How a Zotac RTX Graphics Card is Made

AlphaAtlas

[H]ard|Gawd
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As part of a (Japanese) writeup on the subject, Impress Watch posted a video from inside a factory showing how a Zotac RTX 2000 series graphics card is assembled. It doesn't show the fabrication of the core or memory itself, which would happen at a foundry somewhere else, but assembling and testing the PCB still looks like a massively complicated process. PCGamesN has an excellent (English) writeup on the long process if you want more.

Otherwise, check out the video here. Unmute it at your own peril. https://www.hardocp.com/news/2019/01/21/how_zotac_rtx_graphics_card_made

Production of the product is done at the factory of PC Partner which is the parent company of ZOTAC, the location is Dongguan, Guangdong province, China. It is done consistently here from test manufacturing to packaging. The parts mounting on the board is almost fully automated, and users wanting to worry about how the latest video cards are being manufactured should check them out.... Also, test production of prototype, performance test of cooler, test of noise, various durability tests etc. are done here, impression that quality control is also thoroughly done.
 
Looks exactly the same as the SMT lines I worked on

You also tape your boards down because an engineer cant figure out how to design a decent tray?

As a person who is jelly of them having multiple MPM printer(or not because they are getting long in the tooth) looked incredibly slow in terms of boards per hour. Even without a line and just myself juggling 3 machines, i could be making 30 boards in less than 4 hours.
 
wow really?

humans sitting there twiddling their thumbs waiting for the solder paste squeegee machine?

y'all motherfuckers need line automation
 
So where's the corner where the workers get a 5 minute break to play their favorite video game of jumping off the roof, now with Ray-Tracing reflections?
 
Bwahahaha!
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The first thing that caught my attention was how beat up the machinery was. That doesn't mean they don't work 100%, but the exteriors of those machines were beat to hell considering how high end the production is. It's not kept to the standards of a chip fab, that's for sure.
 
pretty amazing just how many people have their hands doing each part of the cards.....no fucking way we could make them here right? (affordably)
That is an old plant, a new one would do all that with only 3 or 4 people who mostly supervise and monitor for obvious errors or stoppages along the way.
 
pretty amazing just how many people have their hands doing each part of the cards.....no fucking way we could make them here right? (affordably)

Actually we probably could. Discounting to modern factories that are more automates. In an apples to apples comparison instead of just counting how many people are there the proper way is to count how much human time do you have per card. I'd guess under 30 minutes per card. What's the excess costs for 30 minutes of a worker that costs the company about $35/hr (not just hourly pay but taxes, benefits, etc. included) vs one that costs $2 an hour? About $14 extra dollars to make it here using the same methods for apples to apples comparison assuming 30 minutes of contact time. Really, that's a small difference on everything but the most budget cards.
 
Actually we probably could. Discounting to modern factories that are more automates. In an apples to apples comparison instead of just counting how many people are there the proper way is to count how much human time do you have per card. I'd guess under 30 minutes per card. What's the excess costs for 30 minutes of a worker that costs the company about $35/hr (not just hourly pay but taxes, benefits, etc. included) vs one that costs $2 an hour? About $14 extra dollars to make it here using the same methods for apples to apples comparison assuming 30 minutes of contact time. Really, that's a small difference on everything but the most budget cards.

It's already been worked out that the biggest hurdle to building most electronics in North America is the startup costs and hiring difficulties. North American companies have been investing heavily in Chinese manufacturing for more than 50 years, that is a huge start and not something easily overcome they have a skilled and entrenched workforce and facilities on hand, retooling is cheap in comparison when you already have clean rooms built. Now that being said most companies are moving out of China but they are sadly (for us anyways) moving to India where they have hundreds of thousands of people lined up to take the jobs with cheap electricity and cheap land with a government willing to foot the bill for most of it. Even if they were to try to move this to the US or Canada the only cost effective locations would be in the boonies which while being great for the economy as a whole would be terrible for housing and finding skilled employees as most of the hires would have to be imported from either China/India or from other parts of the country. As far as the cost sharing goes though look at how the Foxcon/Sharp deal in Wisconsin went down ... point is getting manufacturing back to the US and Canada for this stuff will be a painful painful process but as automation gets better and more available it becomes more attractive to bring the jobs back here.
 
pretty amazing just how many people have their hands doing each part of the cards.....no fucking way we could make them here right? (affordably)
They certainly aren't at the prices Nvidia is asking for them.
 
That was in japan based on the subtitles, can't read it though. All the workers looked like they came out of high school. Must be high turnover rate
 
That was in japan based on the subtitles, can't read it though. All the workers looked like they came out of high school. Must be high turnover rate
To be fair it is still low-skilled work. The hard parts of assembling the cards are all automated.
 
That was in japan based on the subtitles, can't read it though. All the workers looked like they came out of high school. Must be high turnover rate
Most of their manufacturing is done in Macau so I would assume it was there, though it likely aired in Japan as part of China's "Our electronics are just as good as yours" campaign they have been running for the last few years... I am sure it has a catchier name than that but point is China is really flouting their electronics companies in foreign countries right now to offset a lot of the negative press they have been getting as of late.
 
You also tape your boards down because an engineer cant figure out how to design a decent tray?

As a person who is jelly of them having multiple MPM printer(or not because they are getting long in the tooth) looked incredibly slow in terms of boards per hour. Even without a line and just myself juggling 3 machines, i could be making 30 boards in less than 4 hours.

You must be an uber machine operator. :rolleyes:
 
sure were a lot of youngsters just hanging out down at the end of the assembly line but I thought the low cut crew socks and sandals were excellent

For those who don't know what a plumus is:

 
Thanks for the video. Zotac is always a company I keep an eye on with each new GPU release. Some have commented how their process in the video seems slow but oddly enough I noticed during the first 2 months of RTX that they regularly were the 1st to show in stock on Now In Stock for numerous re-sellers.
 
That is one of the most boring videos I have ever watched. The fast-paced derpy music definitely didn’t sync up with the incredible lack of things happening.
 
That is one of the most boring videos I have ever watched. The fast-paced derpy music definitely didn’t sync up with the incredible lack of things happening.
Making video cards is boring.
 
I have a Zotac 1070 Amp Extreme and a EVGA 1060 on my two PCs. The only thing I don't care for is the Fire Storm utility. It won't just start up automatically like EVGA Precision and I have to manually hit Yes to run it every time I turn my PC on. Otherwise the card has been working fine with my overclock.
 
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