Engineering
Of all of the area’s I visited their Engineering was by far the smallest. Yet I still spent the most time there. I spoke with one of their engineers for the better part of my visit talking about both how they come up with their different products as well as how they test and burn in every PC that they sell. I touched on this a little in the factory section of our tour, but here they actually went through their entire process of setting up, configuring, and later burning in each pc. I was very impressed with how they go about all of this and at the same time very jealous. Their entire installation process is run off of the various SKU’s that each part has. When doing the initial install it picks up what parts make the build and the full installation is customized to that build.
The process starts out by booting up the PC and updating to a validated version of the motherboards firmware. While in there the engineers can actually tag if any other settings need to be changed in the BIOS to customize for water cooling for example. Once the firmware is updated, the process starts the windows installation while also including all of the driver’s for each part of the PC build that have been validated. What they mean by validated means they may not install the most current driver, rather they install the most current driver that they have tested and confirmed that it doesn't cause additional problems.
I even got let in on a little secret. Every PC that ships actually has the logs and results from all of the tests run it before it is shipped to it new owner. That means that those who buy a SYX gaming PC can actually find its 3DMark results for example. In fact with 3DMark they actually put all three (entry, performance, extreme) on one html page for easy reading. The results aren't on the desktop or anyplace that easy to find. But they are in the logs folder on the backup partition.
Although I spent almost all of my time in the engineering section that focuses on gaming, there are also server, notebook, and normal pc sections as well. All of the same level of testing and retesting applies, just without the same cool hardware that we all know and love.
