Gadgetory

Iran we're in Taiwan at MSI's headquarters and the first part of this tour is going to be the EMI lab so we're looking at a few different places at MSI HQ in Taiwan and we have a clip from the acoustic testing room we have another room in sa room that we'll look at and we wanted to start here at the EMI lab because it's actually it's really interesting stuff before that this video is brought to you by be quiet and it's straight power 11 series power supplies the straight power 11 PS use ship from 450 Watts up to a thousand watts accommodating most of the gaming PC build requirements you'd encounter and focuses on delivering a higher quality power supply that doesn't sacrifice on efficiency or stability noise is also a heavy point for the straight power 11 using a 135 millimeters silent winds three fan that can spin as low as 200 rpm for quieter low load operation learn more at the link in the description below first of all you'll notice the paneling is sort of similar in some ways to an acoustic room like a semi anechoic or anechoic chamber except this is used for radiation testing instead of acoustics so in this instance there's the foam paneling on the walls there's metal paneling on the wall behind that and this is setup all for absorption to reduce the influence of bounces from radiation or from EMI on the antenna behind me and there are two types of antenna used where so one of them here is a smaller horn antenna and the range on this one is 1 gigahertz to 6 gigahertz for the signal that it's looking for the larger one here can actually move up and down and we have some footage of that too and it's used for Cee compliance testing so you have different standards around the world depending on where you want to sell your product and they have to comply with different radiation or EMI electromagnetic interference standards and so C II is one of those and MSI complies with the c ii standard so it has to push its components through testing to make sure that it meets those standards for EMI and what msi is doing here is testing a full system they have ways to isolate for individual components so if they want to isolate for their VGA or for their motherboard they can't ask to ensure that those in the component sweetness back this is all pre testing its pre validation so after msi goes through pre testing with their components here they take the component send it out to another lab third party lab for official final specification testing and making sure it's compliant so they can receive the c ii badge or whatever badge it may be so the antenna on the other side of the room they receive direct radiation the paneling around the rooms ensures that there's no sort of application no picking up of unnecessary noise unnecessary radiation that's just direct feed from the system under test or from the d UT and so they're different test patterns the one that's on the screen right now is actually a vga test pattern they generate some kind of load for the system or the device under test and then that's fed through a system that we can't show you unfortunately but there's a system outside of the room that reads all of the what the antenna is picking up and so then msi can validate if it's meeting their spec and so the spec that msi use is a minus 6 DB which is actually lower than what they have to meet so when they send the system out or send the component out for further validation there's some Headroom there just in case there's a difference in how the chambers are set up in different locations and speaking of the chamber setup so this whole room is special built for this we have actually we have a shot of the door opening to if we haven't used it already and the door is a giant metal door there's metal paneling all on the outside of the room metal paneling in the whole inside of the room the corners of the room are very specifically angled as well with metal panels it's on a flush corner then you have foam paneling here foam paneling there the antenna of course and everything else in the room so total room cost or something like this is somewhere between maybe 20 and 30 thousand USD somewhere in that range but it's very important to insure seee compliance and and ensure that the designs are are good so if msi has any issues with emi that can pick it up here improve the design and then test it again to make sure it validates for compliance so this is used for testing vga testing motherboard any other components how much i might make and then system under test is here this actually table can rotate so all the cables are hooked up plugged into the table in the center and that's plugged in elsewhere now the cables are passed through the wall and insulated as well so pretty cool we have a shot of it all rotating as well so they can detect they can pick up EMI from different angles make sure everything is within spec no matter the angle the systems that I think that mostly describes this room oh and they can also switch antennae on the big moving one so they Emma so I can change that out and use a different type of antenna if they want and also you might wonder what the nets for up there it's just strictly for safety it doesn't do anything else but in case something falls down so there's a lot of sensitivity here where if you're testing in this lab you have to put your phone into into airplane mode because the machine will actually pick up that EMI that Electric electromagnetic radiation or interference and it'll pick up on the graph and cause a big spike that isn't obviously from the system so I think our sound recording equipment doesn't create too much EMI but that would pick up as well in theory and it's all very controlled as a test environment so that's the EMI lab let's move on it's one of the other ones maybe the acoustic lab next you're gonna hear my voice change in that one because it's an SM I anechoic chamber so you'll hear my some of the the bass will be removed and it's pretty cool experience so for this room probably the audio in the video my voice will have changed at this point we're in an in a semi anechoic chamber we've filmed these before we did one at Logitech's years and years ago and this is MSI's semi anechoic chamber so it's actually pretty cool the way these work and you may already know some of this but these big foam blocks of course used for I believe in this case its absorption there's normally there's a few different ways you can deal with sound so in a case at a PC case product you might do absorption or like a deflection basically where you just kind of bounce it around until the sound wave dies loses all of its power or you can absorb it and there's a few other methods too but for a room like this I believe they're doing an absorption approach and the idea is to get the noise floor as low as possible so that when you're testing the products you have more room to scale you're testing your test resolution so for example when we do noise testing on cases in our lab we don't have the budget of MSI or Logitech so our noise floor is about 26 DBA which is pretty low it's it's good for a quiet room but this will get you much more accurate results because your range for for the scale of noise that a product will output is expanded so when we test stuff we can't bring our test resolution below 26 it's not possible because the room is louder than that the noise floor here is about 16 DBA and this is set up so that there's padding around the whole room including the ceiling we have some shots of and the padding is mostly just this stuff right here in two corners there's slightly changed foam blocks that are more square and that's just to deal with the deflection in the corners because you're dealing with noise bouncing between three surfaces three adjacent surfaces the walls in the ceiling and so those blocks change to deal with that noise in an appropriate fashion in terms of testing so right now MSI has one of their cases set up in here MSI also does notebook acoustic test and they do testing for customers and the goal is to check from these ten different microphones in the room what the noise levels are typically testing from the front from a user scenario so where would the user be seated realistically versus a notebook and test the noise output of that device and so that's the basics the really cool thing with these anechoic chambers or semi anechoic chambers is always just how how insane the change and type of sound is so when we start our videos we do a clap to synchronize the audio on the camera and my mic and I don't know how well that carries through in video but we'll do one from somewhere else that's not an anechoic chamber and it just deadens the sound immediately it doesn't really feel like it travels and bounces like it would in a normal room the foam even extends to the door so there's two doors one of them has big foam blocks on it there's foam between the door in the wall and then there's a second door as well so any point of entry is thoroughly deadened by more foam so pretty cool stuff the testing here MSI looks at frequency so they can look at the the type of sound in terms of see looks at the DBA output there's some isolation under the floor as well by the way we're not sure exactly what it is but to help with noise further and then this as far as the ISO standards go complies with 37 44 and 77 79 which I'm not specifically familiar with but there's ISO compliance so that msi can do testing for partners and meet those standards and in the dimensions of this room so it was built as sort of added on for MSI and the dimensions outer dimension of this room is five point four meters five point four and then four point one five meters inner dimensions a bit smaller counting the foam blocks comes down to like 3.5 meters mostly well squared plus 2.7 meters and if for other specs the cables are patched through the wall through foam blocks and the point of that is just to further isolate the noise you have to get cables in here to plug into the devices to running them through the foam through the wall will ensure that there's minimum sound getting in through the walls through any potential holes so pretty cool setup and if you want to see more of stuff like this we do have an old video tour of the Logitech sound anechoic chamber as well and I guess I'll also note that temperature and humidity is controlled in here so we have some shots of dehumidifiers things like that an AC unit that I wish I wish was on right now because it's pretty hot in here so but let's move on to the next lab so this is the acoustic lab really cool stuff from MSI we're gonna check out one of the other ones EMI or sa will be next the last time a sight lab that we're looking at is the signal analysis lab or sa lab MSI's electrical engineers use this lab to insure motherboards and video cards are able to produce clean signals that land within the specs of the association's that set them so that would be things like DisplayPort visa specs and HDMI requirements testing is also conducted to ensure USB ports on motherboards meet the USB if' requirements or that SATA ports meet SATA standard requirements but MSI has its display testing hooked up for us today each device is connected to a series of probes that connect two different scopes which then measure the signal through automated testing engineers are able to view a full lab report at the end of the test and see if the device failed any tests and if it did pass all the tests the engineer's can prepare the video card or motherboard to go out to the authorized test centers or third-party validation labs to receive that these certifications needed for DisplayPort HDMI or other standards the first test station is outfitted with a Tektronix DPO seven one six zero 4c it's a high end oscilloscope that's a digital phosphorous illis co but looks at a signal on the time domain for less than 11 hours when validated for compliance test standard version at 1.4 or cts 1.4 the compliance standards are provided by the various display groups or other interface groups depending on what's being tested and must be met to ensure that the device and its video output surpasses all of these standardized tests this includes a video cards and motherboards alike there are eye pattern tests for one example where the signal output produces divergent and convergent patterns with specific amplitudes a single test failure would mean one of the features of device has failed and has to be improved potentially by rerouting circuit traces or redesigning the PCB or updating firmware MSI is experienced enough with this type of testing that there is rarely a failure of this type but if there is one Emma sighs equipped to look at it and figure out where the failure occurred and then fix it before any kind of public launch on the Tektronix DPO seven one six two zero four C scope MSI currently has four differential probes hooked up that each accept a pair of wires coming from DisplayPort connecting into the special header at the back of the video card for signal analysis there are four pairs of differential signals coming out of the DisplayPort that need to be tested which is what we're looking at here the scope captures the signal and uses an auxilliary board positioned next to the blue wires which automates testing and runs through pre-programmed test patterns and sequences to individually benchmark the signal for all cts 1.4 requirements as for the green probes these are SMA coaxial probes that are meant for the same type of tasks but just used for their different bandwidth capabilities MSI also has a customized PCIe test that is used to balance the PCIe signal this board validates PCIe electrical compliance testing and quality circuit trace design for the PCIe capabilities via the video card the board can connect either via PCIe by sixteen or by one depending on the test and has groups of probe connections for each standard for PCIe by sixteen testing 16 pairs of data lanes are connected to validate the signal producing a mountain of data that engineers have to use to ensure signal quality this compliance load board has dip switches for PCIe generations one through three and will eventually need a switch for PCIe Gen four but MSI cant presently talk about the new interface as for the Tektronix oscilloscope used on we mentioned earlier this cost MSI about twenty five thousand dollars USD originally the purchase and configure for testing and it's not even the most expensive scope in the lab the next battery of tests comes from the network analyzer which is focused testing on PCB impedance and s-parameter measurements for these tests MSI connects differential TDR probes or phase matched stable coaxial cables for measurement of impedance or insertion loss or return loss from the device under test or D UT these tests first have to be calibrated which can be done with automation fairly quickly or manually over the course of a few hours and then msi connects the probes to the d-o-t and adjust signal pitch according to the signal traces finally MSI's most impressive test equipment is one which tests signal receiving validating that the signal output is the same as the one that is received or sent in a loop this test is exhaustive and has strict requirements for accuracy and can be used for display outputs SATA USB or other connection standards for example in one test pattern that wasn't running when we visited pc is IG requires that of 10 to the twelfth bits transmitted and received only a single bit can produce an error in order for the D UT to pass PC is IG requirements this tests that the output signal matches the input signal on the other side moving back into the oscilloscope for validation for perspective this equipment cost I'm sorry about two times as much as the earlier Tektronix scope we showed and is one of the most impressive pieces of validation hardware we've yet seen on our tour that's all for this one as always subscribe for more go to patreon.com/scishow brews accents are directly or stored on cameras nexus net to pick up a shirt or one of our mod mats thanks for watching we'll see you all next time