I don’t mean AMD vs Nvidia, I mean Sapphire, Asus, Zotac, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI etc.
Are there some which have better or worse reputations?
Are there specialties?
GPUs are a specialized processor, and I would guess that some enormous percentage of them are made by AMD/ATi, Nvidia or Intel.
Video cards using GPUs, almost wholly those from Nvidia and AMD, are built almost entirely to the system specs issued by the chipmakers, and there is very little difference between, say, an Nvidia 770 card by EVGA and one by ASUS. Each maker follows the “reference model” as far as they care to, which can be 100%, or deviates in ways they think improve their market position - by trading power settings for performance, or opening overclocking settings to the user, or adding extra cooling, or varying the amount of VRAM.
You pretty much have to get into the cheap end, where things are done to save nickels at the expense of more standard engineering, or into the uber-competitive gaming end, where better components, more components, opened-up features and voodoo tweaks are applied without much regard to cost - you have to get to these extremes before the boards from various makers differ much. It’s much easier, much cheaper and much more sensible to follow the chipmaker’s reference design for the vast mid-market.
That said, each maker has strengths and weaknesses, and the best thing to do is choose the GPU you want and read as many reviews of cards using that chip as you can. There are variations in performance, cooling, power, and reliability even between the nearly-identical designs.
I tend to go for EVGA over everyone else, especially after they swapped a red-speckling 680 for a shiny new 770… after two years.
For the most part, the builds and GPUs are reference designs and comparable to one another. You might have some manufacturers who overclock it out of the box. Performance-wise, they’re probably within 5% or so of each other. Looking at some 3DMark scores for different R9 280X cards, for example, the spread is between 2%-6% depending on the test.
There’s some differences in things like fan/cooler quality so some might run a little hotter than others. Sapphire seems to enjoy adding extra fans such as its Tri-X AMD cards. The other major difference is warranties. EVGA has a (limited) lifetime warranty, for example.
My last three AMD cards were all Sapphires but that was more coincidence than conscious choice. They just came in at a good price when I was in the market to upgrade and I trust the brand.
Reference designs are reference designs. Doesn’t matter who the OEM is.
The best three OEMs for non-reference designs are Gigabyte, MSI, and Asus (probably in that order, but all three are a tier above.) Non-reference designs usually means a custom heatsink design, but the order is the same for non-reference PCBs as well.
Asus have a poor reputation when it comes to RMA with their motherboards; I can’t speak for their graphics card side.