Originally Posted by
GFORCE100
This is correct, the part about Asustek, Gigabyte and MSI.
XFX and eVGA are just offices, they never have had and never plan to have any brain design power in them. They are just a front-end office with a pretty website with a bunch of employees you could fit in a medium sized room at best who are good when it comes to marketing. This is all. People think they are some big company but they aren't. They are just AIB vendors that get their hardware from Nvidia, stick on the cooler, sticker, and add a t-shirt lets say with their logo, then flog that off to the consumer. They haven't got a faintest clue about electronics design.
The only thing they can differ in is customer support but even this is really playing with the minds of consumers. It's all calculated into business sense. So what you get a lifetime 10 year warranty if a) its voided if you sell the card/board onto a 2nd buyer and b) you're bound to replace the card/board as you're enthusiast within a year anyway. Nvidia give them a 1 year warranty saying if our reference design product goes wrong, we'll exchange it for you. After the 1st year Nvidia say no, so these AIB's won't be so willing to provide the great customer service some people think they do (i.e. they won't be so happy about spending their own money fixing your warranty obligation). Statistics play a big role in why they say lifetime warranty on their packaging. How many people will come to them after say 9 years and say my card has failed, please give me a new one? Less than 1% in the best case scenario and under 5% in the worst case. Non-enthusiasts do not buy these branded products which just aids the statistics even further.
XFX, eVGA, BFG, it's all the same. If you have $5 million or less in you bank or are prepared to take a loan then you tooo could be an AIB. It's just about having the marketng mind to quickly shift what Nvidia sends you so your cash flow is good hence so you can a) steadily pay Nvidia and b) make a profit during the process.
It's a lightweight, not that demanding but somewhat risky business model. If you can do it right then you'll earn your pension just fine.
There are loads of companies in the world who parasite off other company intellectual achievements. Nvidia is just somewhat different to ATI, now AMD. Nvidia never wanted to sell its own branded products, they just want to be the manufacturer of GPU's and then wash their hands clean as marketing is a really messy, demanding and risky business (how do you make Joe Six Pack buy your product when it's identical to the competitions?). ATI years back instead chose to do what Nvidia does AND also sell their own branded graphics cards.
You will never ever find the likes of BFG, eVGA, XFX and what not selling truly their own products because a) they don't have the brain power in-house and b) making your own products which involves eletronically amending the reference design is a long and costly process. First design, then V&V over several cycles until you get it right. Unless you throw the right people and the right amount of money at it, by the time you do finish making your own product, the competition will have already moved on to the next generation product.
It should be noted that even the likes of Gigabyte and MSI (in a lesser sense Asus) buy from Nvidia in terms of graphics cards while Nvidia itself has the likes of Flextronics of ColorTech manufactuer their reference design cards. Foxconn is also known to do this. The big three: Asustek, Gigabyte, MSI due to their professional experience however choose to go by their own motherboard designs though but these too are based on the reference design to some extent at least.