Chaintech also makes a broad range of video cards. When we looked through our normal US online store lists, we found no current Chaintech video cards. They did however tell us about their future boards. They currently have several NVIDIA-based cards, ranging from a Vanta to a GeForce 256 DDR. In the future, they will carry NV11 and GeForce2 GTS based cards. Chaintech does not, however, limit themselves to NVIDIA products. They carry solutions from SiS and, as of a few months ago, S3 as well. The non-NVIDIA solutions, while not as fast, carry a significantly lower price tag. When you're running a business application on a 15" monitor, you don't need a 350MHz RAMDAC or four pixel pipelines.
The most interesting part of our visit to Chaintech was when we were given a tour of their in-building factory. We have included several photos from our tour along with explanations of the manufacturing process.
The following shots are from a clean room within the Chaintech building. We had to don anti-static anti-dust booties as well as coats, then pass through double doors and an air wash in order to enter this room.
Here is a PCB without any components installed. It is about to go through the process of having components surface mounted.
This machine surface mounts components onto the PCB. The rollers along the bottom of the image feed the components to the machine. The large white block in the center with MPA written on it houses the actual mounting equipment. The silver broken line going across the picture from left to write is a corkscrew mechanism that moves the mounting equipment from left to right. This is a high-speed machine and mounts individual components in a blur.