One eagle-eyed shopper found an interesting discovery at their local Best Buy: It seems NVidia has taken their previous Quadro offerings and extended the self-manufacturing process into the GeForce line. Historically, the GeForce product line was manufactured by 3rd parties like EVGA, BFG, and many others. Apparently NVidia has decided to go head-to-head against them.
HardOCP has discovered Foxconn will be responsible for building these perfectly generic GeForces and NVIDIA is promising a pretty generous three-year warranty to go with their luxurious packaging. The company’s official response to these revelations has been to say that Best Buy will be the only place the own-brand cards can be purchased and that the effort is intended as a “complement” to products from its partners.
Of course, you can see from the pics that it’s a pretty baseline offering. None of the “free games” or other junk (that most people toss anyway), and probably none of the fancy bells & whistles that make some of the other offerings attractive. In particular would be some of the nicer monitoring and overclocking tools available by companies like BFG and EVGA.
Only time will tell how their other vendors will react to this ‘invasion’ of their territory.
via NVIDIA starts selling own-brand GPUs at Best Buy, AIB partners left befuddled — Engadget.
