EVGA was one of the few companies that didn’t price gouge during the pandemic / crypto shortage. They instead went for a queue system and kept prices relatively modest. That couldn’t have helped.
Hence why my PC has one. It was a good card at a (relatively) decent price.
From what people are saying it sounds like NVidia strictly controlled prices. You could put RGB on your card but they would not let you raise the price.
Would you care to expand that letterism? I can deduce from context that it means a manufacturer of a consumer product containing an Nvidia GPU, but I can’t picture the phrase being used here.
On the other hand, if they sold 1,000 cards through the queue in a week, that’s a thousand cards they got retail pricing for versus selling them to Newegg or Microcenter at wholesale rates.
One issue EVGA raised is one that’s come up here before: Nvidia’s Founders Edition MSRP is a joke. Nvidia would produce a card then sell it at basically cost in order to say “The MSRP on the RTX 3080 is $699” and get positive press/reactions to the price. Then the AIB partners sell their 3080s for $849 and get accused of “scalping” and “price gouging” and “omg, but the MSRP of this card is only $699…” when that was never a realistic price. Nvidia can soak it because they’re primarily in the business of selling GPU chips, not retail video cards, and had distribution down to a single retailer, Best Buy.
Sorry, it’s not an obvious term at all. Add-In Board. Basically all the companies like EVGA, ASUS, Gigabyte, Sapphire, etc who buy GPU chips from Nvidia/AMD then add them to a circuit board with memory and other components to make a finished video card are considered “Add-In Board Partners” or AIB partners.
Now I kind of feel bad that I have a near-new EVGA 3050 sitting in a box in my office.
Speaking of, can you undervolt a video card? I was thinking if I ran it at like 95% or whatever, maybe the fans wouldn’t kick on and so I wouldn’t hear it. It’s twice as fast as the 1050 ti I’m using. If a 95% limiter made it only half again as fast but silent, that would be worth doing. Is that a thing?
I have a gaming laptop that got super hot so I went into windows and capped the CPU at 95%. Worked a treat; now both the laptop and its power brick stay reasonably cool for hours on end while gaming. I don’t know how to do that for video cards, though.
Sure. Just download the appropriate software for your card. I do it all the time with my Zotac card. EVGA uses this:
I wouldn’t bother undervolting, though. Just set the clock rate and/or temperature cap lower.
Well that looks promising, thanks. Maybe I have a fun project to tackle this weekend.
EDIT: In my perfect world, video card fans would be as easily replaceable as case fans. I’d love to toss some bequiet fans on that sucker. I know there is one line of noctua fan video cards, pretty sure from ASUS, but I would only do that if I had noctua fans everywhere else. (My next full build I might go with noctua instead of bequiet.)
Yes. I doubt many people undervolt their 3050s but you can if you want to. Use MSI Afterburner and set a custom voltage curve. And/Or adjust the fan curve and max speed. You can use other software like EVGA’s Precision but Afterburner is universal (not just to MSI cards) and considered the gold standard for this sort of thing.
Some cards, like the 3080, benefit from a mild undervolt because they’re overtuned and run hotter than they need to. Undervolting them slightly actually provides better overall performance because otherwise the chip constantly runs itself hot, thermal throttles until it cools then repeats. Also, some PC builders might undervolt a card to make sure it slides in under the wattage capability of the PSU they’re using.
It’s killing me that my dream card – MSI Gaming X 3070 – is down to $560 when I’ve spent $630 combined on a 1050 ti and a 3050 that I don’t even use because it’s too loud.
That’s what I was going to say- if your 80% is losing money, you want to cut that out ASAP. They may end up a smaller company, but a profitable one.
The other thing is that they may have seen the writing on the wall - crypto mining has ceased to be a thing, and it was likely the lion’s share of their business for the past several years. So they’re looking at an unprofitable line of business, and that same line is about to shrink and be flooded with used late model cards. That’s not a recipe for profitability at all.
Considering the timing of the EVGA announcement and the mushroom-like pop-up of articles proclaiming crypto mining to be dead, I’m leaning toward that being a big part of their decision-making.
Sure- the AMD Adrenalin software even comes with it as a default optimization option for more modern cards. Or not so modern; my 5600XT has that option, and it’s about 3 years old.
For what it’s worth, EVGA supposedly informed Nvidia of their decision back in either April or June (depending on reports). So Nvidia’s had some time to prep and, while the decline of crypto undoubtedly played a part, the ETH merger the other day wasn’t a direct cause (for one thing, the Ethereum people have been teasing the merger for years and backing off each time so no one knew if it would finally happen this time).
At its core, it sounds like Nvidia is just a shitty company to be shackled to and their size/market share had allowed them to impose heavy demands on their business partners. Sort of like reports of Walmart telling suppliers “$2 for this? Hahahah… we’ll give you 89¢ a unit and you either take it or get shut out of Walmart!” I like Nvidia cards on a technicial level and they’ve surpassed AMD per tier in features but I can believe that the company itself is a bear to deal with.