Today we were invited to GeIL's Taipei factory to get an up close and personal tour of its facilities for testing and producing its RAM modules.

Since GeIL outsource the SMT part of its memory production, that is the part where the chips get attached to the memory module PCB, we could not show that part, however we do get a chance to give you a really close look at some of the testing aspects as well as the burn-in process.

As you can see in the video above, the first area we visited on the factory tour was the IC testing room. In this room there are a dozen or more IC testing machines. Their purpose is to validate each and every memory chip that is placed on to GeIL RAM. However, it's not just GeIL RAM. GeIL's Taipei factory is operated under a different business under the same group called Valor Precision Testing Co., Ltd. Valor actually help test IC's for competing memory companies - for a fee, of course. We would suspect judging by the vast amount of IC testing machines that this is a big part of GeIL / Valor's business.

During our visit to the IC testing room, we even managed to almost break one of GeIL's machine. Prior to shooting the video, we were told we could open the door when we wished, but we were not told the part about having to pause the machine before doing so. Oops! Nevertheless, you'll probably get a laugh out of that part of the video.

[img]2[/img]

The next step was to change rooms and head into the smaller burn-in room which contains the GeIL DBT-I burn-in chamber. GeIL burns in standard desktop memory for one hour, while more mission critical server memory is burned in for three hours. We had no issues with opening the door in this room and as you can see in the video above, you get a really close up look at the custom-made motherboards that GeIL use to burn in its RAM.

Normal memory will receive another check after the burn-in process to make sure it works fine and passes all the required tests. Then it gets moved to another floor in the building where it gets packaged and shipped off. High-end GeIL RAM isn't quite done yet, though. Enthusiast level RAM after the burn-in proceeds over to the hand testing area where GeIL employees test the RAM on a range of GIGABYTE and ASUS motherboards to ensure that the RAM operates as promised.

At the start of the tour we were told that there was only one machine we could not record and that is the machine which does the final check to ensure the memory is working properly before heading to the packing area on another floor. At the end of the tour we asked if we could record the machine from a distance and were granted access to do so, hence the overlay of it in the video above.

We hope you enjoyed this tour of the GeIL Taipei factory and we'd like to extend our thanks to the friendly staff at GeIL who made it possible!