Rare Footage of Gigabyte's "Black Edition" Testing Facility
We've managed to get our hands on some footage of Gigabyte's hardware endurance testing facility.
Editor's Note: While Computex took place last week and all of the news announcements are behind us, we're still sorting through hundreds of in-person meetings and demonstrations, picking out just a few more of the most interesting items we saw up close.
Gigabyte makes a number of products with the "Black Edition" label, which, in Gigabyte parlance, means that the product has been tested for at least 168 hours – seven full days. This testing occurs in a facility owned and operated by Gigabyte, and is meant to ensure the durability and reliability of certain products. Only after the products make it through this harsh testing process do they get approved and sent to distribution.
While at Computex 2014, we came across a video fragment showing off this testing facility. This video is made by taking a picture every minute for 24 hours, and then playing it in a time-lapse.
The Gigabyte representative who gave us the clip told us we were only allowed to post it if nothing funny or out of the ordinary happened in the clip, to which we sarcastically responded that we'd post it especially if there's something funny. To our disappointment, there wasn't. Still, it's interesting to watch, and it gets particularly pretty when nighttime hits and the lighting is turned off. (Or maybe you can find something out of the ordinary that we couldn't.
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I also like the giant fan that's making papers ruffle a good 20 feet from it.
Fuck their BIOS. Their products are cheaply made. I wouldn't touch it w/ a 10 ft pole.
You ought to see my test labs. We're set up in a warehouse building with 15' ceilings, using rooftop A/C units, with fans and portable A/C units all over the place. We operate at a pretty consistent 77-82F and 5-15% humidity (far outside of recommended specs) with no humidity control at all. The room doesn't even have any sort of sealing to keep out outside air in or inside air out.
When I first took over as admin, they had a door leading directly outside to the parking lot and constant foot traffic through the lab. About a third of the equipment was so old it wasn't used, much of it broken, yet still powered up. At that time, the lab was operating at 85-90F and had about 30% more power usage. There wasn't even any sort of IP address tracking or DNS. The testers did everything by IP address with their managers controlling the pool of addresses they were using.
I went through and cleaned out the old equipment, reorganized the A/C vents, reorganized the rack layout, cleaned out old cables, and set up a whole new DNS and IP tracking system. I'm now in the middle of consolidating the domains I originally created into a single domain. (Apparently, many of the testers can't keep track of the 4 different DNS domains. So, the request came down to consolidate it.) I wound up removing and recycling over 24,000 lbs of old equipment, and over 500lbs of old FC and cat5 cables, each. (imagine all that copper in the cat 5 cables!) I put in a new patching system of OM3 FC cables to handle 10Gbe and 8Gb and 16Gb FC.
In the end, I have managed to streamline the operations in my lab, despite the primitive conditions that still exist, and streamlined myself out of most of my job. I sit around managing DNS and IP addresses, and replacing bad hardware, for about 10 hours per week. Sometimes, I get requests to install operating systems or new versions of software on test units, but the testers usually handle most of that. A trained monkey could do most of this job now. I need a new job. Anyone know a place that could use a good test lab admin?
I have this repeating nightmare that one day my boss come into my cube with a chimp and tells hes my replacement and I need to train him to do my job. Basically I get fired and the chimp gets to kick off all the scripts that I wrote. I always wake up as security is escorting me out and my boss is there telling me there may be some contract work available if the scripts stop working or if I want to clean up chimpanzee crap.