Visiting Corsair in Fremont
05.12.08 - 02:20am
I spent last week in California making new friends and visiting various hardware venders. While traveling through the San Francisco area I had a chance to stop by Corsair in Fremont. I had spoke with Robert Pearce, one of Corsair’s Marketing Specialists, and he arranged for some time to tour Corsair’s offices in Fremont. I actually rode the BART train in from downtown San Francisco at 7am with Michal Nowicki aka bachus_anonym so I had an early start that day. When we finally arrived 45 minutes later, I was decently surprised with the amount of equipment and testing that occurs at Corsair.
Memory Production
Not long ago all of Corsair’s memory was manufactured in their Fremont location. They had 3 complete production lines that assembled and tested memory modules starting with PCBs and ICs and yielding packaged kits. Just recently though Corsair shifted the brunt of their manufacturing capacity to Taiwan. The reasoning for this is that Corsair typically purchases components in Taiwan, has them tested in Taiwan, shipped to Fremont for assembly, shipped back to Taiwan for re-testing, and then shipped globally. By shifting their entire manufacturing process to solely Taiwan they reduce shipping costs and production time.
When creating product lines Corsair must analyze both yield and demand. It makes little sense to produce bleeding edge modules in such low quantity that supply is an issue. At the same time it isn’t good marketing to produce a large quantity of mediocre speed sticks and not consistently be able to hit speeds the competition is reaching. The solution to this is extensive IC(Integrated Circuit) and module testing, a process that Corsair specializes in. Rather than assembling entire kits, Corsair speed tests each IC to insure it’ll hit the required speeds before assembling the sticks. By doing this they prevent abnormally low kit yields as a kit is only as fast as it’s slowest IC. Currently this stringent testing is reserved predominately with DDR2. However, DDR3 tests are in the pipeline which will increase yields for Corsair’s 1800 Cas 7 Dominators and faster speed grades.
Testing Facilities
I spent most of the day just walking around Corsair’s production testing lab. In this room all the pre-production and compatibility testing occurs. Within this single room there must have been nearly a 50 working computers all cycling through a variety of tests to document memory performance and compatibility. This is primarily what Michal does and it looks very similar to what top tier benchers do albeit on a much larger scale. Adjust one setting, loop benchmarks, analyze, adjust another setting, repeat. One step up though that Michal has are these memory testing cards that come pre-loaded with a simple OS and tests similar to MemTest. Each Ram Stress Tool Pro card comes with a slew of memory stress tests and error reporting that indicates which IC on which module is failing.
Conclusion
I had a blast walking around Corsair’s Headquarters, the information I picked up there made me greatly appreciate the amount of work that goes into designing and selling memory. As a parting gift Robert surprised me with a kit of Cas 4 PC2-8888 Dominators and Cas 7 PC3-14400 Dominators. Suffice to say, my heart skipped about fifteen beats. I have had just after a few hours of testing and the memory looks to be immensely promising. It was great visiting Corsair and I can’t wait to set some records with these sticks. Thanks to everyone at Corsair, your hospitality made it a great trip out to Fremont.
Are they just using one kind of motherboard to do their testing (IE what looks like a DFI DK board in the left edge of the pic), or are there a bunch of different boards they use?
They’ve got everything under the sun, both Intel and AMD. They have a large quantity of Asus boards though as Asus is located very close by.