In Search Of Custom Motherboard Manufacturer

[galas]

Hi, I was wondering if anyone could help me out...I'm looking for a motherboard manufacturer who will custom design and build a motherboard to my specifications...i.e. I would specify chipsets, controllers, onboard peripherals, etc and give them a bunch of money and they give me 500 motherboards...if anyone could please help me out with any info on getting a motherboard built i'd really appreciate it...

.:galas:.

 

[Bleep]

Just contact any Motherboard manifacture they are easy to find. I like the part about the bunch of money because it will cost a bundle to get a short run of boards like this. My guess would be about $200.000.00
Bleep

 

[gregor7777]

I bet he'd have the best luck with a Biostar or an Azza or something like that, that is used to taking special orders from OEM's.

 

[Peter]

For 500 pcs, the big OEM mainboard companies won't even pick up the phone I'm afraid. Their engineers have better (read: larger volume) things to do.

In the industrial PC business, low volume customer specific designs, as well as customer specific deviations of existing product, are routine work. However the engineering cost is a constant, no matter how many boards you then buy, so be prepared for a surprisingly huge bill.

Try to find an existing product that suits your needs. What are you out for?

regards, Peter

 

[AA0]

the cost would be horribly high, and even if you could get it done, I would highly question the stability of the board which could be made as fast, and cheap as possible. They won't spend time tweaking memory timings to make things stable. Bios updates? forget

I couldn't see any application that could be greatly improved from a custom board, unless you are using non ATX size and power.

 

[Peter]

Well here's AA0 once more talking about something he doesn't know much about,
in a wording that pisses on someone else's pride and joy. Grow up please.

I happen to be a BIOS engineer with a leading industrial and custom x86 mainboard maker,
and guess what I'm doing all day ... besides, we do take pride in wrestling the maximum
possible performance out of our product, while maintaining absolutely perfect stability.
Many of our products go into aviation, medical and military applications, and you won't stay in this
business for too long if you don't get both right.

It all ain't for free though, so at 500 or so pcs you're looking at comparably huge one-time
engineering and tooling cost. To show you the order of magnitude, the largest standard mainboard
maker out there, the ECS/PC-Chips group of companies, make about 2000 mainboards PER HOUR.

regards, Peter

 

[AA0]

You might make a stable bios, but you won't get the bioses updated monthly like from a mainstream board. Support for future hardware is also a problem, once the boards are paid for, you won't go back and waste your own money developing bios support for 500 boards.

I don't care how much pride you take in your bioses, custom boards do not have the level of competition that a retail board does.

And stop assuming I don't know what I'm talking about, there isn't anything I said that was incorrect. You give me a custom board, and I guarrantee it will crash in my hands.

 

[Peter]

It's so easy to tell from your writing that you have no idea about what that area of the market is about ...

Monthly BIOS updates as a quality indicator ... LOL ... if the standard board makers would quit rushing unfinished product into the market, there'd be no need for monthly BIOS updates. The right way to do it - in markets where stability matters - is to take your time developping hardware and BIOS in order to get it right the first time, and then, if it's one of your standard off-the-shelf products, do an occasional refresh release to support new processors and maybe RAM types.

With true customer specific boards, there's zero point in updating BIOSes beyond the initial product design phase. See, you build a board for someone else who puts it into their application product, that product gets engineered by the customer, tested, validated and released, and then stays that way. It's quite the opposite way round - should you ever dare change the slightest bit on a customer specific mainboard after they've entered mass production, you'll have the customer's quality control round your neck five seconds later. In these markets, you don't even change a single resistor without triggering a huge stack of paperwork ... let alone update a BIOS.

Finally, there's more than enough competition, it's only that this market moves at a more realistic speed with proper design cycles.

So, I take the challenge ... pick any x86 board from www.sbs.com, try to crash it. Here's your challenge: Bring up one VALID point about custom boards. Otherwise, for the sake of this forum's quality, shut up.

Peter

 

[JmsAndrsn]

Hi Peter,
Any chance you would know what program could be used to modify BIOS's from ASUS. I believe most of their boards use Award Medallion 6.0 or something like that. I've tried modbin and a few other programs but have had no luck opening them up.

Thanks
James

 

[galas]

hey everyone, i wanted to thank you all for your input in regards to my quest for a custom motherboard...i've recieved replies from 2 out of about 15 mobo manufactueres that i emailed...AMI and Soltek. While both companies said essentially the same thing, AMI's reply was a bit more specific...here's an excerpt from the email:

<email>
* Yes, we do consider custom designs, and will do them
* Typically we charge about $100,000 for NRE (but this may vary
depending on the complexity of the design idea)
* When we design a board, we retain the rights to exclusively
manufacture the first 5,000 boards. (after all, we're in this to do ongoing
business)
* As for minimum quantities, again, not hard and fast, but as a
general guideline, we like to take on projects that will yield at least
5,000 to 10,000 boards per year.
</email>

So, design costs are about $100,000 (NRE = non-recurring expense), and maybe a little bit more since it's more complex than normal boards
and i'd have to order 5000 boards...yipes...this project is turning out bigger than i had expected

one thing i don't know is how much the individual boards would cost me, if i bought 5000 of them...if anyone knows the average markup on a motherboard, or can give me an estimate on the cost basis then i'd really appreciate it

finally, i just wanted to let everyone know that if you're interested in the project i'm reseraching that requires a custom motherboard, i've started another thread and i'd appreciate any comments or ideas on the board or anything else...thanks

pe@ce,
.:galas:.

 

[killster1]

galas was last seen:

14y 32w ago

i think hes still working on getting the 5000 boards to market great post DMStone.

 

[deadElk]

hm .... oops, my +1 here .... need a board totally without backports. and almost fully covered with heatsink.