6 ms·

Nvidia (and AMD) make the "core", but they don't make a "full" graphics card. Or at least they don't mass produce them, I think Nvidia tried it with their "foun

• SirMaster 2y ago
  They still make reference founders editions. They sell them at Best Buy though, not directly.
  • infecto 2y ago
    Reference cards make up the vast minority of cards for a specific generation though. I looked for numbers and could not find them but they tend to be the Goldilocks of cards if you can grab one because they sell at msrp IIRC.
    • devmor 2y ago
      Yep, I scored a 3070 Founder's at launch and was very lucky, watching other people pay up to the MSRP of the 3090 to get one from elsewhere.
• sigmoid10 2y ago
  Nvidia also doesn't make the "core" (i.e. the actual chip). TSMC and Samsung make those. Nvidia designs the chip and (usually) creates a reference PCB to show how to make an actual working GPU using that chip you got from e.g. TSMC. Sometimes (especially in more recent years) they also sell that design as "founders" edition. But they don't sell most of their hardware directly to average consumers. Of course they also provide drivers to interface with their chips and tons of libraries for parallel computing that makes the most of their design. Most people don't realize that Nvidia is much more of a software company than a hardware company. CUDA in particular is like 90% of the reason why they are where they are while AMD and Intel struggle to keep up.
  • doix 2y ago
    Yeah I should have said design, embarrassingly I used to work in a (fabless) semiconductor company. Totally agree with the software part. AMD usually designs something in the same ball park as Nvidia, and usually has a better price:performance ratio at many price points. But the software is just too far behind.
    • automatic6131 2y ago
      AMDs driver software is more featureful and better than NVidia's offerings. GeForce Experience + the settings app combo was awful, the Nvidia App is just copying some homework, and integrating MSI Afterburner's freeware. But the business software stack was, yes, best in class. But it's not so for the consumer!
      • knowitnone 2y ago
        I think they mean CUDA
  • nightski 2y ago
    I've bought multiple founders editions cards from the nvidia store directly. Did they stop doing that recently?
  • themaninthedark 2y ago
    It seems that they have been tightening what they allow their partners to do, which caused EVGA to break away as they were not allowed to deviate too much from the reference design.
    • sigmoid10 2y ago
      That was mostly about Nvidia's pricing. It's basically impossible to compete economically with the founders editions because Nvidia doesn't charge themselves a hefty markup on the chip. That's why their own cards always sell out instantly and then the aftermarket GPU builders can fight to pick up the scraps. The whole idea of the founders edition seems to be to make a quick buck immediately after release. Long term it's much more profitable to sell the chip itself at a price that they would usually sell their entire GPU for.
• mrweasel 2y ago
  Didn't Nvidia piss of some of their board partners at some point. I think EVGA stopped making Nvidia based graphics cards because of poor behavior on Nvidia part? Also aren't most of the business cards made by Nvidia directly... or at least Nvidia branded?
• grogenaut 2y ago
  The founders edition ones that I had were not great gpus. They were both under cooled and over cooled. They had one squirrel cage style blower that was quite loud and powerful and ran bascially at no speed or full blast. But being that it only had the one airpath and one fan it got overwhelmed by dust or if that blower fan had issues the gpu over heated. The consumer / 3rd party made ones usually have multiple fans at lower speeds larger diameter, multiple flow paths, and more control. TL;DR they were better designed, nvidia took the data center ram as much air as you can in there approach which isn't great for your home pc.
  • 6SixTy 2y ago
    Founders cards being worse than board partner models hasn't been true in like 8 years. They switched to dual axial rather than a single blower fan with the 20 series, which made the value of board partner models hard to justify. Since then, Nvidia is locked in a very strange card war with their board partners, because Nvidia has all the juicy inside details on their own chips which they can just not give the same treatment to their partners, stacking the deck for themselves. Also, the reason why blowers are bad is because the design can't really take advantage of a whole lot of surface area offered by the fins. There's often zero heat pipes spreading the heat evenly in all directions, allowing a hot spot to form.
    • grogenaut 2y ago
      good to know, I have a 980gtx, I had to rma it after a summer of overheating. good to know they've gotten better on their own cards.
• orphea 2y ago
  it's not worth it. I wonder how much "it's not worth it". Surely it should have been at all profitable? (a honest question)