FOR YEARS, ECS HAS churned out budget motherboards destined for pre-built systems and value markets. Recently, however, the company has expressed a keen interest in building high-end boards for gamers and enthusiasts. This interest manifests itself in the new "Extreme" motherboard line, which taps the latest chipsets from ATI, Intel, and NVIDIA, and has many of the features and capabilities one might expect from a high-end enthusiast board.

While we were in Taiwan covering Computex, ECS whisked us away for a quick tour of its manufacturing facilities in China and showed us exactly how these motherboards are built. We saw it all, from traces being etched onto individual PCB layers, to the mounting of surface components like DIMM slots and capacitors, all the way through testing and retail packaging. Join us as we walk through ECS's Golden Elite Technology campus and witness the birth of a motherboard.