the same way as the consumer to prove card reliability makes perfectly good sense.
Being able to put something like this on the internet for public viewing is so great. These are the kinds of jobs and industries you don't normally get exposure to, but are absolutely necessary. Thank you to everyone involved for making this tour happen and put on RU-vid.
I've been an Nvidia guy for the past 25 years but they're just too expensive anymore. At Christmas when I built a new system for my nephew I went with a PowerColor RX7800 XT Hellhound, good board. When it comes time to replace my 3080 I'll probably replace it with a PowerColor GPU. The granite table brought back memories. We had one of those at my old job. We used it to test springs in a test rig that had to be perfectly balanced and level. The springs took 10 minutes to build and 2.5 hours to test. The scary part was the test rig was running on a 20 year old PC that required Windows XP to work. So glad I got laid off before that PC broke.
I wish I could go down the AMD path. I really want them to succeed. The issue is CUDA support, OpenCL is great but it’s not supported by many of the application I use within my work. The AMD option can easily be 4-8x slower for the same tasks. I’m hoping AMD’s increased focus on AI will result in improvements to their GPU Compute performance. I wonder if the US government may move to force NVIDIA to open up CUDA to other platforms in the future due to concerns around monopoly or in the interest of national defence & avoiding a single supplier situation.
Old OS needing to be used is a hilariously sad part of a lot of engineering. I was in an university lab where a piece of equiment literally needed a PC with windows 98 on it to work. Next to it was a new win 10 PC(this was a couple years ago) to do everything else other than run that one piece of software.
Same here. Had been an Nvidia and EVGA customer going back to the GeForce 2 I believe. With EVGA out of the picture, I ended up with a RedDevil and I love it. Would buy again 100%.
PowerColor came a long way, they are the best AMD partner, super innovative, others just slap coolers around, they dont even care much about details. PowerColor for example is the only AMD partner that actually have a trully all white card, with white pcb, heatsink, cables... all the details.
powercolor is quite confident I saw another video showcasing their factory and that video convinced me to buy a red devil 6600xt. still working like out of the box 2 years later.
I work in a US based PCB manufacturing facility and I'm surprised they don't have a robotic arm for the through-hole components after SMT, I guess they just need more manual precision and know-how for a process as precise as making GPUs Also those ORT rooms are brutal. Glad you got to feel it
@Yomammafatboiiii last time I checked no consumer bought multiple GPUs a week or even month. we literally stick with our GPUs until either a new line up that we really want comes or we have to upgrade because we didn't want to for multiple years. Edit: so yes, low volume.
For a sense of scale. The entire dedicated GPU market is around 40 million units per year and each unit has a single large GPU die and normally a single board. Toyota sell around 10 million cars a year, each car has 20-30 silicon dies across dozens of boards. I wouldn’t be surprised if more SMT components are placed on boards for Toyota than the entire GPU market. The AI market is very profitable, but the actual volume of silicon is remarkably low. It’s been reported that around 3% of TSMC’s 7nm or smaller capacity is going to AI chips. It’s not like for like (as a GPU due is huge and much more complex!) but in terms of units, the volume is still considered very low.
This makes me even happier I went with a PowerColor 7800 XT hellhound. I basically got to see how my card was made and the care taken. Great video LTT, great job PowerColor.
I remember that we occasionally sold PowerColor graphics cards way back like 20 years back. Then they kind of disappeared locally. Good to see that they are still in business. As I remember it we had no problems with their products even back then, and with the controlled manufacturing environment shown in this video the current products should be of high quality. If I remember correctly the graphics cards from them we sold way back here built using VGA controllers from Tseng Labs. Now that's a quite different quality of product compared to what we saw in this video.
It's crazy that "future" tech that consumers will be able to buy in 2+ years currently exists and running in RD labs. That state of the art 4090 gpu that just came out actually existed when the 3080 was released. Hell, there's probably a 6080 in a lab somewhere.
Well, gotta test that stuff properly prior. I just hope they don't put out more and more power tho, running a modern PC honestly has gotten somewhat expensive at this point, if we keep that up and expand on it too fast we'll end up with a line up that no one wants at some point for the sole reason of it not being worth it anymore
2+ years out most of the time it's not even at the silicon stage, they're still running a bunch of simulations on the design typically. It's possible you have the first silicon iteration at that point but it will definitely be revised by the time it gets to the release product.
I’ve not worked with GPUs so it’s not quite the same, but for broadcast chain equipment what’s currently being sold is normally at least 2 generation behind what’s in the lab. Back in ~2010 HD broadcasts were still fairly new, but we had 4K & 8K tech in the labs at my old job. It was a surreal experience to be playing with fibre optic connected storage systems for cameras which could read and write data faster than system RAM in my laptop. A few years ago the same tech was used for the Glasgow Games. The video gallery was in London, but it was working as if it was on site in Glasgow. Each frame could get to London faster than the 16ms it took to display the same frame on the viewfinder screen on the back of the camera. It’s an exciting process seeing tech come to life.
@@jamieknight326 This is the entire reason things get better though, both consumer side and manufacturer side. Because things are getting better and they need more powerful support structures. Imagine if there wasn't a need to increase internet speeds, we'd still be on dial-up, and the reason internet speeds increased is more than likely probably because of both widespread usage and manufacturers finding uses of high speed/bandwidth applications.
Fun Fact: Linus you mentioned on the WAN show that you changed the aspect ratio of your videos to fit better on Phone and PC screens, the fun part is that if you made it just 10 pixels wider it would be perfect for my screen, because I use Firefox with the bookmarks toolbar on the left side of the screen, so in "theatre mode" I get basically no pillarboxing.
wow this was awesome. I love stuff like this, there's so much that goes into the things we use every day, and we have no idea about the processes behind it all. This goes a long way to show people who think board partners don't do anything except slap a gpu on a pcb and ship it out the door. and omg i want one of those sakura edition GPU's so bad!!!!
As a general rule of thumb in Canada, if there's a difference pronunciation between the US and the UK both are correct here. Same for spelling, generally, we will do things the American way because many more Canadians interact with Americans than with Europeans so it's just easier to do with the American way. However, you can absolutely find Canadians that will say everything the European way. They're just quite rare
Love it "Every little detail matters" as the door that says "Keep closed at all times" is left open hahaha. (I am guessing the door was meant to be kept open for something else)
Use to intern for lighting company. We made all our power supplies in the states and they were smart controlled powersupplies. We had pretty much all of this equipment runing to build light smart psu's in Urbandale, IA.
I worked for a company doing quality control for circuitboards for companies such as raytheon, lockheed, basically every car manufacturer, stadium/street lighting, and this is cool to see!
Yes those ORT rooms are brutal. Remember doing QA for HP laser printers. And the different rooms. 0c and the 45c at 100% humidity were the worse. But the low humidity was quite uncomfortable as well.
Total agree on low humidity being wildly uncomfortable. I spent time prodding server hardware a while back and the room was kept at ~6% humidity and 18c. The cold wasn’t an issue but the low humidity felt like the moisture was being sucked out of my skin.
4:57 It's a shame these guys don't watch the LinusTechTips channel. They would have known that Linus tends to drop "The really good stuff" "The Linus effect" was there even before Linus arrived. He had already dropped factory production.
I’ve been looking for a good card for gaming in Antarctica tbh so this is a helpful video….. Also I really do love these it’s so cool to see the manufacturing process! I remember working at a few places when I was like 18-20 yrs old and the best part was seeing how stuff like this works or how the tech is set up in these kinds of places. It’s awesome to see this coordinated and made available to you all to film!
A few years ago I was chatting to an automation engineer who explained that small light things & big heavy things are fast with a robot. However small heavy things (like a GPU cooler) are very hard to do with a robot. It’s to do with the ration between the mass of the object being placed and the mass of the moving parts of the robot. The small motors don’t have the torque needed to move dense objects, and the large motors are hard to control accurately when the ratio of object mass to robot mass gets too low He did tell me the name for the concept but I can’t remember it. Was a neat chat, he travels the UK helping companies set up automated production lines. I kinda wish I’d done mechatronics at uni as it seemed like a cool and varied job.
If you look closely at the date on any of the benchmark monitors, this was filmed yesterday. I'm surprised they edited and released this video so soon.
Man, it’s incredible how much have tech youtube channels done for tech enthusiasts. Before, tours like this would never happen, and now these companies clearly want to do them. There’s something magical about seeing how and where this stuff is made.
Amazing as well how you could do an hours long video on each and every small step of this entire process and the equipment/skills used. All of us to pop it in a machine and take it for granted.
It absolutely blows my mind how each step in the process has been thought out and designed down to intricate details. And it's someone's job to design and build machines that perform all these tasks.
7:46 the fact that a factory of this caliber uses a piece of scrap wood with 4 other more different pieces of scrap wood screwed into it to carry around the GPU's is amazing. I appreciate the jank. Edit: yes, I too have realized that it's not actually scrap wood. I was high and probably saw what I wanted to see. So the correct statement would be: I'm disappointed by the lack of jank
i dont think that is wood scraps..... It doesnt have any wood texture. probably some kind of plastic or coated metal alloy cause like that thing went through the fountain of solder which would probably burn and deform the wood
These videos greatly improve my perception of the companies that allow it. It shows how much work it is to build the product so I'm more accepting of the price, it shows how much care they take to spot any faults before it ships which improves my confidence in the quality of the products, and that they are willing to be mostly transparent about the process builds a lot of trust that they treat workers reasonably and that they aren't trying to hide anything bad. As for the companies that don't allow this sort of thing I'm left wondering what could be so bad that they wouldn't want all this good publicity.
I like powercolor cards! Also the fact they actually shut down the factory to prevent accidental mistakes and just a bad batch while it also costs them probably a lot is cool
This is one of the coolest videos you have ever done! And I don't even use Powercolor GPUs. I use XFX. I have used AMD/ATI cards since 1997 when I had an All-In-Wonder Pro, which was a graphics card and TV card "all-in-one".
Why is knowing a license plate in NA such a big deal? Noone in Australia gives a shit as far as i know, because there isn't really any info that can be gleaned from it?
That machine at 4:15 is called a pick and pluck. It picks up chiplets chips caps and whatever else’s you want and places them on boards to be soldered Ive never seen a modern one, you were right Linus.
It's actually quite awesome that you happen to be touring this exact manufacturer because I'm in the process of building a current gen PC and was looking at a PowerColor GPU!
BTW: 40*C isn't so bad, compared to the 60*C I had to work in when I worked in a plastics manufacturing department for a refrigerator company. (in the summer if it got to 110*F outside, it was 140 or higher inside that department. We had port-a-cool fans that half worked and large fans as well that ... "helped" (when we didn't have any fans, you knew how much they did help... but otherwise it was just hot air blowing, or so you would think).
7:28 It kinda reminds me a technique used in 1960's and 1970's during soldering computer boards. Here, in Poland, we are calling this technique "Lutowanie na fali gorącej cyny" which translates to "Soldering on a wave of melted solder"
