EVGA Terminates NVIDIA Partnership, Cites Disrespectful Treatment

[laymanpigeon]

 

[Keatah]

OMG!! Are we sure this isn't April Fools day happening early?

 

I always liked EVGA overall as a company, how the hell are they gonna compete? On the otherhand, Nvidia is an asshole. Ever since their preferential favoritism toward miners I started disliking them.

 

IDK, maybe it's a good thing.. EVGA was having too many SKU#'s. Boards being differentiated by $5 and 10MHz clock increments. Just too much granularism. One recent time they had over 80 different cards for sale.

 

Now I'll go watch the videos.

Edited September 18, 2022 by Keatah

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Yeah I'm really not okay with this news. I've been a strict EVGA nVidia card owner since my first EVGA card I bought when I had my 7800GS. That card lasted me until I finally upgraded it to a 975 and then to a 1070 and now my current EVGA 2070super. Never had a single issue with any of those cards (Well, I'm not totally convinced my current super might not have some issues but still). I really have no idea what I will do once I need to upgrade again. But apparently I will have to go with something like MSI or Gigabyte...

 

It also isn't clear on if EVGA is getting out of all video cards period or what. Gamers Nexus video states pretty clearly at the beginning that the CEO states NO video cards period for the foreseeable future. But then at the end of it, seems to make it appear that they could get on board with Intel ARCs or AMD chipsets. Jay'z Two Cents makes it seem that they would most likely go with AMD or other chip maker but again the quotes from the CEO at Gamer's Nexus seem pretty clear that EVGA is getting out of the video card business side of things completely.

 

Even more dishearten when you hear they had working engineering samples of 4000 series cards that will now not get made and offered to the masses. 

 

[Keatah]

Yes GN report made it sound like they're out of videocards permanently. Perhaps it is the same kind of marketing tactic like how Windows 10 was the last OS ever. Now we have Win11. A little bit shock never hurt anyone. Companies change their tune every day of the week.

 

I guess EVGA doesn't want to do cards because the profit margin is thin. I suppose in the end it doesn't really matter too much, there's always going to someone making cards. Asus, Gigabyte, MSI (though I avoid MSI), and Nvidia themselves, are enough to carry the GPU flag.

 

I also don't generally compare prices from one mfg to another. They're all priced similarly. And the only thing that's worth my time watching is the broad industry trend like the end of a generation 20xx, 30xx, etc., or whatever the miners or large purchasing groups may be doing. Those are worth keeping an eye on since they move the prices by hundreds of dollarz.

 

I have ZERO loyalty to any corporation. None of them do me any favors. Just go with something used from ebay. Not anything where you gotta pay a premium for. Not anything gussied up with gamerz terminology like founder's edition or something that isn't overclocked or superclocked, KO'ed or FTW'ed.. unless you like buying into that sort of thing. Bunch a gobbledygook to me.

[Tanooki]

Is this a bad thing?  And is it just an excuse or is nvidia really that bad as I never seen any large complaints about them before so it is a smoke bomb?  I'm going to be in the market for a PC sooner than later as this one is up on I think 8 years now.  The fans seem to run a bit harder than the first half of its life when I fire up youtube and some other stuff, so age, dust, more...?   Going desktop this time though, been over 12 years now I think since I had one.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Well for me I'd been sticking with EVGA cards because I had ASUS and even Creative Labs cards prior to this. Heck my first nVidia based card was actually an Riva128 from STB. Point is, the other cards I've bought would all give up the ghost just shortly after their warranty periods but the EVGA cards were still ticking strong. And EVGA tended to have one of the best customer service experiences with their cards. They also had their trade up policy where you could within a year I think it was of purchasing one of their cards, trade it in towards value on a newer version card. Yes they had a ton of different skus that never made much sense to me, but I'm sure they did that so that all price brackets were covered.

 

Not sure which brand I go with on my next card in the future.

 

[Keatah]

2 hours ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

Well for me I'd been sticking with EVGA cards because I had ASUS and even Creative Labs cards prior to this. Heck my first nVidia based card was actually an Riva128 from STB.

My first 3D card would also have been the RIVA-128. PCI, VIVO, from Canopus.. I was building out a new Pentium-266 at the time, and I couldn't afford (nor did I want) to have TWO videocards in the same rig.

 

3DFx Voodoo stuff did the pass-through thing and it did cause some image degradation. Plus all that switching and proprietary driver stuff. Not quite for me.

 

I would eventually try out a Voodoo² SLI and eventually a 3500. But none were compelling considering the added complexity. At one time I had 4 graphics cards going, TNT2, Voodoo² SLI, and PowerVR PCX2. This last card had no VGA connector on it - it rendered across the PCI bus and used the system memory for textures. It worked surprisingly well with good framerates.

 

As the TNT2's drivers matured and gained functionality I decided to stick with Nvidia only thereafter. It was simply too much confusion and busywork making 4 cards work in win98. And anything pass-through suddenly became passe'.

 

I (thankfully) became of the mindset that "hey! if you want your software to work, make it work with standard chips! No more specialty crap!" TNT2 and derivatives like Vanta were becoming popular OEM parts..

 

2 hours ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

Point is, the other cards I've bought would all give up the ghost just shortly after their warranty periods but the EVGA cards were still ticking strong. And EVGA tended to have one of the best customer service experiences with their cards. They also had their trade up policy where you could within a year I think it was of purchasing one of their cards, trade it in towards value on a newer version card.

I made use of their warranty one time. But never the step-up program because I tend to hang on to old hardware.

 

2 hours ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

Yes they had a ton of different skus that never made much sense to me, but I'm sure they did that so that all price brackets were covered.

Consider the Pentium II, it came out in 3 speed grades. 233, 266, and 300MHz. And that means 3 price points, $636, $775, $1981 respectively.

 

In something as complex as a CPU, no two parts are ever the same, hence the speed grade binning. The better chips pass at 300MHz, the lesser ones at 233, and 266. So what about a part that passes 275MHz where does it go? In the 266 bin. And an enterprising overclocker may discover it's good for 275. Or 300 with the right over voltaging an cooling.

 

BAM! Now we have a silicon lottery, what chip do you get? What speed can go without crashing? Remember the Celeron 300A? That was huge! All made on the smaller process, all very conservatively binned. Overclockers were winning the silicon lottery left and right! Taking a 300MHz part to 500MHz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeron#Mendocino

 

So what does all this have to do with EVGA's overbloated SKU count? Graphics cards from 3rd party makers are simply taking up the slack. Marketing is paying attention to the binning in excruciating detail, and every 5 or 10 MHZ difference warrants a price increase. To get that last dollar possible. Milk the customer. Make sure every last MHz is paid for. They'd do 1 MHz if it was profitable, but it wouldn't be. The amount of packaging and SKU#s would be too costly. I can assure you their offerings are balanced to a T. Any more, and it costs more to maintain inventory. Anything less, and they're giving away free MHz.

 

To make matters worse, they did the same thing with the GDDR memory. And you can see, all the mixes and matches could add up to a confusing array of choices. And none of it was to be generous and nice and cater to every price point.

 

2 hours ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

Not sure which brand I go with on my next card in the future.

Well I remember recently shopping for a card in 2018/2019, and I was totally overwhelmed with all the editions EVGA was offering. I didn't know what to get, spent too much time hemming-n-hawing over this price vs this benchmark vs MHz vs the coolness of the name vs cooling method.

 

In the end I said fuckitall and just got a lightly-used GTX 1080 Founder's Edition from ebay, got it for a song and dance, less than $300 IIRC, lightly used and complete in box. It looks nice, performs great, and most importantly it didn't confuse me or bog me down trying to sift through a huge range of models. I figured it would be properly optimized, conservatively optimized, coming from the "founder's" own factory. Not running on the edge, but having plenty of "reserve" available that can be called into action as the card ages. So to speak.

 

It's like when something is overclocked, there's no breathing room, no wiggle room, to accommodate aging. Parts are run against the limit, and any change from age causes them to crash. And the crash causes a lockup. And a lockup causes localized overheating on the die. And then the die dies! So no-no on overclocking.

[Keatah]

Jensen Hang's omniverse is fullashit. It's like they're making a virtual world so you can use their tools, to build stuff, in that virtual world. Just too mucha that crap. You know?

 

The 2022 keynote was like 10 minutes on the 40xx series boards and the rest on omnishit.

[youxia]

What does it even mean, "disrespectful"? I'm not gonna watch these vids, can somebody recap?

 

As for EVGA, I couldn't care less. There are plenty of other solid brands out there and they're all pretty much indistnguinshable. As for Nvidia, I don't like their market position and bullying any more than Intel's or MS's but, what can you do. If you're into high-level modern gaming (I mean the pro-nerd level) then their stuff is usually the one to get.

[Tanooki]

I don't believe I have ever used something from EVGA, seen the emblem but know nothing about them or why I should give a damn about their greatness.  But what I'm seeing here doesn't seem to really add up to where the respect thing seems more like entitled whining for preferential treatment that didn't happen.

 

I can't recall every card I've had since 3D popped up but I went from a Voodoo 3 card and Matrox Mystique in the FF7 on PC era, various diamond cards around that on both sides, had an earlier nvidia card that pissed me off as it made 2D stuff forced to be fuzzy/blurry because of shit graphics choices they forced, so I went with AMD for years until they crumbled.  I only went to nvidia because of this gaming laptop that's 100% soldered in parts free, it's like  portable tower pc, the 980mobile it has has 8GB of ram of its own and the guts match the 970 desktop otherwise so it's between the pair, minimal loss in this first generation of non-garbage laptop chips(usual loss was 50-60% before hand.)  I've enjoyed it, the drivers are no longer a garbage fire, and I like their work on their own tegra tablet which turned into Switch.  But again, no EVGA... so I'm not really sure why this is something to feel bad about vs EVGA trying to be drama queens or whoever made the video.

[Keatah]

In context, "disrespect" means tougher business conditions. Little more. Nvidia kinda wants its partners to purchase larger quantities of chips too far in advance. In the present business climate that could spell disaster for AIB partners - because their profit margin is truly very thin.

 

This was planned over 6 months ago anyway, so it seems like some drama to draw attention to the market. Market is oversaturated with cards right now, yet the 3090ti flagship from last year costs over 1200. Too expensive.

 

Last year's outmoded outdated crap. So never paying a premium for it. Has to sell for half original MSRP!

Edited September 21, 2022 by Keatah

[Austin]

The TL/DR is that Nvidia has poor communication with its board partners, not providing manufacturers enough information far enough ahead of time before a product launch, and the partners end up having to scramble to get everything together at the last minute. Gamers Nexus basically confirmed with other board partners that it's the same for everyone and no company is liking how Nvidia is going about it.

 

EVGA's CEO has also been running this thing for a long time and it sounds like he's contemplating retirement, along with considering the future of his company. At this moment he does not plan to sell, especially not to some investor that's only looking to make a profit, but it's up in the air at the moment. Gamers Nexus stated that the GPU segment of EVGA makes up about 80% of their business, but it also has the lowest profit margin so it sounds like EVGA has come to the conclusion that this segment of their business is way more trouble than it's worth. High stress by being smacked around by Nvidia along with low return on investment, basically.

 

I have used several EVGA products and they were all solid. That said, in terms of GPUs, I've primarily been rocking Asus Strix cards the last five years or so and probably will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I don't like seeing major players exit the business but at least in this case there are other decent alternatives.

[Tanooki]

So it seems like Nvidia both being overly guarded but also very CYA about their own selves first causes some others to get upset because they'd rather nvidia take the risk more than them so it's disrespectful.  Seems like a give and take, and evga just doesn't like that anymore for the reasons Austin pointed out...risk vs reward.  SO they can finger point and blame, then knowing what they do but not wanting to spell it out that way can deflect and retreat for their own better interests.  Scapegoating does work if you don't know the details.

 

I do agree on the sickening prices.  Inflation bubble isn't helping now either.  I would have replaced this nice albeit aging laptop with a true desktop, but, the costs blow.  Look what the 2XXX and 3XXX cards go for, now they're talking 4's.  I am still using a 980mobile with 8GB of ram (it's like a 970 desktop with double the ram.) and it works awesome for PS4/Pro level work at 1080p which is nice.  But I know this is started to creak and I don't want a fail, I'd like a solid fall back computer in case of issues I can tuck away.  SO it's like what do I do?  I sold some serious stuff off and put a couple thousand into an account that's hands off, but I want to maximize what I can do with this slush fund.  I'd hate to have to gimp due to crooked video card pricing shenanigans, but the last thing I want with the 4X coming is a 1X card or a shitty 2X that won't last long.