BREAKING NEWS! - EVGA will no longer do business with NVIDIA

yeah you read the title right evga is no longer going to be doing business with nvidia we got to talk about this before we get into today's video i want to go and let you know about our new t-shirt design that's dropping because it'd be really weird putting a sponsor on this video no there's no sponsors on this one but uh it's our new dad buds and pc mods shirts kind of pulling together two of my hobbies cars and dad mods don't make me start reviewing dad mods i'll do it starting with mine okay so i've got my computer up right here if you're wondering um these are just basically notes that i've taken during a meeting that we recently had with evga so can i give you a little bit of a background ebj has been in the gpu market and industry since 1999 well the company's been around since 1999. um just about as long as nvidia itself has been around in fact nvidia and evga partnered up very early on in the whole pre-voodoo era and 3dfx era of graphics cards so to say that this is not like kind of big news for the industry is gonna be it's interesting i'm gonna i'm gonna do the best i can i started the bullet points and stuff i put down here sort of have a flow to it i'm trying to make this video too long but i'm sure there's a lot of you that have a lot of questions how does it affect you as a consumer how does it affect you as an existing customer and i'm gonna try and cover all of that today um we were i say weeks there was a few of us that were invited to a um very i want to say secret meeting it wasn't a secret i mean obviously this there was an embargo regarding when we could make this announcement and you'll see some other channels that have talked about it we invited this meeting and we had no idea what it was about it was i personally started speculating it was very like no cameras no recording no nothing it was it was very like are we going to the white house like i don't know what's happening right and so i had this speculation i thought well maybe evgas are making the amd graphics card because we've seen evga now make amd motherboards so what are we going to see a title is what is what we were seeing which was complete blindside no idea this was coming announcement that evga will not be making 40 series graphics cards or any subsequent graphics cards after that as ebga is fully breaking its business partnership with nvidia now as we move forward in this it's important to note that this was a direct meeting with the ceo of ebga uh his name is andrew by the way and i'll probably refer to him as andrew mostly because i don't want to mutilate his last name it was a fairly long meeting we talked about a lot of things and i feel like a lot of it turned into like almost trying to convince him not to do this but again so the bullet points and the notes and stuff that i have here uh i'm going to just kind of go through them because i want to make sure that the information is accurate and stuff but it's also important to note that this is as we're reporting this there's gonna be a lot of allegedly and there's gonna be a lot of like according to and stuff like that because i'm not privy to first-hand knowledge this is all second and third hand knowledge as portrayed by evga but basically the relationship has been strained between nvidia and evga and side note this isn't anything that was mentioned there this is not the first time i've heard this this is not the first time i've had aibs open up with certain meetings saying man i'll tell you what it is rough oh yeah it's a rough market yeah it's a rough market yeah of course but it's rough being a partner of nvidia the reason for that is nvidia is very very strict with how they operate the programs by the programs i mean being an aib or an add-in board partner evga and any other aib is in the business of manufacturing and selling the graphics cards that they design using nvidia's um architecture design but nvidia is very strong armed in what the brands are allowed to do do you remember the old days when we would see like the crazy dual graphics boards where you'd see like the mars card i think it was like the 960 mars or something like that from asus where we'd see like these crazy dual chip designs and stuff nvidia never sanctioned any of that sort of stuff in fact nvidia is the one that's put a stop to all of that sort of custom stuff remember when graphics card cup manufacturers outside of the actual manufacturer themselves where the aibs were able to add ram and they were able to add versions of their own that had more ram to again nvidia putting a stop to all of that nvidia has very very tight control over the perimeters at which the board partners were able to operate within and when that happened as far as i'm concerned that sort of was the death of the enthusiast market if you will when enthusiasts running these companies and designing this stuff were able to kind of go hey wouldn't it be cool if we and then they would do it well nvidia doesn't allow that anymore um and so that's why you've seen a lot of these really custom i might say custom i don't mean like kingpin yes kingpin is a custom power delivery design and such but in terms of the core design and you know the ram layout and all that's all very tied down and and strict within the nvidia partner program when you'd see these crazy custom boards that had dual gpu designs and and stacked boards remember remember when they tried to come up when i say they i mean just custom designers would come up with a stacked pcb whereas essentially two graphics cards that were had to interconnect and then one pcie you saw that crazy stuff that you'd try and think would have fun and innovate and move the market forward and all of that was shut down by nvidia and that's not evga saying that that's just what i know from the decade i've been doing this and having a lot of off the record conversations with different people and just how difficult it's been to be an nvidia partner evj also sharing that sediment very difficult to be an nvidia partner what do i mean by that when you're in the business of creating graphics cards on the on the back of another company being nvidia in this case the aibs were often the last to know when they were being launched the last to know what they were going to cost the last to know what basically anything genson was going to get on stage and say i cannot tell you how many times i've had conversations with market reps that told me they found out the same time we did now you would think a company like evga would be some of the first to know i can tell you right now more often than not we as reviewers get the drivers before the aibs do they have functioning working cards because they have schematics they're working within functionally they work but in terms of being able to like see their true potential and it's the software that requires to unlock that the drivers and such they don't even have access to them i'm about to knock that over they don't even have access to them it's i can't tell you how many times it's been like hey do you have a driver it's like well i have a press driver and it's like okay because we have nothing and that's crazy that's that's absolutely crazy to me to think that nvidia would put partners that in the dark and i think it's about leak protection leak control honestly i think that's what the reason is and when they control the drivers and such by getting them to the press partners um like us and linus and gamers nexus and paul and kyle and harvard canucks and all of them they at least know what they okay moving forward from here there's probably gonna be some leaks that are make their way out but it's in a it's a within a very controlled environment where it's very close to to launch whereas the aibs are building boards probably months ahead of time so it's a it's about i'm not knock this over i swear it's about leak control of no doubt but imagine trying to run your business on that because the other thing that was an unknown is what's the allocation going to be remember nvidia has its partners and it has to divvy up the stuff in this case the course amongst its partners now you're going to have your favorites you're going to have your high performers the the brands that sell more in certain markets and you're going to have your underperformers maybe brands that don't sell as much you never know exactly what you're going to get especially over the last couple of years with how constrained things were imagine trying to run a business on on not knowing what you're going to have when you're going to have it and even what's it going to cost so you can imagine if you don't know how much of it you're getting how can you put together a business plan to keep your business running now one of the things you have to understand too um a it's a very competitive market you've got a lot of brands out there making graphics cards and they're all competing and so one of the things that you have to do is you have to try and price position yourself so that you can still stay afloat and make ends meet in terms of operating costs your company but there's not a lot of margin in graphics cards i don't think a lot of people realize that when it comes to the actual profit margins of graphics it's very low if you are at aib let's say evga and you're selling on amazon and you're selling at best buy and you're selling at micro center and you're selling at what other i guess new egg or whatever other retailers there are there's a lot of time and money and cost and effort in advertising that goes into each one of those outlets and each one of those outlets get a piece of the cost too so you see your margin just gets thinner and thinner and thinner that's the cost of doing business but what happens when the company which you're partnered with starts undercutting you what do you do then because that's exactly what nvidia is doing right now and this is one of the principles that evga is basing its decision upon is that nvidia is now competing with its own partners now this is something that myself and other reviewers were concerned about back in 2016 when we were in austin texas for the pascal launch when they first launched the very first founders edition card or the 10 series we were very concerned like what does this mean for their partners does this mean nvidia is now doing business against the people they're selling the core to which seemed like a very interesting conflict of interest if i were a board partner i'd be kind of concerned if the person i'm buying gpus and by gpus i mean the core from is now in business competing with me what is what is that what does that relationship look like when the pascal launch happened there was a a lot of brands like reviewers and other written articles and tons of people including myself said hey this is scary does it mean nvidia is trying to kind of eventually cut out the aib and become their own retailer and basically nvidia responded to a lot of us saying you guys don't know what you're talking about these are very limited boards they're very limited runs we're not going to be doing this full time well in cologne germany and 20 series came around with again with the founders edition that was available full time when that showed nvidia's true colors about even being honest came out and showed that nvidia was absolutely in business against the aibs from that moment forward now the founder's edition cards typically were the ones that were at quote-unquote msrp i'll take that let me rewind the founders edition cards back in 10 series were 100 more than msrp but 20 series came around and that was when msrp and founders cost became the same typically msrp has the lowest cost so now as a board partner you're in a very precarious position of trying to create a board that is quote unquote better because you want to improve upon the design typically it was cooling and power delivery but how are you going to do that against a company that can always build the board cheaper than you because there is no relate there is no sales to themself they have the cost of producing the product the gpu core and that that it can now manufacture against and say hey we just have the cost of materials and manufacturing it whereas they don't have any markup to themselves if that makes sense so they can always build it cheaper than aibs well with all the cost reductions and cost slashing happening right now with graphics cards this is as of today i'm filming this video this is a an image taken from best buy you can see that right now 3090 ti founders edition is for 1099 that is 900 below the msrp of 1 999 pretty good deal i think most people would agree given if the two thousand dollars was ever actually worth it this is the price of the further win three card which is currently showing unavailable now you know why and we'll explain that supply chain in the next section of this video 300 or 399 300 difference the reason for that is the fact that there's already a loss i i asked evg i said is there a loss at that price does 1 399 dollars to manufacture a 3090 ti for the win3 lose you money and the answer was yes because all of this price slashing every gpu sold right now is a loss for the aibs is 1099 a loss for eve or for nvidia i don't know i don't know what their cost to produce the card is but this is a direct example of again what evga is explaining an undermining a disrespect a non-mutual agreement strong-arm tactics play ball by nvidia's rules or they're gonna screw you and then they end up screwing you anyway with pricing like this because it is the cheapest 30 series 3090 ti on the market period in terms of compared to the aibs so nvidia being in the precarious position of obviously having a lot of 30 series to off sale will absolutely smack the face of all their partners just to get back some of that cost so whereas evga's principles kind of stand is all of those things have already explained not knowing when the product is coming when it's going to launch how much is it going to cost when's it going to be available not even getting drivers before reviewers it's kind of like a bad relationship that you finally just had enough of we specifically asked evga okay what does this mean then what's the future of evga because now it sounds like one maybe they should partner up with another brand amd intel sell the company what's the future evga not selling graphics cards they're just e at that point there's no more vga evga is super extreme video graphics adapter right so that's what e was it was always extreme not just extreme extremely not gonna be selling graphics cards anymore so the andrew said he has zero interest in selling the company he will not be selling the company at all i mean apparently they own outright the building that they're in their overhead costs are very low it's not like it's gonna be a sinking ship or anything this is a very calculated decision they've decided to make where apparently allegedly the terrible relationship and strained relationship that exists between nvidia and evga is just not feasible anymore and that's the that's the takeaway from the meeting andrea's fear if he were to sell the company is what does the future leadership of the company do do they just then start making mediocre product do they just start making bad decisions that no longer go with the last 22 years of of principle and philosophy within the company are because you have to admit like there's no brand i can mention where people don't have a problem with it so that aside evga has had one of the best warranty programs the step up program standing by their product us-based repair centers look you asked anyone about ebj's warranty and rma process you're going to find outliers where people that are that have had problems that existed every company but overall overall it's been positive and i feel like the industry's losing that and that really sort of sucks so what does this mean now if you're a current 30 series owner that's still under warranty or let's just say you just literally today you bought a 30 series evga card and you've got a three year warranty or whatever the warranty is on that card and you're like crap what does that mean for my warranty i asked that question specifically there's a formula that they use because they have they have massive amounts of data of what are the what are the the yields what are the failure rates you know what what's the likelihood that you're going to have to warranty a product and how much of it are you gonna have to warranty they will continue selling 30 series cards that they currently have in inventory until they're gone and however long that lasts and depend on again what's pricing going to do what's availability of 40 series going to look like how many people are just going to say screw 40 series what's the price so they could be gone very very soon or it could take some time depending on what that that backlog or pipeline looks like of inventory that they have sitting there i can tell you that apparently right now they don't have any 30 series coming in from nvidia right now because nvidia is obviously aware of all of this it's not like we're notifying nvidia of this breakup they already know that's why you know you're not going to see evga's name on any 40 series stuff so it's important that you guys if you're waiting for 40 series evga stuff it's not coming so anyway 30 series there's a there you have a formula that they're going to be holding back product to have on hand specifically for warranty issues so your rma is still good your warranty is still good hopefully the formula is accurate enough to where let's say two years and 10 months from now you have a 30 90 that dies they'll have a warranty replacement for you or something i hope it doesn't turn into more there are more rmas than there are backlog slash reserves i really hope they're on the wall on that one because that can turn into a really ugly situation but the future of evga looks like they're going to really focus on their other arms remember evga is not just graphics they've got power supplies evj is very passionate about its power supplies it really the avga as a brand really wants to focus on power delivery and hey that might be a better industry if 40 series demands what we're seeing and might demand in terms of power delivery that might be a smart move there's gonna be a lot of people need to upgrade their power supplies with 40 series we already know that um they've got their peripherals like keyboards and mice and the very small portion of the peripherals though is like capture cards maybe for some of the sound cards for a little while there and motherboards motherboards is also not a huge market for them but they do have still are going to have intel motherboards amd motherboards which we've already mentioned dark kingpin all that sort of stuff but to kind of recap this i feel like the industry is unfortunately losing a very important key player in the market when it comes to how much evga really stood by its product i mean i've been a customer of evga since like 2003 nearly 20 years so to me it's like i know i left that meeting which ended up lasting almost four hours going man why do i feel like i just went through like a divorce mediation it was really weird i've never been through divorce mediation by the way i'm still married you know so i'm only married one time but never i just imagine that's what it would feel like just emotionally like just drained of going okay now we gotta comprehend and process and i also decompose this info whatever poop it out into this video for you guys to kind of understand but uh it kind of makes um it makes me feel bad for the industry because the step-up program no other brands did anything like the step-up program we had 90 days where you bought a graphics card and there was something new that came out you wanted to upgrade it you could get like full cost of that card back towards a new card like no other brand ever did anything like that it was huge and evga undoubtedly sold like the most product in north america out of any brand it's it's weird it's weird to think that there there won't be on retail shelves anywhere 40 series evga cards which are always a huge partner to me it feels like if nvidia really valued this relationship they would have never let it get to this point but it's if the takeaway from this meeting was that the leadership didn't value it or the they didn't they didn't hold the same value of this relationship that evga did and it became allegedly very one-sided very controlling borderline abusive it sounds like and and i'm i'm using the term abusive they didn't say that that's the term i'm using based on just off the record anonymous discussions i've had with other people in the industry of what it's like to work with that brand but you know what if nvidia is really working towards the model of being their own brand selling their cards only maybe they don't care you know maybe at the end of the day this is a sigh of relief for them because there's that many more cores they have to build their own cards and to spread out amongst allocation because basically this is kind of like you know that many gpu cores are now going to be available to other aibs who might now be rejoicing because the allocation could go up but i think it's a it's a bad move to ever think it's okay to lose a partner especially one as large and it's been around as long as nvidia has been around that's going to have a ripple through the industry is it going to be is it going to affect the bottom line of anyone is it going to affect you as a consumer only time will tell on that one so anyway there you go that's the crazy news if you've if you've got a 30 series graphics card or you're planning on buying one i think a lot of people i think people might honestly be shopping for one right now too saying hey i kind of want one of the last hurrahs of evga you never know that would be scary because again you really have to hope that they're doing the logistics side of things properly to have a card on hand if your warranty were to or your card were to fail need to rma this 3090 ti right here which we've only used for the review now has a little bit more sentimental value i guess because i mean i've never hid the fact that i'm kind of an evga fanboy i've always been fair in my reviews i've called them out when they've had problems remember with the the 10 that's what this card is right here this is actually a dead 1080. this is a gtx 1080 that suffered the vrm failure problems where the screens would just go black and the fans would go 100 anytime you went into 3d gaming this is a bad card i've always been a bit of a fanboy of theirs and i i feel like kind of sad now i just had to be a regular fanboy of all graphics and not just any one brand anyway there you go guys i don't know what to say beyond the end of an era 22 years of graphics comes to an end in 2022

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 1,361,219

Keywords: evga, evga news, evga not making 40 series, evga 40 series, nvidia, evga qutting nvidia, evga not making gpus anymore

Id: 12Hcbx33Rb4

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 16 2022