Despite being a motherboard reviewer, I’ve never had the chance to ever see inside the HQ of any of the prominent consumer and OEM motherboard vendors.  Most of us decide which price and performance segment we want with our processor, and find a motherboard that fits the frame from reviews.  There’s actually so much to designing and producing a motherboard that I didn’t realize before, so having a chance to see how ECS works and produces product from start to finish is one that I jumped at.

On floor 13 out of 20 of the ECS HQ in Taipei, I was shown one of the many research and design rooms at the motherboard manufacturer.  In each cubicle were tens of motherboard products all being worked on by testers, BIOS coders, signal processors, trace designers, product marketers and so on.  First, I was given a brief demonstration behind the motherboard product design from the engineer’s point of view.  This in itself was interesting, going through the many stages of initial idea, to design, to testing, to debugging, and finally production:

• Motherboard segments decided by product/project manager, often dictated by cost
  • Discussions: Specifications, Schedule, Other Details
• Schematic Design
  • Data Research based on standards and chipset/IC specifications
  • Initial schematic CAD design, checked and double checked
• PCB Design
  • Layer by layer – impedance for signal traces and signal integration
  • Placement of components due to thermal, current and spatial consideration
  • Layout as per design guidelines to avoid interference
  • Initial PCB design in ECS factory
• Motherboard Sampling
  • Provide Bill of Materials
  • Revision 0.1 PCBs from factory
• Motherboard Testing and Debugging
  • Complete test process – functionality, signal quality, power management, stability (3DMark), compatibility (software, games), electromagnetic disturbance testing
  • Fix design errors by checking signals and reworking the design.  Repeat as necessary
• Motherboard Revision/Mass Production
  • Revise all must-fix items and confirm all solutions are implemented

I was allowed to take an alarming amount of pictures whilst walking around the engineer’s cubicles, so I photographed anything and everything.  For example we have BIOS engineers working on ECS’ new UEFI (out in July, apparently):

Power engineers working on trace lines:

Designers working on the latest marketing and taking pictures of products:

And a variety of desks full of equipment and testing beds:

As part of the tour, the soldering room and oscilloscope testing were also shown:

The oscilloscope was used for output signal testing – when the output is too high or low, the engineers will suggest changes to resistors and/or capacitors to improve the quality of the test PCBs.

I managed to find an ECS X79R-A on one of the desks similar to what we’d seen at the booth, and took some pictures.  This clearly shows that ECS are well on their way to an X79 product for launch – if I get one in to test I’ll let you know how it performs.

The life of an Engineer, Sales Rep or Team Leader at an electronics company is a hard one, which requires meetings at every product design stage, and the company has to look after them to ensure a good product from content workers.  In terms of meeting rooms beyond small ones found on most floors, I was introduced to a large 200+ seat hall for presentations that used televisions to broadcast to the back of the room:

In order to feed the staff of the 20 floor building, the canteen on the second floor complimented two restaurants on the bottom floor:

On the 19^th and 20^th floor however are the company game and weights rooms, overlooking a terrace with views across Taipei.  It’s also fairly close to the local airport so aeroplanes fly quite near.  I was informed that internally they run table tennis/ping pong tournaments often.

There was also a little gem back in the engineers floor I went to – clearly fruit with faces will scare media away:

From a business perspective, having access to these types of facilities is without question.  However, as a long-time consumer and recently a reviewer, I have a new found insight into how complicated it is from the other end – in terms of getting the right people, having the right ideas and access to the right facilities.  This put me in a better position for a Question and Answer session headed by David Chien, Vice President of the ECS Channel Business Unit, for selected media at Computex.

Our session with David Chien began with the marketing line of ECS as a company, and the goals which they strive to achieve.  Any media situation such as this is an opportunity for any company to reel off the positive numbers rather than the negative – for example, we were informed that ECS is experiencing a 5% growth on their product sales quarter on quarter, compared to the tech industry standard of 3-4% (unfortunately I cannot verify this, it is an ECS figure).

In his initial pitch, he stated that ECS have plans for tablets – by developing Intel as a strategic partner, they are planning to produce a seven inch and a ten inch tablet using the Oak Trail platform with the MeeGo operating system.  These are due around September.  Also in the works are the promotion of their All-in-One SKUs, the G10 and G11, featuring Sandy Bridge platforms – presumably the mobile chipsets.

In terms of Motherboards and VGAs, he was keen to stress that consumers are being well looked after, despite OEM sales being more than 75% of ECS sales in total.  He mentioned several times the new eBoost technology that ECS are bringing to the AMD platforms, including A75, which offers at the touch of a button an automatic 33% overclock.  This sounds a relatively impressive feature to support across such a chipset, meaning that the power delivery across the range must be strong enough.  He did not state whether this was a CPU or iGPU overclock though, but liked to point out that it gave a 2x GPU score boost, quoting a score of 8000 over 4000 at stock – but surprisingly enough, no mention of a benchmark.  Then there was also the hint at a Haswell mini-ITX in the works.

In terms of the Q&A, unfortunately my sounder recorder was malfunctioning and so I cannot quote David word for word, however, I will summarize the questions asked at the Q&A session as accurately as I can.  Those marked IC are ones I asked (which happened to be numerous) in the time allowed.

Q: Is ECS coming out with a Tegra 2 system with Android?

A: ECS believes there are limitations with the Android system, seeing it more as a smartphone platform rather than an OS geared towards tablets.  Microsoft has been relatively slow in coming to the market with an appropriate OS version for tablets, but ECS are tentatively waiting for Windows 8 to be available, and combining it with an Oak Trail platform.  Until then, SKUs will be shipped with MeeGo – with the 10 inch primarily for the EU/NA markets, and the 7 inch for Asia.

IC: In terms of market research, how does ECS determine future markets?

A: Internally, we get our departments to work with each other and with our customers to define future products – especially in terms of our OEM sales.  It is important to stress that in most product segments, people only remember the top five – for example with motherboards, people remember ASUS, Gigabyte, ASRock, ECS/MSI (IC: depending on region), and then maybe one other who in reality has a minimal market share.  So it is hard to break into new markets quickly, and be one of the products that people remember.

Q: In terms of Latin America, what steps are you taking to provide consumers with products?

A: (Note, DC talks mainly about Brazil here and was possibly a bit confused) In certain countries, such as Brazil, the government discourages imports from non-native companies by taxing those imports very heavily – they like to keep products from within their own state.  As a result, ECS are working heavily with local partners in order to ensure our product reaches retail at reasonable prices to our competitors.  In terms of Latin America, we are number one in selling to OEMs, and in Eastern Europe, we are number four.

IC: How many motherboard units are you projected to sell in 2011 and 2012?

A: In terms of growth, we are seeing a 5% increase in quarter to quarter sales, compared with the 3-4% growth the industry and Intel is seeing.  This is in part due to the release of the iPad 2, which has decreased sales to netbook providers, but also due to the Japan earthquake which has caused certain shortages in electronics production.  But ECS are still the number three seller to OEMs worldwide.

IC: ECS were initially an OEM retailer – how as ECS overcome the dogma of ‘standard’ products into producing enthusiast level equipment?

A: For ECS, there are two extremes in terms of motherboards in particular – on one level there are the OEMs, and on the other there are the enthusiasts.  Particularly to the enthusiasts, branding is very important – that is why we will be promoting the specifications of our products and technologies such as eBoost for our AMD platforms.  As a comparison, ECS want to be seen like we see Toyota – stable at a reasonable price.  However, we are obviously looking to the future of enthusiasts and overclockers.

IC: ECS currently sell VGA cards, but only using the standard reference design and coolers.  Are ECS planning to expand this range to custom PCB and cooler designs?

A: The VGA market is very dangerous and volatile at this time – with Intel’s Sandy Bridge graphics and AMD’s APU solutions providing proportionally more performance every generation.  To proceed beyond the reference designs, we need to move step-by-step, which requires a great deal of time and money.

Unfortunately, there was no more time to ask questions, even though I still had several planned.

The ECS booth at Computex was fairly extravagant this year, in terms of piling in most of the current and new product range but also the eye candy used to pose next to them.  Most people know that ECS make motherboards and graphics cards – also on display were All-in-One solutions, net/notebooks, HTPCs and eBook readers.

In the tour, it was explained that ECS actually make a lot of products that do not retail with the ECS name but are branded through other companies.  The eBook readers are a typical example of this – I picket one up but found it very sluggish with large delays between turning pages.  One model on display was using Android 2.2 with a Wondermedia 8650 CPU, 8” color TFT at 800x600, 256/512MB memory, internal storage up to 32GB, external storage expandable through microSD card and weighing in at 450g.  However ECS were keen to stress that these were mostly engineering samples – on display to entice OEMs for future sales rather than consumers directly. 

The All-in-one solutions are also an example of products that will not bear the ECS name when coming to market.  They were all happily showcasing Angry Birds (as was almost every AIO at Computex I should add), but based on the thin mini-ITX platform.  The G11-21ERS can use a 65W Sandy Bridge processor (maximum), support for up to 8 GB DDR3, 1.3MP camera with microphone, multi-card reader, USB 2.0, HDMI in, and all using a 150W power adaptor.  Personally I think USB 3.0 support wouldn’t be too much to ask, but the system does come with 10-finger input recognition.

In terms of VGAs, there was not much new, and if any where, it would all be reference design – motherboards were more interesting.  Anand showed you the X79R-A and A75 preview boards, which by the look of things at ECS HQ represents a more-or-less finalised layout and design.  The CDC-I is ECS’ product in the world of Cedar View, whereas the HDC-I and HDC-I2 are from the E350/Hudson M1 Fusion range – I should be getting the HDC-I in for review to compare to some other E350 products shortly.

The A990FXM-A motherboard was also on show, which is debuting ECS’ CoolTech II technology.  Apart from a redesigned power and chipset cooling design, the PCH also has a heat-sensitive logo on it, changing from black to orange (40ºC) to red (60ºC) as the temperature increases.  It’s quite a gimmicky addition to a motherboard, in my opinion.

For HTPC, three models were there: to start, the DS110 using an E350, space for a full 3.5” HDD, USB 3.0, VGA, HDMI, gigabit Ethernet and two mini-PCIe for a TV Tuner and WLAN, all in a 65W power envelope.  Though unfortunately while it was running the latest Harry Potter film, it was incredibly choppy, around 10-15 frames per second.  Also present were the MS150 and MS300, using 65W under Cedar View and 120W under H61 respectively with similar connectivity.

I’m fairly critical of every motherboard that passes through my fingers – it has to be perfect.  The BIOS has to work flawlessly, the performance has to be in the upper echelons, the design choices have to be right, it has to offer a good warranty and a good package, and be priced aggressively for the consumer.  After having the opportunity to look at the ECS HQ and talk to a VP, this will not change.  I will keep reviewing ECS with the same rigor as before.

However, since my tour, I feel it is important for a reviewer who works on a product to see how it is made.  How the design process is thought out and realized for something that will eventually come to market.  I will be aggressively questioning all and sundry behind design choices and product representations of market segments – it is important to question how these companies think, in order to predict what will happen in the future, so we can possibly steer them into what you, the readers, want.

What David Chien said about how people only remember the top few companies in terms of electronic products, in my opinion, is true – if ECS want more sales, they will need to push their products beyond current designs and performance.  They need to breach the top slots held by ASUS, Gigabyte, ASRock, and to a certain extent MSI (in terms of motherboards).  This is wholly dependant on the design team, the market research and the markets themselves into how ECS position and design their products.  ECS will never steer away from the OEM market – it’s their core business.  But here’s hoping they devote more time and money to the consumer market.