Every motherboard is checked after the surface mounting stage is complete. First, the boards are checked manually with a template that the worker simply runs their fingers over. If there are surface mount components missing from the board, it cannot move on to the next stage in the process. Instead, the missing components must be manually soldered on to the board.
The boards are then screened using a scanning machine. This is linked up to a computer that has a blueprint of how the PCB covered in SMD components should look. This is done to check that the components are mounted within the thresholds for operation. If components are mis-placed, the board is put to one side, and then the components are manually repositioned.
Before the larger components can be installed onto the motherboard, the back of the PCI slots are solder-masked. First, the memory slots are placed...
I/O ports on the back panel start to be placed, but they're not all installed at the same time. The housing for the BIOS chip and some of the on-board capacitors are placed.
Onboard VGA, USB and parallel ports are placed, as has the 4-pin ATX power connector, and some of the three-pin fan headers. At this point, most of the capacitors have been placed.
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