DFI Consumer boards dead, EVGA team goes to Sapphire

drunkenmaster

drunkenmaster

drunkenmaster

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Rumour that EVGA's motherboard team up and quit the other day was denied, but has since been confirmed and several sites are now saying the Computex talk is that the team was snapped up by Sapphire.

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/06/03/sapphire-scores-new-motherboard-team/

Sapphire are due to lose a lot of sales of low end cards as low end gpu's move to the cpu die. But AMD are likely to gain a lot of market share with a very cheap/powerful platform and some likely incredibly powerful on die gpu's Intel probably won't be competitive with for a good while. So theres loads of room for AMD motherboard sales growth as AMD's market share increases, more cpu's sold, more AMD mobo's sold.


http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/motherboards/2010/06/03/the-lanparty-is-over-for-dfi/1

DFI Lanparty boards no more(as Charlie reported end of last year and was laughed at for being wrong), bit-tech guy basically ambushed a guy at DFI headquarters and got a bad feeling and confirmed at Computex finally that DFI are out of consumer boards and only doing industrial boards.

Not too surprising, nothing new for ages, no signs of anything new, very little market presence and not close to the best overclocking boards for a few years anyway and personally, I've had 2 out of 3 boards completely die and one had the onboard lan die.
 
Theguy said:
less and less competition in the motherboard business :/
Click to expand...

Well in the AMD arena(where DFI were most competitive) we've got EVGA's interesting team moved to Sapphire, so thats a much bigger move forwards than DFI is a move back. DFI were pretty small, with a limited range and hadn't been particularly good recently. Sapphire are just a massive company in comparison and every bit capable of being massively bigger than DFI.

MSI are going from strength to strength, Gigabyte are decent, Asus are decent, Biostar are improving dramatically in terms of enthusiast boards, Foxconn, well, all the employee's are commiting suicide it seems but the boards are good(though little presence in the UK).

Epox, Abit, DFi are the biggest losses, Epox/DFI were never that big, and Abit, few great boards, few awful boards, had been in trouble for years and years though on and off. I think as we've lost them Gigabyte, MSI, have more than moved in to replace and better them and Sapphire could be very interesting.

Nickg said:
shame my last DFi boards were the best mobos id ever had, until my dfi p35 set on fire:/
Click to expand...

:p
 
Theguy said:
less and less competition in the motherboard business :/
Click to expand...

Well in the AMD arena(where DFI were most competitive) we've got EVGA's interesting team moved to Sapphire, so thats a much bigger move forwards than DFI is a move back. DFI were pretty small, with a limited range and hadn't been particularly good recently. Sapphire are just a massive company in comparison and every bit capable of being massively bigger than DFI.

MSI are going from strength to strength, Gigabyte are decent, Asus are decent, Biostar are improving dramatically in terms of enthusiast boards, Foxconn, well, all the employee's are commiting suicide it seems but the boards are good(though little presence in the UK).

Epox, Abit, DFi are the biggest losses, Epox/DFI were never that big, and Abit, few great boards, few awful boards, had been in trouble for years and years though on and off. I think as we've lost them Gigabyte, MSI, have more than moved in to replace and better them and Sapphire could be very interesting.

Saying that, 890fx board's, competion and prices are pretty terrible compared to the 790fx situation. IE 790FX AM2+ £100 would get you a top end board without a designer heatsink, 58 onboard lan ports and overclocking via a usb cable connected to a laptop. They are screwing enthusiasts on 890fx, because its a very small upgrade except those buying things like Sata 3 ssd's, and they know they can fleece enthusiasts for every last penny.

Nickg said:
shame my last DFi boards were the best mobos id ever had, until my dfi p35 set on fire:/
Click to expand...

:p
 
I'm really sad to hear this. Thanks for the news.

It's a sad day when you can no longer buy a motherboard that'll cheerfully kill itself at your command.
 
Drunkenmaster - i do not jest!

nickg07-atxp35.jpg


you should see the back and my case (under that part of the mobo is scorched) my ram is also scorched. there was a full blown fire going on.

thing is that despite borking initially via a persistant ON OFF cycle i managed to get the mobo to 'meld' itself back together and it ran 'fine' for 6 months thereafter?!?


do sapph even make boards any more?! i remember some premium WHITE coloured boards they did a few years ago...

DFi
biostar
abit
xfx
evga

all RIP!
 
Sad day. :( Asus will be happy, can charge more money now!

Well Sapphire must be getting in some cash to do this, since they have expanded into the PSU market.

Hopefully they will make some quality boards. And yeah I remember that white board, that was like 3/4 years a go now though! Remember seeing it in Custom PC mag. Still got that issue as well. Can remember it being quite good as well I think.
 
I cant imagine why this happened, EVGA get to do what ever they want it seems, SR-2 for eg. So why go to a big company that will want to churn out motherboards all the time.
 
EVGA's pricing always seemed a bit out of sync for me, compared to the competition. And biostar are surely not RIP in motherboards btw :)
 
So Sapphire now has EVGA's design team but do they own the brand name and the IP? That's not what the article says, to me it looks like the designers have tapped up by Sapphire who have offered them more money and as result they have had a falling out with the directors over pay, got the ump and left.

Nickg - When did Biostar bite the dust? That's news to me.

EVGA Press Release said:
Also, I'd like to bring to your attention; the rumors that you are reading are NOT completely accurate!
Click to expand...

No that's right, there semi-accurate. :;
 
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Sapphire make mobo's but not really going after enthusiasts, I think they've been selling them the whole time, probably more like mobo's to Dell and those kinds of guys.

EVGA are still going, they'll hire new guys, but their team did seem to work pretty well together and you can't necessarily get guys who are as good or innovative, anything EVGA release in the next several months will most likely have been designed and be in testing already but further into the future their boards, well, you'd have to see if they end up as good as they are now........ though are they even good, never had one.

Sapphire are HUGE though, iirc they are really just one brand name of one of the chinese/taiwanese manufactures that make so much stuff its scary, though its always hard to remember who is owned by who these days. I'm sure they are completely set for manufacturing, they have distribution and a brand, they needed obviously a better team to make better quality/designed/clocking mobo's and they have that aswell now.

Theres also the basic fact that, EVGA used to work with Nvidia making Nvidia mobo's, which are all done now, they make Intel boards and theres probably not the profits there that they had with Nvidia mobo's, prefered partner getting great pricing on chipsets, with Intel they are small time, I'd imagine the situation changed quite dramatically in terms of the work being done by that team in the past year.
 
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