Just wondering why ATI and nVidia sell their cards via different brands such as XFX, BFG, PowerColor etc. when, to best of my knowledge, no other companies which sell PC components do. Is there some law regarding this? Or is it just mutually beneficial to sell their products in this way?
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A POINTLESS QUESTION
- Thread starter Overslop
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AFAIK they just licence the chipset. Think about it, how many times have you heard someone wanting to buy a "new Hoover", Hoover is a brand VACCUM CLEANER is the product. In the same way people buy a new Radeon or Geforce, regardless of branding.
Soldato
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The sell core chips to partners and licence the board reference designs. ATI do make some of their own btw. Not sure about NV. I'd guess they could make all the production, but their production line would have to be massive. What happens if there is a down turn? Also the other companies would start to think about making their own chips. So its safer to concentrate on chip design and allow others to support your products without capital investment. At a guess.
The difference is that these are still ATI/nVidia products, but sold under various brands. When people say "hoover" they usually mean vacuum cleaner regardless of the brand at all. I get your point though Frippy.
That would sound logical fornowgain but doesn't account for why this isn't the case for other components such as CPUs.
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Soldato
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Maybe the performance of the GPU core matched to a reference design is more critical to ATI/NV than with their own north/southbridge chips. Cpu's, other than socket pin outs and voltages, I suppose motherboards manufacturing need much greater design flexibility and can't be tied to a reference.Duel said:
From what i know previously both Nvidia & ATI would sign exclusivity deals, which would give these companies slighlty better prices as an incentive, with these companies, for X amount of years. So in effect lock the companies in to selling their products only, but the cheaper prices being an incentive to do so. More recently however some companies such as Asus sell both types of cards, due to not wanting to sign these exclusivity deals, and being large enough to broker good deals on the chips regardless of this. As chips are usualy sold on a X number bases & the larger the X the better the price (prices are confidential). So some of the smaller companies group together to buy the chips as a single entity, & bring the prices down, but these exclusivity deals still exist afaik.
Associate
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It kind of happens with memory chips. Samsung, Hynix etc make the chips, and then sell them to companies who put them on to the pcbs.
3dfx wanted to make their own cards and we all know what happened to them.
I think that the companies just want to concentrate on making cores and not have to worry that much about cards, marketing and RMA stuff.
I think that the companies just want to concentrate on making cores and not have to worry that much about cards, marketing and RMA stuff.
Duel said:The difference is that these are still ATI/nVidia products, but sold under various brands. When people say "hoover" they usually mean vacuum cleaner regardless of the brand at all. I get your point though Frippy.
That would sound logical fornowgain but doesn't account for why this isn't the case for other components such as CPUs.
They do. Think of a graphics card as a whole subsystem, its got a GPU, the board and the memory.
When you but a CPU you only get the CPU from AMD, the motherboard and RAM comes from someone else. Its just with graphics cards the board and memory is fixed.
Duel said:
Motherboards too, asus, abit, MSI, epox, dfi and so on dont make their own chips do they?
A lot of dvd drives are simply the same thing rebranded, so are a lot of cheaper cases. Sometimes chips for soundcards are outsources from other companies as it is cheaper to buy them than to develop them. It is common practice.