PC EVGA terminates relationship with NVIDIA, ceases all video card manufacturing on grounds of disrespectful treatment, among other things

[cusideabelincoln]

6 hours ago, stepee said:

I almost always buy evga nvidia cards, so this suxxxxxx

 

Who is the next best now?

 

No one really, each manufacturer makes several different models of the same card that have different capabilities. It's all about power delivery now. So you'll want to get the "premium" model from a manufacturery. For MSI that is the SuprimX, Asus that's the ROG Strix, and Gigabyte has the Aurus Xtreme. Then each has a budget model, MSI is the Ventus, ASUS is the TUF, and Gigabyte is the Eagle. And then there are models in between and some will have special high end model, like EVGA's Kingpin. Right now, the ROG Strix has one of the best VRM designs so it will probably carry over to next gen as well.

 

6 hours ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

Actually, EVGA F'd up the early rev as well:

 

Access Denied

FORUMS.EVGA.COM

 

 

 

2 hours ago, Spork3245 said:

Oh, weird, I remember them being listed as having the better capacitors that didn’t have the issues with power distribution for clock speeds

 

That was the initial reporting, but after some time the EVGA 3090 cards this gen, as well as some other brands and models, had an inadequate VRM  *controller*. There were a lot of other cards with this design or a worse one because Nvdia provided a bad reference design, but there were some of other manufacturers who used better controllers on their SKUs (ROG Strix for example). The controller basically couldn't properly distribute an even load across all of the VRM stages, so some of the stages were overworked while others did nothing. If hit with too high of a load that's where some of the failures would happen.  The BIOS allowing too high of a clockspeed is just a side effect of the problem. By reducing the clockspeeds, they reduced the power needs so that the VRM controller would never be put into a situation where it could send more power than the VRM can handle. The reference design did change for the 3090 Ti cards so just about any brand should be good for longevity, the only thing to look for when buying a Ti is how much power will the BIOS let you have, and cooling.

 

3 hours ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

Well now I don't know! I just remember articles from the time saying they had defective boards. and the Reddit cowd melting down about it! 

 

There were definitely some other cards affected the New World issue, I believe Gigabyte reported problems too. I suspect we only heard of EVGA as the widespread issue because more people buy EVGA cards than other brands.

[HardAct]

DAMN!!

    I was just looking at a Evga FTW 3090Ti for 1099$!! I love Evga. This 2080Ti Zotac Amp edition I'm on now is the first GPU is a very long time that wasn't Evga. This is sad/bad news! They really seem like a good company. Crazy to think they were losing money at on their cards while they watched them then be sold for 1.5-2.5x what they sold for by scalpers.

[cusideabelincoln]

7 hours ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

This really points to the bursting of the "Crypto Bubble" being a HELLUVA LOT WORSE for GPU vendors than we could ever have possibly imagined.

 

Just how much unsold GPU inventory could they be sitting on?!?

 

It's bad now, but how much profit were they making during the booms? Surely they were making as much or more profit for a longer period of time than what they have been losing lately.

[Dre801]

Nvidia is a dick of a company.  Great products though.

[Spork3245]

4 hours ago, cusideabelincoln said:

 

No one really, each manufacturer makes several different models of the same card that have different capabilities. It's all about power delivery now. So you'll want to get the "premium" model from a manufacturery. For MSI that is the SuprimX, Asus that's the ROG Strix, and Gigabyte has the Aurus Xtreme. Then each has a budget model, MSI is the Ventus, ASUS is the TUF, and Gigabyte is the Eagle. And then there are models in between and some will have special high end model, like EVGA's Kingpin. Right now, the ROG Strix has one of the best VRM designs so it will probably carry over to next gen as well.

 

 

 

That was the initial reporting, but after some time the EVGA 3090 cards this gen, as well as some other brands and models, had an inadequate VRM  *controller*. There were a lot of other cards with this design or a worse one because Nvdia provided a bad reference design, but there were some of other manufacturers who used better controllers on their SKUs (ROG Strix for example). The controller basically couldn't properly distribute an even load across all of the VRM stages, so some of the stages were overworked while others did nothing. If hit with too high of a load that's where some of the failures would happen.  The BIOS allowing too high of a clockspeed is just a side effect of the problem. By reducing the clockspeeds, they reduced the power needs so that the VRM controller would never be put into a situation where it could send more power than the VRM can handle. The reference design did change for the 3090 Ti cards so just about any brand should be good for longevity, the only thing to look for when buying a Ti is how much power will the BIOS let you have, and cooling.

 

 

There were definitely some other cards affected the New World issue, I believe Gigabyte reported problems too. I suspect we only heard of EVGA as the widespread issue because more people buy EVGA cards than other brands.

Yea, everything had the VRM issue, I was only referencing the capacitor source/type issue

[Spork3245]

What’s interesting is that I’m old enough to remember when nVidia were the “good guys”. The TNT through GeForce 2 days they were the “fun” GPU company that was doing new things. GeForce 4, with the intentionally misleading MX series, is when they started to be kinda dickish, the disaster that was the GeForceFX (GeForce 5) is when it really came into light, IMO.

[Reputator]

What a blow! They were a tight partner of NVIDIA's for DECADES. If EVGA was suffering I can't imagine how the smaller partners were/are faring.

 

Guess the "EVGA" name is a bit of a misnomer now, huh?

[elbobo]

Crazy news. I wonder how many 40xx series cards they have made already

[Spork3245]

58 minutes ago, Reputator said:

What a blow! They were a tight partner of NVIDIA's for DECADES. If EVGA was suffering I can't imagine how the smaller partners were/are faring.

 

Guess the "EVGA" name is a bit of a misnomer now, huh?

Who’s smaller than EVGA? (Honest question)

Maybe Zotac?

[SuperSpreader]

6 hours ago, Spork3245 said:

What’s interesting is that I’m old enough to remember when nVidia were the “good guys”. The TNT through GeForce 2 days they were the “fun” GPU company that was doing new things. GeForce 4, with the intentionally misleading MX series, is when they started to be kinda dickish, the disaster that was the GeForceFX (GeForce 5) is when it really came into light, IMO.

 

Wow so long ago 15yr

[Spork3245]

12 minutes ago, SuperSpreader said:

 

Wow so long ago 15yr

For which part? GeForceFX came out in Jan of 2003, that’s nearly 20 years ago. The original TNT came out in 1998

[Zaku3]

14 hours ago, cusideabelincoln said:

 

It's bad now, but how much profit were they making during the booms? Surely they were making as much or more profit for a longer period of time than what they have been losing lately.

 

It's multiple things. While yes they made alot of money during the boom, they were also buying Nvidia GPUs at boom level pricing, sales were epic so they bought a ton, they saw the crash coming and probably wanted stock buybacks, rebates, something to help them deal with the supply glut. Nvidia being Nvidia is probably on some Papa that ain't my problem. EVGA kept trying to work something out wasn't getting anywhere decided to bail on GPUs. It appears they told Nvidia in April in the hopes that one of their biggest partners bailing on them would force their hand. Nvidia chucked up the dueces. 

 

In between that they looked at the loses they are taking on cards right now. The futher loses they will need to take to get rid of their stock in the tidal wave of cheap used mining cards incoming. The futher loses they'd take because the 4xxx series is coming and they are probably gonna force 3xxx prices down further. The razor thin margins are gonna get even thinner since the 4xxx is most likely gonna need crazy levels of cooling and power. Plus there is no way these founders edition cards isn't Nvidia trying to drive out the AIBs. So why stay.

 

The AMD thing is probably either Nvidia dominating the GPU space so why bother fighting for scraps in a low margin market. Could also be part of their agreement with Nvidia and they need the clock to run out on it or it could be a way to stay in Nvidia's good graces. Like if Nvidia decides to help em out to keep em (which if they did we wouldn't have had this news) they would do it if they don't go to AMD. Nvidia is petty enough to cut them off of any future possible partnerships if they go to AMD. 

 

However there is an oppurtunity for them. They can expand their mobo offerings and PSU offerings. AMD is switching to a new socket and Intel does that shyt like every 2 weeks. The PSU market is also gonna boom due to Lovelace probably needing it's own fussion reactor and RDNA3 might even take more power then RDNA2. Rumors are the Geforce 5xxx series will continue being a monolithic design so probably even more power hungry then lovelace to keep up with chiplet based Radeons.

 

I didn't mention Intel because it's gonna be a long time before their GPUs are available and worth a damn. (Drivers and well last I heard they got the guy that was in charge of Vega and that wasn't exactly peaches and cream for Radeon tech group.)

[Jason]

17 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

In what world do you intentionally lose 80% of your revenue, not have plans to expand into any other market, and expect to not have any layoffs or anything?

It just doesn't seem realistic.

 

They're claiming that the actual profit margin on GPUs was so incredibly thin that while it's 80% of revenue it's barely any of their profit.

[Zaku3]

2 minutes ago, Jason said:

 

They're claiming that the actual profit margin on GPUs was so incredibly thin that while it's 80% of revenue it's barely any of their profit.

 

To add they make mobos and PSU so they don't technically need to expand into new markets. They are in the markets they should focus on. 

[jaethos]

They've also been making keyboards and mice and such recently, so they have areas they can grow in without entering new markets.

 

I'm pretty bummed though, I was hoping to get an EVGA 40 series. I have an MSI 3080 right now and it works great, but the experience with my previous 2 EVGA cards was just more user friendly.

[Ghost_MH]

I have one of their 2080TI cards, but this entire things is sort of leaving me sour on nvidia. Between this, the way they tried to take out Hardware Unboxed. I'll probably replace my RTX card with something from AMD in the future. Probably makes sense to me since it's unlikely I go back to Intel CPUs anytime soon. Linus went into them for a while on their podcast with some extra details about all the shit nvidia has been pulling for years.

 

 

[Xbob42]

4 hours ago, Jason said:

 

They're claiming that the actual profit margin on GPUs was so incredibly thin that while it's 80% of revenue it's barely any of their profit.

So why have they wasted their time doing it for like 20 years? Something about this just doesn't make any sense, especially from a business perspective. Either there was barely any profit, in which case why invest substantially into it, or there was profit, in which case why leave suddenly and without warning?

[Ghost_MH]

2 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

So why have they wasted their time doing it for like 20 years? Something about this just doesn't make any sense, especially from a business perspective. Either there was barely any profit, in which case why invest substantially into it, or there was profit, in which case why leave suddenly and without warning?

 

Seems the margins were just low, however, it was a large portion of their customer base. That is, the customer that buys a low margin GPU is likely the same customer that also buys a high margin PSU. The bigger issue is nvidia entering the high end GPU market with the 1080 Founder's Edition six years ago. That was OK for a while when the Founder's Edition was a low run SKU, but that's changed over the years and now nvidia is directly competing with their own partners by making as many cards as they can AND charging less for their cards than folks like EVGA can get away with for their own. That's how EVGA went from thin margins to losing money on some cards they were selling. On top of that nvidia puts a cap on how much they can charge and keeps them from being able to do creative things with their cards.

 

I'm sure the upcoming release of the 40xx series was putting extra pressure on them. nvidia wasn't letting them know how much these cards were going to cost, refused to provide them with drivers, and did not let them know how many chips they'd be getting because nvidia had to feed their own production line first. That's a lot of bullshit to try to overlook. That's on top of the bottom of the GPU market falling out from under them thanks to all the cards that are about to hit eBay thanks to Ethereum moving to proof of stake.

[jaethos]

The Gamers Nexus video goes into the reasoning a bit more. It seems like it's a mix of the reported issues with nvidia and personal reasons of the CEO.