Posted by dinos22 on November 5, 2007

Corsair Factory Tour (Team.AU Exclusive)

Josh (moloko) and Dino (dinos22) from Team.AU got the opportunity to visit Corsair Fremont HQ and receive a tour of the facilities. We were also accompanied by no other than Charles Wirth (aka FUGGER > owner of Xtreme Systems Forum).

First thing is first, Corsair guys made us wear some loony jackets and slapped some anti-static slippers (perfect for us i must say) >> very pedantic and i must say i liked that. They look after this stuff and pay a lot of attention to detail and quality from what we could see.

Here we see some Nautilus water cooling units getting assembled …ohhh soo many in one place

You can also see a PCB block on which they mount the ICs and rest of stuff in these monster machines in following shots.

Sooo they actually get these ICs in these white rolls which fit into the assembly machines. The work on these machines is done so quickly and with such precision it’s crazy….man i could have watched this all day long…heheheh

That little CRT monitor you see below show (extremely quickly mind you) the IC mounting area so that the machine can hit it correctly. There is a quick video of that which will be uploaded at some later point

I don’t know if you can make it out but this black CRT monitor below show the temps these RAM modules are baking under once they have the ICs mounted >>> hows 250+ Celsius Interestingly enough RAM is baked a couple of times and a lot of testing gets done.

Not hard to guess what is going on in these shots with magnifying glass and all. Some seriously steady hands necessary for occasional microscopic fixes may occasionally be necessary. We didn’t see anyone working on this but i’m sure a bit of popcord and some beer wouldn’t go astray next to this spot heh >> oh boy do we love our memory at www.i4memory.com or what

You guys notice a stock of trays chock a block full of memory there. i did . Those trays on the left of those stocks are DDR3 sticks GRRRRRRRRRRRRR >> i think George may have mentioned that you could probably buy a pretty nice house with those stocks fills up pockets full of that fear >> NOT heh.

These next couple of machines are interesting. One cuts the excess PCB that holds the RAM sticks and the other is the SPD programmer . The SPD machine had soo many SPD files on there it’s amazing to think that all these were individually researched and tweaked to work best for each series of sticks (i assume)

SPD machine again and some trays of finished Dominators

Check out the testing systems >> one thing i noticed also is that these AMD systems had 4xsticks occupied. We all know that having 4xsticks in a system is harder to tweak to run at some speeds as 2xsticks. It’s good to see Corsair actually do this because you know they will easily run as duals in these systems and even in 4xsticks configurations. We saw plenty of AMD and Intel based systems in this particular lab. That’s not the only lab of course and i really liked bachus_anonym one but forgot to take pics LOL

Here is an interest fact and something you guys will like to know more about. Corsair use a lot of different methods to test their RAM and they found that by using these RSTPro cards they would get the best results and most reliable ones too….These little cards cost US$700 each from memory EEEEEK

pics of RSTPro cards are underneath

Is anyone able to make out what the ICs say cooool heheh

So they bake the sticks again in another oven with around 200C on them >> you see how they clamp the heatspreaders on the ICs

See that hallway underneath >>> well between shift changes the hard working folk at Corsair uses it as a skating ring

NOW NOW NOW >> this is the room JohnnyGuru would have to be held on leash . It’s got some serious PSU testing gear. Corsair guys are saying one of these PSU testing machines will set you back a lazy US$120,000 each . The blue machine next to it is another baking machine LOL….they use it to set 50C ambient temps and that is how they actually test their PSUs

Anyone notice competitor’s products somewhere in the shot hehehe >>>> that’s nothing…you should see the selection nvidia has lol hahahah

Corsair reckon that this baking plus PSU testing machines has helped them select their OEMs as well and it was unbelievable how many OEMs samples they tested with a failure rate….put it this way these guys really do give a **** and don’t necessarily rely on what OEMs tell them either

^^^^^^^^ HELLOOOOOOOOO looks like they’ve got an unofficial product there on the pile .. heh the new 650W PSUs

We had such a long day and all these bloody baking ovens for RAM and PSUs just makes you hella hungry

Fugger was keen to move on to see a few other people as we had very little time and Robert from Corsair mentioned some macaroni place but that didn’t sound tempting enough until Fudruckers was dropped into the conversation. Well Fugger was like Oh man, oh man, fudruckers, really, oh man >>> next thing you know we’re driving in George’s truck heading over there for lunch. Man this place is awesome for any of you that haven’t been to US and don’t know about this place. One thing is for sure these burgers are MASSIVE. I ate a 1/2pounder and had trouble finishing it all. I took photos of me trying to scoff it all down and also different sizes you can order….have a look at that 1pound mofo

Oh btw Robert is on the left photo standing up in his Harley shirt, the bold dude is errr the legend himself bachus_anonym and George is laughing his head off next to me looking at this Aussie tool trying to eat a burger in one go