PCBA manufacturing
With a motherboard's printed circuit board complete, the process moves to PCBA manufacturing. Here, the motherboards begin to resemble a finished product.

Boards are assembled in racks and fed through a surface-mount technology (SMT) machine that populates them with components.

Surface-mounted components are stored on massive reels that are fed into automated machines.

Those machines are capable of mounting approximately seven components per second. Mounting TSOP, BGA, and other chips is a little slower; the machines populate boards with those chips at a measly two chips per second.

Once they're populated by the SMT machines, boards proceed to a reflow oven. From there, it's on to a visual inspection.

Boards are also fed through an X-Ray machine that examines components that aren't covered by the visual inspection. Then, an in-circuit test validates roughly 90% of the board. This test probes between 1300 and 1600 test points in about 12 seconds.

Once this automated assembly validation is complete, the boards move onto manual assembly. Here, workers populated the boards with components by hand.

And I've never seen faster hands.

Larger components, such as ports, slots, and even capacitors are installed by hand.

Once a board's component diet is filled, everything's soldered in place and baked to perfection.

Boards are then cooled before final assembly takes place.

Final assembly is rather short, with only a few components being added after the oven. Next, it's on to a final visual inspection before boards are run through a number of test stations.

There are three stages to ECS's testing regime, and each test is applied to every board on the line. First, boards are subjected to a basic power-on test. A functional verification in DOS follows.

After the DOS test comes a more comprehensive Windows XP functionality verification test. If a board passes all three tests, it moves on to final packaging.

During the packaging stage, the board is boxed, bundles are packed, and stickers are applied. This is the final stop for most boards before they're shipped off. However, ECS also randomly samples 1% of the boards that come off the line for additional inspection and compatibility testing.

Compatibility testing includes loops through 3DMark2001 and Content Creation Winstone 2003. 0.2% of boards that come off the line are also subjected to a 72-bour burn-in test consisting of 3DMark2001 looping in an environment that ranges in temperature from 30 to 55 degrees Celsius. Ongoing reliability tests with more extreme environments are also conducted with select boards. These tests push temperatures from -40 to 150 degrees Celsius with between 10% and 90% humidity. ECS even simulates transportation, including a drop test that examines how well a packed board can withstand physical shock.