The Manufacturing Process: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at CPU Cooler Production

As we step into the manufacturing facility, we're greeted by the hum of machinery and the whir of fans. The production line is a marvel of efficiency, with each component carefully crafted and assembled to create the perfect cooling solution for AMD's rise processors. Let's take a closer look at how it all works.

First, we see the hopper system, where small components are vibrated onto a track, moving them towards a laser-guided automatic arm. This arm expertly guides the components into place, ensuring precision and accuracy in every step of the process. The next stage involves another arm grabbing the blade from the opposite conveyor belt, moving it to a carrier, which then transports it to the fan housing. But before we can get to that, the fan itself must be processed through several stages.

The first stage involves hoppers vibrating to move small components around a track and toward a laser-guided automatic arm. This arm expertly guides the components into place, ensuring precision and accuracy in every step of the process. The next stage involves another arm grabbing the blade from the opposite conveyor belt, moving it to a carrier that feeds back into the center of the machine briefly before an arm then pushes down to secure the hub and the blades to the housing. Although we're showcasing fan manufacturing here, the same steps are used in all fan manufacturers – it's just that some factories are less automated than others.

Some differences do exist, particularly with assembly, which is a crucial aspect of creating high-quality fans. The Andes stock puller requires specific handling procedures, so we need to take those into account when observing the manufacturing process. Now, let's move on to the actual and cooler assembly line, where workers load individual pieces onto the conveyor belt. On one line, the assembly is relatively straightforward, but it does highlight the importance of quality control in every step of the process.

The assembly line starts with workers loading heatsinks onto the conveyor belt, followed by other workers loading fans and then LED diffusers. These components are loaded into a small press that briefly vibrates and generates heat to bond the housings more firmly for final assembly. The next worker grabs the fan and secures the fan cable to the housing with an electric screwdriver. Another worker pins through the four corners of the fan into the housing, applying a metal retention kit.

The cooler now proceeds to an isolated room for acoustic checks. Workers are looking for any catastrophic failures, such as whining from the bearing. This quality check is used for all AMD coolers and serves as a final assurance that no major issues will be present in the finished product. The more detailed acoustic testing for DBA measurements happens in Cooler Master's semi-anechoic chamber with a noise floor of about 6 dB, but only during the design and validation phases of the product.

Once the spec is set and the variance is known, this room is no longer needed for mass production products and can instead be used for upcoming designs and new products. After the small testing room, the heat sink fan assembly comes back out via conveyor belts and undergoes further testing for RGB functionality and fan rpm performance. There's usually a slight RPM variance in most fans of about plus or minus 10% from one to the next, so workers look for variance defined by the spec and pass or fail the device.

The fans have already undergone previous quality checks during the initial manufacturing, so this is really just to ensure they still work after all those assembly steps. Next, software is used to measure performance of multiple fans and pass or fail each cooler. Some companies like ASA Tack use silk screens for applying thermal paste, but Cooler Master uses an acrylic and metal template that fits cleanly over the cooler cold plate.

The next station involves a taping machine where the cooler is packaged into the plastic carrier, and its companion cables are taped to the carrier. Finally, the coolers are boxed in the AMD black box and eventually palletized for shipment out of the factory and to wherever they may go. But before we leave, let's take a closer look at some of the specific machinery used in this process.

The machines used in making CPU coolers can vary depending on the product and the stage of production. However, many companies use similar machinery throughout their manufacturing process. As we've seen, each day is different parts of the line or making different products, so there's never a point where you have one product going through every single step in the line.

Companies will move thin stack A through the stamping machine today and then move fin stack B through it tomorrow, while assembly is happening already for product C. This means that we'll rarely see everything lined up perfectly, especially since we're only at each factory for one day. However, the same steps apply to making just about any CPU cooler.

In fact, the same process used to make AMD coolers can be applied to other brands and models of CPUs. As we've seen, every step of the manufacturing process is crucial in creating a high-quality cooling solution that meets the needs of demanding users. By understanding how these products are made, we can appreciate the complexity and expertise involved in bringing them to market.

As we conclude our behind-the-scenes look at CPU cooler production, we hope you've gained a deeper appreciation for the craftsmanship and attention to detail that goes into creating these essential components. Whether it's AMD or another brand, every cooling solution has its unique characteristics, but they all share one thing in common – the need for precision, quality, and innovative design.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enboth AMD and Intel stock CPU coolers have been made by Coolermaster for a long time now and these recent revival with its Wraith and spire class stock coolers so our return to Coolermaster for manufacturing and as part of our recent trip to Shenzhen and donjuan we visited the cooler master factories responsible for making those and these coolers today we'll be following an AMD cooler through the process of assembly and we'll be looking at some of the machines used to manufacture the different parts of an AMD stock cooler if you've enjoyed our factory tours the absolute best way to make sure we can continue to afford these expensive international trips is to support us via the GN merch store you can pick up GPO artifact in shirt designs for $20 g ends critically acclaimed mod mats now available in both large and medium GPU teardown sizes blue tinted beer glasses with gold rims and 3d laser etched glass statues with g ends anniversary teardown logo each containing a high detail design with MOSFETs fans and VRMs hidden within support these tours at store gamers Nexus dotnet or click the link below our factory tours allowed us to see every type of machine used to make the AMD coolers although note that some of the machines were busy making different parts depending on what was going on that particular day to make a single Andy stock cooler is incredibly complex before even getting to the final assembly line where each part is put together coolers have to travel through many steps prior service mount technology or s-70 lines are needed to make the pc b--'s for RGB LED and fan speed where the PCB will go through pick-and-place machines conveyor belts through ovens filled with lakes of solder and automated optical inspection fin stacks have to be stamped by large machinery but they need tools builds first fans must be built and assembled plastic has to be injected to make the shroud and heat pipes have to be filled with liquid and sintered powder then bent to size let's start our journey with the aluminum fin stack tooling before the fin stack itself can be made a tool for the fin stack has to be created cooler master has shell upon shelves of tools some dating back to about two thousand three or four but solve these tools costing upwards of a million dollars for a single case each tool is good for a product lifecycle without meaningful degradation of the material tools are made by skilled machine operators and technicians who use large drills to pour holes into metal slabs Machinery is also used to cut holes out where the staff needs to impact the sheet metal to shape it and tooling can take up to 60 days to complete depending on complexity of a project and how many revisions are required with cases taking longer this is one of the biggest costs of the entire operation case tooling can cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars up to $1,000,000 for instance and CPU cooler tooling isn't cheap either as for what a tool is if you're not quite sure a tool or tooling when referring to something used to manufacture a case or a cooler component it's really just a large piece of metal with a template stamped or drilled out of it that then mounts the bottom of the large machinery that does stamping or other work with sheet metal to shape the final product so a tool is just a large piece of metal they can weigh hundreds of pounds and it's tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the complexity tooling often goes through at least two iterations before final approval although three is common these are referred to as T 1 T 2 T 3 and so forth the first tool is typically a rougher design with the second one fixing most of the underlying issues once the tools are done they're mounted to the multiple stamping machine so that mass production can begin Coolermaster uses largely automated stamping for this process with a tool mounted to the bottom of the press to stamp out the shape and rid of excess material aluminum is fed into the machine and sheet metal form and from a flat reel stamped by the tool and spit out the other side as a thin stack after traveling through the stamping process multiple times this particular machine was making GPU cooler fin stacks as cooler master is the supplier of most stock G view coolers on the market as well but it also makes stock CPU coolers like the one for the AMD r8 series schoolers that come with rising processors coolermaster has many of these stamping machines across its numerous factories with this particular area this one shot of the factory containing at least ten of them and as for all the waste that you see spewing out all the excess metal that's not used when it's stamped from the sheet metal that goes into the machine that's recycled it's sold to a third-party company that can bring it off to get recycled in a different plant that Coolermaster has only a third-party relationship with so the metal can be melted down and reused once the heat sink is spat out it gets carted over to a separate assembly area that we'll look at later PCB manufacturing is also an important part of this process and one that's easy to forget this process goes through an SMT line which we showed in our gigabyte motherboard Factory video the process is the exact same as every other SMT line including that gigabyte Factory the PCB is first well designed of course but then it's sourced from a third-party supplier then it gets run through a solder paste machine with a silkscreen the solder paste applies to a surface mount device mounting points on the PCB after this the PCB goes through automatic optical inspection or Aoi to ensure the solder paste was properly apply it next goes through pick-and-place component placement which uses a reel of up to ten thousand capacitors resistors and other small s of these to populate the board rapidly some components can be in reels of even a hundred thousand but the average is kind of about ten thousand individual parts per reel and those reels contain one specific model typically a PCB as simple as AMD's would only take a few seconds to fully populate in one of these whereas a motherboard would take 17 to 20 seconds just for this one part of the line the board next goes through a reflow oven and eventually is fed through a piping hot furnace where solder isn't melted down from a bar that dips into the lake of solder and then the PCB is fed through the molten solder in such a way that only the exposed contacts underneath come into contact with that Lake of solder and these machines or these furnaces run upwards of about 250 260 degrees Celsius depending if relevant the PCB would also go through dual inline package inand in circuit testing but it depends on how complex the project is and what the customer has required for its Quality Assurance or for its mandated checks some of cooler masters factories even dip PCBs manually and to solder hot plates as shown in some of our footage here but it all hinges on what the design is how advanced it is and what the customer calls for to learn more about SMT line specifically watch our gigabyte factory tour from a couple weeks ago when we showed how a motherboard is made heat pipes are the next part on the roster we already have a dedicated video on how copper heat pipes are made they'll recap parts of it here copper heat pipes have to be shrunken on one side and welded and then filled with copper powder and baked at 1,000 degrees Celsius for eight hours this bonds the copper powder to the inner walls of the heat pipe to create a sintered copper heat pipe liquid is later injected into the heat pipe in quantities amounting to a few drops per pipe at which point the heat pipe is vacuum sealed and cut to size after this the heat pipe gets bent by an automated machine which holds and bends the heat pipes then grabs them with a robot arm to drop them into the bin we sped through this section in this video but if this process interests you further we have a ten minute long video exclusively dedicated to the creation of copper heat pipes at color masters factory we'll link that in the description below heat pipes are now ready to be delivered with the heat sink to be assembled and soldered together in the meantime fans have to be made for the cooler cooler master also supplies the fan here as shown in our other content where we look at the and the cooler but we have some footage from our deep pool fan factory tour and because these processes are largely the same and automated we can look at the previous footage to see how a fan is made fans first have their wires soldered to the small PCB that's internal this is done by hand and by workers at the front of the assembly line after this soldering process the PCB and motor are assembled into the hub and at the facility we've previously filmed the fan blade assembly is set upon the conveyor belt and then fed into the machine with the fan frame moves by robotic arm from one carrier next a series of robotic arms can grab and insert the bearing and bushings or other parts into the fan using hoppers that vibrate to move small components around a track and toward a laser-guided automatic arm and then another arm grabs the blade from the opposite conveyor belt moves it to a carrier moves it to the fan housing the fan housing is fed back into the center of the machine briefly for an arm then pushes down to secure the hub and the blades to the housing although we're technically showing case fan manufacturing here the same steps for the most part are used in all fan manufactures it's just that some factories are less automated than others there are a few differences though and those come down to assembly particularly with the blade which isn't the same in the Andes stock puller so we need to look at that too we've finally made it to the actual and the cooler assembly line the assembly line is just under 80 feet long for one of them and is actually fairly straightforward the assembly line starts with workers loading individual pieces onto the conveyor belt workers on opposite sides will load the heatsink while others load the fan and then others still load the fans plastic housing the PCBs and so forth next the LED diffuser and the fan housing are loaded into a small press that briefly vibrates and generates some heat to bond the housings of the LED reen more firmly for final assembly the next worker grabs the fan and the fan housing and secures the fan cable to the housing with an electric screwdriver after which another worker pins through the four corners of the fan into the housing and apply the metal retention kit the cooler now goes through an isolated room for a simple acoustic check all they're looking for is whether there's a catastrophic failure like whining and the bearing and that's it this quality check is used for all AMD coolers through the line and again it's not a specific decibel level or DBA test that's done separately it's really just to make sure there's no major issue going out to the customer the more detailed acoustic testing for DBA measurements happens in cooler masters semi anechoic chamber with a noise floor of about 6 DBA but only during the design and validation phases of the product once the spec is set and the variance is known this room is no longer needed for mass production products and can instead be used for upcoming designs and new products and the pipe one after the small testing room the heat sink fan assembly has come back out via conveyor belts and are tested for RGB functionality and fan rpm performance there is a usual rpm variance in most fans of about plus or minus 10% from one to the next so workers look for variance defined by the spec and pass or fail the device we should note that the fans have already undergone previous quality checks during the initial manufacturing so this is really just to make sure it still works after all those assembly steps prior software is used to measure performance of multiple fans and pass or fail each cooler and next the stock thermal paste is applied to the cooler from large tubs using a template and acrylic spreader to apply a uniform layer of paste to the bottom of the cooler some companies like ASA tack use silk screens for this but cooler master just uses an acrylic and metal template that fits cleanly over the cooler cold plate and then they spread it over the cold plate as necessary the next station is a taping machine where the cooler is packaged into the plastic carrier and where its companion cables are taped to the carrier finally the coolers are boxed in the Andy black box and eventually palletized for shipment out of the factory and to wherever they may go next that's it for this tour as stated some of these clips we've shown are from technically other products being made but the way it works is each day different parts of the line or making different products so there's never a point where you've got one product going through every single step in the line in order to keep things efficient companies will move maybe thin stack a through the stamping machine today and then they'll move fin stack B through it tomorrow meanwhile assembly is happening already for product C and so you never quite have everything line up especially since we're only at each factory for one day but the same steps apply we got to see all the machines used in making the Andy coolers and in fact these are the same steps to use to make just about any CPU cooler but we did get the excellent opportunity of seeing the specific assembly line for those AMD coolers that are used in the rise in processors and of course we're sure many of you are interested in specifically that part of things so thank you for watching subscribe for more you can go to patreon.com/scishow and runs access to topside directly or store dot cameras nexus net we can pick up for example one of our lightweight two-tone hoodies that's currently on 10% discount with code Jian shil at checkout we'll see you all next timeboth AMD and Intel stock CPU coolers have been made by Coolermaster for a long time now and these recent revival with its Wraith and spire class stock coolers so our return to Coolermaster for manufacturing and as part of our recent trip to Shenzhen and donjuan we visited the cooler master factories responsible for making those and these coolers today we'll be following an AMD cooler through the process of assembly and we'll be looking at some of the machines used to manufacture the different parts of an AMD stock cooler if you've enjoyed our factory tours the absolute best way to make sure we can continue to afford these expensive international trips is to support us via the GN merch store you can pick up GPO artifact in shirt designs for $20 g ends critically acclaimed mod mats now available in both large and medium GPU teardown sizes blue tinted beer glasses with gold rims and 3d laser etched glass statues with g ends anniversary teardown logo each containing a high detail design with MOSFETs fans and VRMs hidden within support these tours at store gamers Nexus dotnet or click the link below our factory tours allowed us to see every type of machine used to make the AMD coolers although note that some of the machines were busy making different parts depending on what was going on that particular day to make a single Andy stock cooler is incredibly complex before even getting to the final assembly line where each part is put together coolers have to travel through many steps prior service mount technology or s-70 lines are needed to make the pc b--'s for RGB LED and fan speed where the PCB will go through pick-and-place machines conveyor belts through ovens filled with lakes of solder and automated optical inspection fin stacks have to be stamped by large machinery but they need tools builds first fans must be built and assembled plastic has to be injected to make the shroud and heat pipes have to be filled with liquid and sintered powder then bent to size let's start our journey with the aluminum fin stack tooling before the fin stack itself can be made a tool for the fin stack has to be created cooler master has shell upon shelves of tools some dating back to about two thousand three or four but solve these tools costing upwards of a million dollars for a single case each tool is good for a product lifecycle without meaningful degradation of the material tools are made by skilled machine operators and technicians who use large drills to pour holes into metal slabs Machinery is also used to cut holes out where the staff needs to impact the sheet metal to shape it and tooling can take up to 60 days to complete depending on complexity of a project and how many revisions are required with cases taking longer this is one of the biggest costs of the entire operation case tooling can cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars up to $1,000,000 for instance and CPU cooler tooling isn't cheap either as for what a tool is if you're not quite sure a tool or tooling when referring to something used to manufacture a case or a cooler component it's really just a large piece of metal with a template stamped or drilled out of it that then mounts the bottom of the large machinery that does stamping or other work with sheet metal to shape the final product so a tool is just a large piece of metal they can weigh hundreds of pounds and it's tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the complexity tooling often goes through at least two iterations before final approval although three is common these are referred to as T 1 T 2 T 3 and so forth the first tool is typically a rougher design with the second one fixing most of the underlying issues once the tools are done they're mounted to the multiple stamping machine so that mass production can begin Coolermaster uses largely automated stamping for this process with a tool mounted to the bottom of the press to stamp out the shape and rid of excess material aluminum is fed into the machine and sheet metal form and from a flat reel stamped by the tool and spit out the other side as a thin stack after traveling through the stamping process multiple times this particular machine was making GPU cooler fin stacks as cooler master is the supplier of most stock G view coolers on the market as well but it also makes stock CPU coolers like the one for the AMD r8 series schoolers that come with rising processors coolermaster has many of these stamping machines across its numerous factories with this particular area this one shot of the factory containing at least ten of them and as for all the waste that you see spewing out all the excess metal that's not used when it's stamped from the sheet metal that goes into the machine that's recycled it's sold to a third-party company that can bring it off to get recycled in a different plant that Coolermaster has only a third-party relationship with so the metal can be melted down and reused once the heat sink is spat out it gets carted over to a separate assembly area that we'll look at later PCB manufacturing is also an important part of this process and one that's easy to forget this process goes through an SMT line which we showed in our gigabyte motherboard Factory video the process is the exact same as every other SMT line including that gigabyte Factory the PCB is first well designed of course but then it's sourced from a third-party supplier then it gets run through a solder paste machine with a silkscreen the solder paste applies to a surface mount device mounting points on the PCB after this the PCB goes through automatic optical inspection or Aoi to ensure the solder paste was properly apply it next goes through pick-and-place component placement which uses a reel of up to ten thousand capacitors resistors and other small s of these to populate the board rapidly some components can be in reels of even a hundred thousand but the average is kind of about ten thousand individual parts per reel and those reels contain one specific model typically a PCB as simple as AMD's would only take a few seconds to fully populate in one of these whereas a motherboard would take 17 to 20 seconds just for this one part of the line the board next goes through a reflow oven and eventually is fed through a piping hot furnace where solder isn't melted down from a bar that dips into the lake of solder and then the PCB is fed through the molten solder in such a way that only the exposed contacts underneath come into contact with that Lake of solder and these machines or these furnaces run upwards of about 250 260 degrees Celsius depending if relevant the PCB would also go through dual inline package inand in circuit testing but it depends on how complex the project is and what the customer has required for its Quality Assurance or for its mandated checks some of cooler masters factories even dip PCBs manually and to solder hot plates as shown in some of our footage here but it all hinges on what the design is how advanced it is and what the customer calls for to learn more about SMT line specifically watch our gigabyte factory tour from a couple weeks ago when we showed how a motherboard is made heat pipes are the next part on the roster we already have a dedicated video on how copper heat pipes are made they'll recap parts of it here copper heat pipes have to be shrunken on one side and welded and then filled with copper powder and baked at 1,000 degrees Celsius for eight hours this bonds the copper powder to the inner walls of the heat pipe to create a sintered copper heat pipe liquid is later injected into the heat pipe in quantities amounting to a few drops per pipe at which point the heat pipe is vacuum sealed and cut to size after this the heat pipe gets bent by an automated machine which holds and bends the heat pipes then grabs them with a robot arm to drop them into the bin we sped through this section in this video but if this process interests you further we have a ten minute long video exclusively dedicated to the creation of copper heat pipes at color masters factory we'll link that in the description below heat pipes are now ready to be delivered with the heat sink to be assembled and soldered together in the meantime fans have to be made for the cooler cooler master also supplies the fan here as shown in our other content where we look at the and the cooler but we have some footage from our deep pool fan factory tour and because these processes are largely the same and automated we can look at the previous footage to see how a fan is made fans first have their wires soldered to the small PCB that's internal this is done by hand and by workers at the front of the assembly line after this soldering process the PCB and motor are assembled into the hub and at the facility we've previously filmed the fan blade assembly is set upon the conveyor belt and then fed into the machine with the fan frame moves by robotic arm from one carrier next a series of robotic arms can grab and insert the bearing and bushings or other parts into the fan using hoppers that vibrate to move small components around a track and toward a laser-guided automatic arm and then another arm grabs the blade from the opposite conveyor belt moves it to a carrier moves it to the fan housing the fan housing is fed back into the center of the machine briefly for an arm then pushes down to secure the hub and the blades to the housing although we're technically showing case fan manufacturing here the same steps for the most part are used in all fan manufactures it's just that some factories are less automated than others there are a few differences though and those come down to assembly particularly with the blade which isn't the same in the Andes stock puller so we need to look at that too we've finally made it to the actual and the cooler assembly line the assembly line is just under 80 feet long for one of them and is actually fairly straightforward the assembly line starts with workers loading individual pieces onto the conveyor belt workers on opposite sides will load the heatsink while others load the fan and then others still load the fans plastic housing the PCBs and so forth next the LED diffuser and the fan housing are loaded into a small press that briefly vibrates and generates some heat to bond the housings of the LED reen more firmly for final assembly the next worker grabs the fan and the fan housing and secures the fan cable to the housing with an electric screwdriver after which another worker pins through the four corners of the fan into the housing and apply the metal retention kit the cooler now goes through an isolated room for a simple acoustic check all they're looking for is whether there's a catastrophic failure like whining and the bearing and that's it this quality check is used for all AMD coolers through the line and again it's not a specific decibel level or DBA test that's done separately it's really just to make sure there's no major issue going out to the customer the more detailed acoustic testing for DBA measurements happens in cooler masters semi anechoic chamber with a noise floor of about 6 DBA but only during the design and validation phases of the product once the spec is set and the variance is known this room is no longer needed for mass production products and can instead be used for upcoming designs and new products and the pipe one after the small testing room the heat sink fan assembly has come back out via conveyor belts and are tested for RGB functionality and fan rpm performance there is a usual rpm variance in most fans of about plus or minus 10% from one to the next so workers look for variance defined by the spec and pass or fail the device we should note that the fans have already undergone previous quality checks during the initial manufacturing so this is really just to make sure it still works after all those assembly steps prior software is used to measure performance of multiple fans and pass or fail each cooler and next the stock thermal paste is applied to the cooler from large tubs using a template and acrylic spreader to apply a uniform layer of paste to the bottom of the cooler some companies like ASA tack use silk screens for this but cooler master just uses an acrylic and metal template that fits cleanly over the cooler cold plate and then they spread it over the cold plate as necessary the next station is a taping machine where the cooler is packaged into the plastic carrier and where its companion cables are taped to the carrier finally the coolers are boxed in the Andy black box and eventually palletized for shipment out of the factory and to wherever they may go next that's it for this tour as stated some of these clips we've shown are from technically other products being made but the way it works is each day different parts of the line or making different products so there's never a point where you've got one product going through every single step in the line in order to keep things efficient companies will move maybe thin stack a through the stamping machine today and then they'll move fin stack B through it tomorrow meanwhile assembly is happening already for product C and so you never quite have everything line up especially since we're only at each factory for one day but the same steps apply we got to see all the machines used in making the Andy coolers and in fact these are the same steps to use to make just about any CPU cooler but we did get the excellent opportunity of seeing the specific assembly line for those AMD coolers that are used in the rise in processors and of course we're sure many of you are interested in specifically that part of things so thank you for watching subscribe for more you can go to patreon.com/scishow and runs access to topside directly or store dot cameras nexus net we can pick up for example one of our lightweight two-tone hoodies that's currently on 10% discount with code Jian shil at checkout we'll see you all next time\n"