![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Friday , May 11, 2001
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Tour the VisionTek Factory and see them build the first Retail GeForce3 Card!!
We had the opportunity to head up to Illinois a few weeks back in order to watch the first VisionTek GeForce3 card roll off the production line. We took a lot of pictures that we want to share with you.
Welcome to VisionTek! Come on in and take a look around. See how they make the GeForce3 card that they are selling to folks like you.
If you have been hanging around the [H]ardOCP for awhile, you are probably familiar with VisionTek. If you haven't been with us long, you may not know them unless you have seen their GeForce3 Vid Cards on store shelves this week. The reason their name is not that widely known (yet) is that they have been working long and hard on the OEM side of things. Yeppers, many of those premium boxes you see at your local electronics retailer have VisionTek Vid Cards in them, although you probably did not know it.
While we are not going to get into specifics, we could sit here and rattle off a few of the largest and most quality-conscious computer builders, and that would be exactly who VisionTek has been catering to for years. I can confidently tell you that top-name OEM suppliers in the computer market produce some of the most reliable products on the planet. All that VisionTek is doing is taking that same product and selling it to you instead of the big OEM.
As VisionTek's sales have increased, they have expanded their manufacturing facilities to become one of the most flexible I have ever seen. Along with increasing capacity, this flexibility has allowed them to have the resources to get into the retail Vid Card market. Remember, they were making them anyway; they just were not putting them in a fancy box! Also, with 3dfx exiting the picture, and Creative fully confused as to what they are going to do in North America, there was certainly a spot open for someone to step up and sell some quality products at a decent price, and that is exactly what they plan to do.
I figure that many of you guys have never had the opportunity to see a Vid Card being put together. It is much like the process that you may have seen a mainboard go through in our ABIT tour here a couple years ago. What we are going to do here today is to lay out some pictures of the process, along with an MPEG, and show you how that VisionTek GeForce3 ended up on the shelf. Also worth mentioning here is that VisionTek is the ONLY major manufacturer of Vid Cards in the USA. All American made, baby! That means when you buy a VisionTek card, you helped give someone a job right here in the USA.
I have been to many manufacturing plants in and around Taipei, and I have to say that VisionTek is very unique compared to what I have been experienced overseas. At first I thought they seemed a bit disorganized, as some things seemed thrown together, and I mentioned this to them. They responded with an explanation that helped me understand the heart and soul of their business.
They don't just make one product. They produce four or five Vid Cards, multiple configurations of memory for both PC, notebook, and special applications, Firewire cards, and a few other products that are top secret. So, while some things looked disorganized to me to begin with, what I was really seeing was their flexibility when it comes to production. They may be knocking out TNT Vantas in the morning and Firewire cards on the next shift. When you are running this many OEM products, you have to be flexible.
Let's take a look at where your GeForce3 starts.
As mentioned above, VisionTek does a ton of OEM Vid Card work. Many OEMs have their own specifications for the software that will be installed on those cards, better known as the BIOS. Yeppers, your Vid Card has got a BIOS too, and many of you may have flashed your own. If you have, you know that this procedure can be a bit long and drawn out, not to mention nerve-racking. That is why VisionTek invested in a super-duty BIOS flashing machine.
This machine is very nifty to watch work. The first pic shown is of the entire unit, while the second and third pics show you the inside of the machine. What basically happens is that the big spool, which you can see behind the monitor, feeds blank BIOS chips into a robotic arm. That arm picks up the BIOS chips and places them in the flashing sockets. You can see eight of them inside the machine. The machine will start flashing the BIOS chips as the robotic arm is setting up or removing BIOS chips from the other sockets. The robotic arm can then either place them into a tray or back onto a spool. The machine is set up to put the finished product back into a spool on this setup. In the last two pics, you can see where the BIOS chips are being fed into the machine on a spool, as well as see them come out onto a spool. Once the spool is filled, it is removed and placed in The VAULT.
The VAULT is a big "pick and pull" parts room that stays under lock and key. In this room you have BIOS chips, DDR and SDRAMs, NVIDIA Vid Card chips, and all sorts of other stuff that is needed to make the cards.
It seems a bit simple, but keep in mind that VisionTek is doing many custom orders. This means that they are not making the same product thousands of times per day, for months. They need a human touch in making sure they get things right. Above, you can see what the aisles look like, and even see that spool of BIOS chips they were cranking out earlier.
Now what happens when an order comes in, let's say for GeForce3s, is that the VisionTek employee gets the order sheet with a list of components and he actually goes into the The VAULT and pulls the items needed to build that card.
From there, the cart or carts that he was loading up go to a staging room.
In the staging room, the cart gets wheeled over to a board on the wall. Here, the order is double checked for parts accuracy and is either green-lighted, red-lighted, or yellow-lighted. Obviously, if it is red-lighted someone is getting a talking to, yellow-lighted points to an easily correctable error, and green means that this portion of the order is ready to head for the floor and be put together.