A hot potato: The relationship between Nvidia and one of its top board partners seems to have reached a breaking point. EVGA won’t produce RTX 40 series GPUs, effectively exiting the graphics card market entirely. Possibly heralding the end of EVGA, the decision could bring closer attention to the business interactions between GPU makers and board partners.
In an exclusive report, EVGA told Gamers Nexus that it won’t sell Nvidia graphics cards after the RTX 30 series. The company will keep supporting current customers’ warranties but expects to sell through its remaining inventory by the end of 2022.
A primary reason for the falling out is that Nvidia’s Founders Edition 30 series GPUs have undercut EVGA’s variants of those cards, especially as Nvidia recently made significant price cuts to clear stock.
GPU makers boosted supply in response to the crypto boom, but then the crash and the more recent Ethereum merge have left them struggling to get rid of unsold stock, while competing with the deluge of used cards as they prepare to launch a new generation. Board manufacturers like EVGA say they can’t absorb these shocks the way Nvidia can, and EVGA says it is losing hundreds of dollars on every RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 sold.
The board partner also accuses Nvidia of a lack of communication regarding MSRP when launching new GPUs. EVGA doesn’t know the final price it will sell cards for until Nvidia announces the suggested pricing to the public. The GPU maker also enforces price floors and ceilings, restricting EVGA’s ability to price its variants according to how it customizes overclocking or cooling systems.
Currently, EVGA calls itself Nvidia’s #1 authorized partner in US and UK graphics card sales, and Nvidia GPUs make up about three-quarters of EVGA’s gross revenue. Furthermore, the company doesn’t sell AMD or Intel cards and doesn’t intend to after splitting with Nvidia. Power supplies comprise most of the rest of EVGA’s business, but it’s hard to imagine what the company will look like in the coming year or two without GeForce products.
The decision to leave the GPU business didn’t come suddenly or recently. EVGA says they notified Nvidia in April after trying to renegotiate the partnership several times. EVGA CEO and founder Andrew Han said the decision to leave Nvidia was easy, and that working with the company was hard. Han called the choice a matter of principle, not money.
Han says he has no intention of selling EVGA, worrying investors would change its identity and culture. The company also doesn’t want to lay anyone off but that seems almost inevitable if it abandoned its main source of revenue.