Introduction

TUL is an ODM powerhouse that has completed 25 years in business, specializing in logic boards and integrated manufacturing of a variety of PC and consumer electronics products, most notably the PowerColor brand of graphics cards. The company also specializes in Embedded computing products for industrial applications, as well as home IoT products, all manufactured in their factory in New Taipei City, PowerColor recently commissioned their third factory dedicated to graphics card manufacturing, and invited us for a tour, with unrestricted photography access to all key stages of the manufacturing, and the various machinery in use on their production line.



PowerColor is a major graphics card manufacturer and a brand popular among gamers and PC enthusiasts, for their custom design AMD Radeon graphics cards, which are sold under several recognizable brand extensions, such as Red Devil, Hellhound, and Fighter. The company is at the cutting edge of integrated manufacturing, and this new facility uses the latest industrial standards to ensure graphics cards meet the highest manufacturing quality standards. At every stage, there are numerous quality and validation checks before the next stage. There's also a department to look into what exactly went wrong with a graphics card that has been returned for RMA. In this special feature article, we'll walk you through the effort it takes for PowerColor to put together your next Radeon 7000-series graphics card.


PowerColor and its parent company TUL Corporation, went into business in 1997. The company has had a long affiliation with ATI (later AMD), they even made some NVIDIA cards a long time ago. Our tour of their factory begins with a large showcase with samples of graphics cards they've made over these last 25 years. We see some very noteworthy pieces of graphics card history that PowerColor has been a major part of, and we've actually reviewed or owned many of those.


Before we were taken to the actual manufacturing and testing facilities, we were given a brief corporate presentation on what TUL Corporation manufactures in this facility, and what the production workflow essentially looks like. You may know PowerColor for making gaming graphics cards and MXM modules (notebook graphics cards), but did you know, they also make FPGA cards, motherboards, external graphics card enclosures, video signal management equipment, Thunderbolt and USB docking stations; and M.2 NVMe SSDs? Of course, not all of this is sold under the PowerColor brand, TUL has other brands, and also does ODM/OEM activity. The production capability on line 1 at the new facility stands at up to 2,400 PCBA (PCB assemblies) a day, and the ability to manufacture up to 1,440 finished high-end graphics cards, such as the RX 6900 or 7900 XTX.


The manufacturing steps at this facility involve testing the quality of the various electronic and non-electronic components making up the graphics card, the assembly line, where components are placed on the bare circuit boards, and the final production, where the finished PCBs are mated with the non-electronic components (such as heatsinks and backplates), before packaging. This is easier said than done, and each stage of manufacturing involves a painstaking level of quality control. It costs the company a lot more money to deal with a defective graphics card that's been returned after sale, than to invest in a high degree of quality control that can prevent those manufacturing defects from appear in the first place.

This presentation also let PowerColor show off the various makes and models of its key manufacturing machines. While some of these are as small as dishwashers and others the size of a hatchback car; these are all supremely expensive electronics manufacturing machines, and PowerColor certainly spent millions setting up a single assembly line in this facility. The vacant floor-space in the facility is room for PowerColor to add more production lines in the near-future.