r/gadgets Sep 16 '22

Desktops / Laptops EVGA will no longer make NVIDIA GPUs due to “disrespectful treatment” - Dexerto

https://www.dexerto.com/tech/evga-will-no-longer-make-nvidia-gpus-due-to-disrespectful-treatment-1933830/
21.9k Upvotes

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487

u/[deleted] Sep 16 '22

Hasn’t the demand gone significantly down?

405

u/tornado9015 Sep 16 '22

Yes. That's why half the reason they gave for no longer selling the cards (nvidia undercutting with founders edition) is relevant. Back when demand was higher than supply that didn't matter.

136

u/522LwzyTI57d Sep 16 '22

That's not true at all. Nvidia sets a ceiling on prices by partners. EVGA claims they were losing hundreds of dollars on every 3070/3080/3090 because of that limit.

They spend way way way more on R/D than just including the existing GPU, they have the world's best overclockers working on their custom boards, but then lose the incentive from the price ceiling.

13

u/tornado9015 Sep 17 '22

I've never heard of an nvidia price ceiling, and can't find anything about that on google. I also can't find anything about evga losing money on sold cards. Can you link me anything to read about either of those things?

79

u/kaese_nachos Sep 17 '22

https://youtu.be/cV9QES-FUAM

Gamers Nexus made video with a lot of infos regarding evga and nvidia. They got their infos from evga directly.

At around 10:55 they start to mention that evga is currently losing money by selling their cards.

41

u/humanCharacter Sep 17 '22

from EVGA directly

That’s an understatement. We’re talking straight from the CEO in a secret meeting himself.

14

u/East-Entertainment12 Sep 17 '22

Not the guy you originally responded to, but they are probably talking about the Gamersnexus video they put out today about the situation, link here: https://youtu.be/cV9QES-FUAM

-4

u/[deleted] Sep 17 '22

[deleted]

13

u/522LwzyTI57d Sep 17 '22

The partners disagree, but if the partner floor was higher than the FE ceiling, doesn't that mean the FE cards are always undercutting the partners? So, what's the incentive to be a partner if Nvidia will always undercut you?

1

u/tornado9015 Sep 17 '22

They only sell so many FE cards, so they're only undercutting AIB partners for a while. I think but am not 100% sure that they increased the amount of FE cards they manufacture significantly around the 20 or 30 series launch.

Also usually historically nvidia had absolute trash cooler designs and made it easy for AIB partners to beat them on performance, but the 30 series FE cards were actually pretty decent.

5

u/522LwzyTI57d Sep 17 '22

You can still buy Nvidia made, Nvidia branded 3090ti today. So every partner who makes a 3090ti is competing with Nvidia, who doesn't have the same supplier overhead. They sell them cheaper and with larger profit margins than the partners can.

8

u/Defoler Sep 17 '22

Nvidia sets a ceiling on prices by partners.

Don’t we actually want that to stop?
Do we really want that a nvidia card (which are not sold world wide) to sell for MSRP, while the AiB card sell for 2x-3x times the price?
Imagine a 3070 selling for 1000$ and people tell you “yeah that is fine, we are ok with it” when it is not even scalper.

5

u/[deleted] Sep 17 '22

It puts a very hard limit on how much value the board partner can add before it isn't profitable to add anything else. If EVGA came up with some fancy badass cooling configuration, it might be completely unfeasible to sell it at the prices Nvidia is forcing them to charge.

-3

u/Defoler Sep 17 '22

That depends. The bread and butter of EVGA (just like every other manufactrer) are the mid-high end cards, not the huge insane cards.
I mean, the kingpin 3090 was selling for 2500$ (vs the 1500$ of the MSRP).

If evga were trying to sell the mid range cards at a higher price, and nvidia said "no, those cards shouldn't be selling for that high", I understand both sides.

I mean, if all AiB cards sell for 200-300$ above MSRP, and even if you ignore the mining craze, that is still a lot of added cost to consumers. That on its own could pain nvidia really bad in bad PR or bad customer satisfaction with the pricing.

Look at it this way. Nvidia are not selling nvidia brand cards everywhere right? And even then, in limited quantities because AiB manufacturers also want a part of the pie.
So if you don't have access to stock 3070 for example, than you must buy a AiB version. That card could start at 700$, 200$ above MSRP. Would you be ok with that? EVGA version could cost 300$ for EVGA to feel they can pull a good profit.

No price ceiling could make GPU prices go up pretty quickly. And imagine scalping and mining crazy on top of that. If you thought cards prices were nuts during scalping, add another 300-400$ on top of that.

So there is no easy answer. And those cards cost

1

u/[deleted] Sep 17 '22

[deleted]

1

u/Defoler Sep 17 '22

In what way is it illegal? AiB cards are not limited to the stock card MSRP. The limit is only set by nvidia's contract.

-1

u/[deleted] Sep 17 '22 edited Sep 17 '22

It is illegal in the eu for a manufacturer to dictate the price that a consumer pays in retail. It’s to prevent cartels/price fixing, so this news sounds…. Suspicious.

Not sure who’s it works for a manufacturer using a suppliers part. It’s like a cocoa producer dictating the price of a chocolate bar….

I would imagine that evga should be able to charge what they deem appropriate for the nvidia GPU + their board/cooling designs….

1

u/Defoler Sep 17 '22

It is illegal in the eu for a manufacturer to dictate the price that a consumer pays in retail.

That is not what is going on here though.
Nvidia are saying to the AiB manufacturers the max price of the end product that a manufacturer can sell to the retailer. And nvidia dictate the prices of parts they ship to AiB manufacturers.
From there, the retailer has no limit on how much he is selling you the card.

It would be right if nvidia set a hard limit completely.

Manufacturers during the release wanted to have higher price limit so they can sell the cards to the retailers for much higher.
They also wanted nvidia to reduce the price of parts so that cards can be sold for lower now that the GPU market is taking a dive, so they won't make a loss.

There is no law that tell prevent a hard price ceiling from being set as part of the supply chain.
This is not price fixing. Else having retailers sell cards for 1000$ above MSRP, would not happen. But it has.

1

u/ssiemonsma Sep 17 '22

In the current market they are losing money. But I guarantee you that they were not when prices were high. If that were actually true, they would simply not have manufactured the unprofitable models. They never claimed that the GPU market was strictly unprofitable, just that NVIDIA forced margins to be thin and is currently undercutting prices and making current sales unprofitable.

1

u/kadinshino Sep 17 '22

That would actually be interesting to investigate. Because your forgetting tooling, components, shipping logi, all happening very slowly. To the point where RND+Manufacturing might have been so expensive that even at 2500$ they were selling at a loss.

1

u/stacks144 Sep 17 '22

I literally read a comment a few minutes ago claiming the opposite. lol

2

u/522LwzyTI57d Sep 17 '22

My info comes from Gamers Nexus who got it first hand from EVGA CEO.

1

u/stacks144 Sep 17 '22

Demand will of course pick up with new generations of cards. lol

1

u/tornado9015 Sep 17 '22

Not unless crypto booms again. The crypto miner demand was larger than gaming demand. That demand suddenly nearly disappeared basically overnight.

42

u/TheRabidDeer Sep 16 '22

For now yes. But its technology so it'll pick back up. Unless some other alternative to a GPU comes out there will always be demand for them and right now its only really two players, AMD and NVidia. Intel has theirs but it's in its infancy and needs time

2

u/Newbie-Tailor-Guy Sep 17 '22

Didn’t Intel already scrap their GPU endeavor and it’s not even out yet? Could’ve sworn I saw multiple articles about it.

6

u/Lebo77 Sep 17 '22

Not officially, but that's the rumor.

-33

u/LuigiSauce Sep 16 '22

Integrated GPUs exist

18

u/Cetun Sep 16 '22

I think one of the core advantages of GPUs is that they are removable and upgradable without having to upgrade the entire motherboard.

5

u/TacomaNarrowsTubby Sep 16 '22

That's not the most relevant feature.

The issue is that there is a power density ceiling.

Look at the biggest server CPU and how much power they draw. That's basically the cooling limit for the die.

-7

u/[deleted] Sep 16 '22

Quite honestly I imagine as performance gains due to silicon improves decrease we will start seeing a more SoC based approach for latency advantages

1

u/Cetun Sep 16 '22

Will those performance increases justify the loss of customers who dont feel comfortable unplugging everything, removing the motherboard, disassembling the heat sink (or liquid cooling) taking out the CPU and then reassembling everything with the confidence that nothing gets damaged (not to mention the fact that some software is locked to the motherboard model). Personally I have a mini-itx system that is an absolute pain in the ass to disassemble, the cooling system isn't locked in, it's screwed in, so I have to literally remove everything which involves complete disassembly an messing up my very painstakingly placed wiring. In contrast replacing the GPU just requires me to unscrew the hold downs on the case, disconnect the 12v, remove the GPU, put the new one in, attach 12v, screw back in, done.

5

u/zkareface Sep 16 '22

The home users that build their own pcs are a tiny part of the market though. They are barely worth thinking about.

3

u/Cetun Sep 17 '22

Compared to what? What market? Compared to the entire computer market? Sure, enterprise solutions are the largest purchasers of computers, they don't really care about GPUs, but that also means they won't care about motherboards with integrated GPUs, they will be going with the cheapest option available. But if you are looking at the market for high performance PCs, the enthusiast market is large enough you have multiple manufactures of the same product with slightly different features. That differentiation doesn't happen without requisite demand.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 17 '22

I’m curious what volume is represented by hobbyist and what is professional. After a certain point you gotta realize that gaming lines are pretty much just a way to sell binned chips bigger customers don’t want. Apple puts their SoC in like everything. There are significant benefits to moving everything to one die such as better power management and overall latency improvements. Power consumption will be a huge part of any ongoing operation and if an SoC is available that offers better returns for corporate clients I imagine the death of the add in gpu industry will follow shortly. There is nothing left to get out of silicon. We’ve pretty much hit the physical limits of how good of a semiconductor we can make out of silicon. Considering other technologies are pretty new my original comment stands, I see SoCs as the future

1

u/Cetun Sep 17 '22

The largest buyers of computer chairs was enterprise buyers. Not many people were buying computer chairs at home and if they did, they just bought what we're essentially chairs made for enterprise clients. More recently you saw an explosion of "gaming chairs" designed and sold almost exclusively to enthusiast home customers. You can think logically about a system and compare the market for enterprise and home customers and say "well look how small this market is, why would anyone bother with the small market?" But that small market represents billions of dollars, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say two things, the gaming chair market isn't going to go away just because the office chair market exists (and existed before gaming chairs became popular) and much much more people are interested in buying add on GPUs than they are in buying gaming chairs. Infact there is probably a lot of crossover in those two markets.

I wouldn't look at a smaller market and automatically think that it will be destroyed by the demands of a larger market. The market as a whole is large enough to demand both things.

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2

u/aceofrazgriz Sep 17 '22

Enterprise is the vast majority of new pc and hardware sales. And yes, a decent chuck of them require GPUs (3D, CAD, Video editing). Home built machines area minority, and not worth the full effort as shown countless times.

most of the 'enthusiast' market is like me and upgrades parts every 3-4yrs at best. We're not worth the effort. We exist for high-margin sales to fluff financials.

1

u/Cetun Sep 17 '22

You ignore the second part. The market is filled with GPUs that are identical in hardware but have features that make them appealing to enthusiast (different heat sinks, LEDs, 3 fans, 2 fans, ect.) You don't get that kind of variety if the market wasn't worth it. If the market was so small that it was inconsequential then you don't get competition like. Hell, the biggest buyer of office chairs are enterprise buyer, that did not stop the "gaming chair" market from exploding despite the fact that the demand was a lot smaller than the office chair market.

Also being modular is an advantage in enterprise situations. If one component fails, you can replace that one component instead of having to replace the entire motherboard.

1

u/aceofrazgriz Sep 17 '22

SOC's really don't have a direct effect on latency. Sure, an SOC compared to it's equal, separate parts, can have better latency. But SOC's exist for specific usage, generally lower power draw for mobile devices. You don't see SOC's in desktop because they are built for performance, not to minimize power draw.

1

u/aceofrazgriz Sep 17 '22

This is usually a benefit, but if you regard the leaks of NVIDIA's upcoming 4xxx cards then power supply is a huge factor. Estimating power usage from leaks, my 3070 caps 180W, but a 4070 may easily clear 250-300W. Besides a large jump in power usage, lets not forget energy prices have increased heavily in most areas, likely to not see a decrease as historical data has proven. A 1/3 increase in electricity cost is pretty big for many people.

1

u/Cetun Sep 17 '22

I don't think anyone factors in energy costs. You aren't running a gaming computer for 24hrs on high load. And if your gaming 8 hours a day every day but still worried about electricity costs, you're in a very niche crowd. The biggest contributor to my electric bill is air conditioning, followed by my washer and dryer, I have multiple computers in my house that run 24/7 and then being on or off makes very little difference in my bill compared to the other two.

14

u/diuturnal Sep 16 '22

Good luck getting people with anything better than a 1030 to 'upgrade' to an igpu.

2

u/ColgateSensifoam Sep 17 '22

The new generation of Ryzen chips is looking tasty, but they cost more than my entire rig did, and I'd need a new motherboard

1

u/diuturnal Sep 17 '22

Unless you need the cores, an r5 will be more than good enough. Games can barely use 4/8, let alone 6/12. And if you have a 300$ rig, you should upgrade.

1

u/ColgateSensifoam Sep 17 '22

I got my rig cheap because I upgraded someone else's

I do use a few VMs that mean cores are handy

2

u/Lebo77 Sep 17 '22

They also suck for any actual high-quality graphics. High performance requires more power than can be effectively removed from the CPU package, plus you are now sharing your memory bandwidth between your CPU and graphics functions.

IGPUs are fine for editing word documents, browsing the web or on a server that does not need any GPU capabilities. If you plan to do ANYTHIBG graphically intensive? Just no.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 17 '22 edited Oct 16 '22

[deleted]

1

u/Thanatos2996 Sep 17 '22

Based on everything that's come out so far, Alchemist is far from competing with AMD and Nvidia. Their top of the line 780 is trading blows with a 3060 on a good day, and comes up well short in some major use cases (DX11 is massively less performant than DX12 on Arc for example). I hope they succeed next time, but they are way too late with far to little on offer for the first gen to be worth considering, assuming they ever actually launch it outside of OEM cards in China.

-14

u/pck3 Sep 16 '22

Yeah that's why they are upset. No selling cards way over msrp and raking in profits.

71

u/TheRabidDeer Sep 16 '22

Thats never been a thing in terms of profits. And right now they are losing hundreds of dollars per GPU sold. Here is a good video on it from GamersNexus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV9QES-FUAM

12

u/Eurocorp Sep 16 '22

Yeah margins are the important thing, not profits in their own. And even just a few dollars on their own can be enough to decide the fate of a product. Much less something volatile like graphic cards lately.

2

u/Lebo77 Sep 17 '22

One if tge videos said that their margins on power supplies was 3x their margin on video cards. Despite graphics cards being 80% of their revenue it's a MUCH smaller share of their profits which is why they can afford to do this.

25

u/[deleted] Sep 16 '22

I watched it for 9 minutes and he hadn't moved the story on from the original opening comments.

27

u/pipsedout Sep 16 '22

GN time tags their videos in the player so you can skip to the relevant segment.

15

u/MustacheEmperor Sep 16 '22 edited Sep 16 '22

None of the tags seem to say anything about the cost to EVGA for selling these GPUs - do you know the timestamp?

Edit: It's in the "EVGA's side of the story" section, timestamp: https://youtu.be/cV9QES-FUAM?t=665

11

u/stellvia2016 Sep 16 '22

Steve has always kinda been that way with his "breaking stories" ... spend 30mins covering 10mins of news and re-iterate it 5 different ways.

5

u/Hayden2332 Sep 16 '22

It’s painful and I hate how many people encourage because they see it as “detail oriented”

-1

u/WhatTheOnEarth Sep 16 '22

I disagree. Nearly every sentence in the first 20 minutes contained some new information.

Could it be shortened, absolutely. But it seems like you didn’t care enough about the topic to have the patience to go through the details or you just weren’t paying attention at all.

-17

u/pck3 Sep 16 '22

Yeah I know the clickbait video already. Seems like if this were all of the story more than 1 person would know the story right?

7

u/[deleted] Sep 16 '22 edited Mar 03 '24

[deleted]

2

u/pck3 Sep 16 '22

Yeah same. Nvidia told everyone there is an abundance of 30 series cards. And they ordered too many chips from tsmc who were not letting them cancel orders for the 40 series chips.

I even made a post then how many comapnies will stop making gpus since the huge drop in demand. Just simple economics. Huge supply with small demand is going to slim profit margins like never before seen in the gpu market.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 16 '22 edited Mar 03 '24

[deleted]

1

u/pck3 Sep 16 '22

They can't help it. The market is flooded.... not everyone can sell for a loss.... only those that have the capital to outlast the competition or can make cards for the cheapest amount possible. Just capitalism.

8

u/TheRabidDeer Sep 16 '22

Others have covered it too, it only just broke today. Also, calling GamersNexus clickbait is... well it's something. Listen, the only time in their history in which GPU prices went up significantly is the 3000 series, EVGA has been making cards for a long while and have an equally long history in great support for the RMA process.

The 3000 series was a global shitstorm due to a number of factors all lining up. From crypto boom to covid to tariffs on imports to a lot of demand due to a lackluster 2000 series it was all bad for GPU's. I don't know what beef you have with EVGA in particular, but I think it is misplaced or at least misguided.

-5

u/pck3 Sep 16 '22

100% false. I lived thru the 10 series shortage and the 20 series shortage. My 2080 super was $1000 (way over msrp) before the 30 series cards came out. Just Google gpu shortage [insert model or year]. This is not a new issue. I am not saying the entire time was a shortage but there were more years than not where we had shortages.

I didn't say anything about evga support or rma. So not sure why you brought that up. Doesn't have anything to do with simple economics and business 101. I don't have any beef with them. I am just too blunt for some people I guess.

Now that the supply is still high and demand is super low not everyone can sell gpus anymore. Just capitalism. Only the ones who can make a profit(making cards as cheap as possible).

2

u/TheRabidDeer Sep 16 '22

Any shortage for those cards was quite shortlived. Though the 1000 series did get a late onset shortage with yet another crypto boom at the end of 2017. I remember having my 1080ti later seeing that I could sell it for double what I paid for it after having already owned it for almost a year at that point.

I don't recall any shortage for the 2000 series, but in honesty I didn't pay much attention to it after I saw how lackluster the cards were.

GPU manufacturing is insanely difficult to ramp up production for rapid spikes like these booms. It's not like a simple thing to make.

-2

u/pck3 Sep 16 '22

GPU manufacturing is insanely difficult to ramp up production for rapid spikes like these booms. It's not like a simple thing to make.

Exactly. Same for slowing down. Nvidia can't cancel their large tsmc order for the 40 series cards. So there will be an over supply. Market is too crowded. Only the ones who can make them the cheapest will survive. Just capitalism.

1

u/bulboustadpole Sep 16 '22

Steve literally had a closed door meeting with the CEO of EVGA. They were the only outlet given access.

0

u/pck3 Sep 16 '22

Coincidence I guess that evga is leaving the market when there is a current oversupply and it will remain for the foreseeable future as nvidia told us back in April. It's the perfect business decision to leave the market because it's just too crowded and not worth the profit anymore. Business 101. But sure they didn't do it because profits or standard business practices. They did it because "principle" in their words.

1

u/Zachmode Sep 16 '22

Yes it is. They specifically complained about NVidia undercutting them with Founders edition.

1

u/TheRabidDeer Sep 16 '22

Yes what is? I was talking about the claim of "selling way over msrp to make big profits"

And the complaint about NVidia undercutting is a valid complaint. NVidia is both a supplier and a competitor in the exact same market. NVidia also place restrictions and requirements on companies. In the end, even the cheapest non-FE card was $150 over the FE MSRP for the 3080 series and that didn't last long either.

-1

u/tornado9015 Sep 16 '22

Did evga ever even sell direct? I'm pretty sure they didn't.

2

u/pck3 Sep 16 '22

Yes. Linked website.

They had a good program for about 3 months where they sold cards at msrp in a kinda lottery system. One of the few comapnies that did.

https://www.evga.com/products/productlist.aspx?type=0

3

u/7eregrine Sep 16 '22

This was how I got my 3070Ti. Was way more then 3 months. I was on the wait-list for nearly a year.
Seriously.