Gadgetory

the machine you're looking at right now can apply up to 600 metric tons of downward force and it's used for stamping outside panels for cases pretty crazy and this thing is easily 20 feet tall I didn't measure it easily 20 feet tall does 600 tons of downward force for stamping out metal and it costs 2 million US dollars this was just part of the NZXT factory tour that we recently took in China before getting into that all this Computex coverage is brought to you by a messiahs new x99 motherboard is ready for Broadwell ii including the x99 a gaming pro carbon as many of you know we already visited in win' in their Taiwan or Tao en Taiwan facilities we hopped over from the Taipei area to Shenzhen and then drove from there to Dongguan which is where mzx Keys Factory is and I'm sure I'm pronouncing these things terribly so the factory was pretty darn cool it was built in 2000 it's got about 1200 full-time employees and this is largely dominated by NZXT and their production team for cases and whatever else they may be making but basically all cases at this specific facility first of all just to give an overview of the manufacturing process for a case this starts with making tools and we previously interviewed george makers of corsair about this specific part of the process of you're curious to learn more but tooling as a brief overview is the process of creating what is effectively a mold made out of steel and it's it's not quite a mold like you might find for injection but it is a giant piece of steel it's milled out and cut using CNC machines and other tools sometimes laser etching machines depending on what factory you're looking at what we saw mostly at NZXT these factories were the automated CNC machines and these operate on coordinates input by software and they're designed of course by a designer or engineer those coordinates translate to the head which is h's out the shapes and specific cuts that need to be made in the steel is of metal they're very heavy they weigh upwards of a metric ton a thousand kilograms more or less and they need to be separated by these really cool green pieces of plastic I'm not sure what the material is it feels kind of like a fancier ABS but it looks like ballistics gel it is not so this is a green piece of plastic they cut out using another machine and they stack these between the tools to ensure that they don't damage one another just because of how monstrously heavy the tools are for perspective on where the tools are used the H 440 power supply shroud alone requires six independent tools just to make that little abode out cover that hides the power supply with a piece of steel so that is six tools independently and shows how quickly they can stack up to be 60 70 or 100 plus now one of the things with the tooling process is there need to be very fine tolerances for the tools so the engineers have a specification that is provided to the factory and the factory needs to make sure that the tools that match that specification what are the ways they do this is by using something cool called an electrical discharge machine and this machine refines tools down to a tolerance of within 0.005 millimeters that is crazy small for tolerances and this is done purely with heat so they'll electrically charge this sort of hammer at the top at the tip of the machine the discharge machine and the hammer will smash down on the piece of the tool that needs to be refined and it applies instant heat to that tool which then shaves off very fine amounts of the metal to make sure that the tool fits the tolerances in NZXT steel factory the tools are used in all the machines to punch the metal into shapes demanded by the spec metal is generally supplied to the punch machines via a large reel so it's a giant circular she think of packing tape except made of metal insanely heavy and expensive this is mounted to these machines and it unwinds over the period of making the different panels and pieces of the case so as this unwinds it is fed into rollers and eventually meets the stamping machine the stamping machines slam down into the metal and cut out the shape that is demanded and some of these machines are gargantuan in size as you saw the beginning of it the 20-foot tall sa g600 can apply 600 metric tons of downward force to the material and these previously worked on the source 210 side panels so they weren't working on that today and the machine again is two million dollars USD the next step of this process is quality control and this happens toward the end of the stamping line so the panels and pieces of the case are fed down to the line all the way to the end of the factory and the technicians at the end of this line use their calipers and other tools to check a very fine measurements of the paneling to make sure it meets the tolerances demanded again by the engineers if the component passes is then fed into effectively a giant stamping machine that punches holes for the screws that later get put into the case or the rivets or whatever may be needed for pass-throughs for mounting hardware there's also plastic injection molding and this happens pretty much in the exact same way as we showed in the in one factory tour but we've got some new information that I didn't have then that I'd like to present here injection molding uses pellets of plastic that are fed into a hopper so you'll see the hopper toward the top of these things those contain very small just tons and tons of pellets of plastic and these are dropped into an electrical heating element warmed up and the output is basically injected into the mold that is provided where eventually it'll cool down and become the hardened plastic shells that everyone's familiar with for example there's found on the Phantom cases and these are then processed by technicians and operators who will go about the routine of packing them or preparing them for inclusion in the assembly line eventually the case reaches the riveting line for the Phantom 820 and this is still being manufactured believe it or not the phantom 820 requires about 56 people to rivet and assemble and the line can produce 50 to 60 phantom 820 s per hour so for perspective because that's not a useful metric has its own ngx ease assembly line is able to push about 150 H 440 s per hour and about 200 to s to tens per hour this for me personally was very eye-opening as to the cost of a case and what goes into it because if you've got the choice of producing 50 to 60 phantom e 20s you know you can produce 200s to tens per hour obviously there's a bit of a cost-benefit analysis there you have to figure out where the cutoff point is what the MSRP is things like that and if you're curious about how they go about deciding when to make these cases it is largely by some of the forecasting done by retailers they'll pin NZXT or other relevant manufacturers say hey we're running low on this particular product we're gonna need more soon and that is actually a very challenging problem to grasp in terms of logistics because these products are all first of all they have to be made they have to be shipped by boat that takes about three weeks to the west coast five weeks to go to Europe and that means in order to make sure there's never a complete absence of stock the company NZXT in this case has to have a lead time of about five weeks on their order just for safety and then there's of course a week or more in customs and processing and things like that but aside from the logistics there's also the painting process and this includes powder coating for NZXT teas factory powder coatings a bit more eco-friendly than some of the normal painting means and before getting to powder all the panels are fed through water they are cleaned of dust and other debris that may have collected on the panel while being manufactured and stamped and one of the cooler things is the air blasting so they'll blast the panels with compressed air to again push the dust off and dry them out from the water and then there's heating - so this happens right before the case is fed into the automated powder coating line the they'll be blowtorch to PI an operator who heats them up then the cases are fed into the line they're completely clean and free of any contaminants the powder coating machine uses giant nozzles that move up and down vertically on the walls and these just dump powdered paint onto the panels to make sure they are evenly coated all of the powder that's left over is ventilated out of the chamber and into what is effectively a filter so that the chamber remains clean and finally in the painting process this is all done as the case is mostly riveted together at this point so that means there are some space is on the case that may be missed by the machines and in order to account for that technicians will manually check and apply paints where there is a lack of presence of that paint so all of this done the final part of the factory is of course assembly where it is packaged together you'll see that with some of the Phantom 820 s in our video packaged together put into a box shipped out to the customer and sent by boat so that concludes our tour of NZXT keys factories in Dongguan China and as always if you like our efforts here please hit that patreon link in the post or video and subscribe for more content we'll see you all next time