Starting a Motherboard Manufacturing company

Hello,

I wish to start a motherboard company. Here ae the issues I wish to bring to you:

What should the name be
What do you want to see in the motherboard
Where do you want the motherboard made,( I hope you say USA)
Where do I recriute R&D and Fab people,( colleges, formers?)

I ask you these things because as the consumer, you are values..and other companies do not really ask the consumer what they want.

They also don't normally ask the consumer "how".

Below 100% mark up.

I cannot really tell you based on the fact that I have no resources or accounting systems to estimate. I am guessing it usually takes 50 US dollars to manufacture in the USA, so the board should be around 80-90 US dollars direct.

Not to rain on your parade on your parade mate, but you're biting off a big chunk there! You're going to need a serious R&D team of Electrical Engineers who will need to burn a LOT of hours designing your silicon before you can even consider offering something.

They'll need to be experienced with CAD, a god-awful amount of high-level mathematics, computer science, quantum architecture, and... well you get the idea.

Thanks guys.
Keep the feedback coming and encourage others to post ideas.

If only the manufacturing costs were the same! The reason we can buy feature rich motherboards for $130-200 is because they are made in China.

exactly. I would pay no more than 50 dollars more, but I would pay extra for USA! If the company made a good product of course

yeah, thats the problem with america anymore is there is no more pride when something says MADE IN USA. Good Luck, I will have my eyes open. Keep in touch, what name are you thinking of? Maybe America Motherboards heh.

C.L.S or C.L.T? I'm not sure heh, good luck. How soon are you expecting to get this started?

Name BFGM.
You'd need a lot of capital.
The microelectronics people are better 'stolen' recruited from a competitor.
Labor and production is easier overseas; a/k/a China or Taiwan. Unless profits don't matter to your partners or shareholders. Unfortunately, nobody cares where it's made.

MOBO's themselves are easy to fabricate, the real cost is in the assembly automation equipment; the chips/controllers/etc/etc for the most part are purchased.
The next biggest costs are the purchase quantities, startup overhead and advertising.

There are other less profitable ways to get started. Also, I would start with making the best MOBO versus the cheapest; easier for startup and production limitations; get a NAME out there that beats the competition; opportunity cost for NAME and REPUTATION.

Good Luck!

Ever Play Doom? Big F-----g Gun MOBO.

BFG 9001

Most Gamer know what BFG stands for, even my teenager and I'm not that old.

http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/BFG9000

Yes, and Big Freaking Gun can be used. It's cool sounding. It too was a coveted weapon - it destroyed the 'Bad Guys.' You get it now?!

Nice one.

Anyways. Back to business.

Okay. Well, anyone else. If you guys could, round up a bunch of forum members and have them come over here with some input.

Thanks.

Good to see your getting some constructive input on this one Dog, if I can just specify upfront, I want all my sockets on the rear of the board for C.M. ok?
20+4, 8pin cpu, sata's, and any casefan headers, maybe even the I/O sockets too, really clean up the front of the plate
All the best man,
Moto

I suggest for name: start with something that easy to remember. "Waterbuffer". Sounds cool?

^ yeah. MSI do have some good looking boards.


Stick with the blue and black!

make it in the USA and i'd buy it.. i knwo most people don't care where thier stuff comes from but some of us do. often i can't get everythign made in usa cause there isn't any options

as for actual suggestions i'd actually love for somebody to make a legacy line.. like maybe a old school game port, and multiple ide controllers , possibly even with older cpu sockets as replacments in older machines for those of us who still ike fring up old games that run on say windows 95/98 only

also the opposite modern board with usb 3.0 headers, no legacy stuff like ide controllers or floppy connector just sata/pcie/e-sata/usb 3.0 with evtreme overclocking in mind

If you are going to be building boards, PLEASE kill IDE and VGA and Serial ports and Floppy. I and any modern person have no use for them. There is no reason manufacturers should still integrate them on the board.

FYI: You WILL need a licensing/OEM deal with AMD and Intel for their chip sets and this ain't cheap at ALL. From what I have herd, Intel won't sell you chipsets directly with out a license agreement.

Also realize that trying to get stuff made in the US for mass production (esp. electronics) is going to cut VERY, VERY deeply in to your profits. There is NO WAY your company will survive if it isn't profitable even if you don't care about profits. There will be VERY little advantage from producing in the US compared to a place like Taiwan,etc. Setting up a new FAB is also going to cost you a ton more here than opening it in China/Taiwan. At the end of the day, the quality of the MOSFETS, caps, VREGS, matter MORE than the quality of labor. There is very little manual labor involved at a motherboard manufacturing plant. From what I remember from an article Toms did a few years ago is, the ONLY part humans are involved is in QC and fitting SATA, IDE,etc sockets to the board. The soldering,etc are done by bots.

Maybe inputs ports for home theater surround sound. I'm talking surround sound ports that you can use on your everyday home theater.

Like as in what kind? that i'm not sure. I am sure each company has a different speaker jack. or maybe even an input straight to the surround system. Not sure, I'm not that smart :0

Like an HDMI interface? How about multiple TV's?

Personaly I would like to see a motherboard basicly like this with a few changes, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 813157208.

1. 4 - pci express 2.0 x16 all running at 16x when all in use
2. 1 - pci express 8x
3. 2 - pci express 1x
4. 2 - regular pci

and I want all the the 16x slots spaced in such a way that there is room for the fans to get decent air flow. With all of that im expecting it to be a extended atx board pluss i could see paying about $300 give or take.

^ lol.

That is HIGHLY impractical. At this stage, you will most likely need to go WCing. Just extending the board is not that simple. You have to take in to account standard board layouts AND the latency caused by the extra length of copper traces.