It was rumored back in January but quickly Debunked, but now it seems it might be official: XFX claims they will no longer offer NVidia graphics cards, going AMD only.
XFX told us earlier that as of this day, they officially stop selling any Nvidia cards. This is a direct action after Nvidia’s decision to de-authorise XFX from approved partner list. The decision to stop working with Nvidia doesn’t surprise us as Nvidia simply didn’t send any Fermi chips to XFX and they were encouraging channel partners not to work with XFX, and therefore XFX simply could not sell enough Nvidia cards.
Several reports claim a bit of a pissing match between NVidia and XFX over XFX’s recent decision to start selling AMD product. They claim NVidia began witholding Fermi chips to strongarm them, and eventual delisted them from the ‘approved partner list’. Seems they just got tired of fighting and now they’re going AMD only.
However, didn’t XFX release a GTX480 and 470 back in March? These are Fermi chips, so how’ld that happen?
I’m not sure how much market share XFX had anyway, as EVGA is NVidia’s primary European supplier anyway (for Quadro & Tesla cards, anyway). No doubt this will offer a little bump to AMD’s bottom line in the short-term, but I think XFX will regret it in the long term.
Anyway…?
As someone with first-hand knowlege of these business partnerships, it was easy to see what happened and it IS NOT XFX’s fault. Let’s say you made a product and you relied on a supplier for the parts nessisary for you to sell your product. The supplier refused to deliver the product you needed to sell your own products, what do you do?
Well we already seen what they did, they remarketed the same old silicone twice and basically ran out of ways to remarket it. They Adopted the GTS/GTX lines with the same old 8000 series silicone. Then they went to the next step by factory overclocking the same old silicone… still waiting on Fermi. Where do you go with your products when ATI/AMD is crushing you with faster products at better prices? You are basically dead in the water holding inferior silicone and no way to compete.
As I see it, XFX really had no choice but to turn to the competition. You would think that Nvidia would have learned a lesson from another company that did something similar, 3DFx (who Nvidia actually bought-up because of similar issues).
I doubt there is anything to regret for XFX, they were just fired and they try to make it look like a decision on their part.
Besides, they were never considered by reviewers and other sector “experts” as a really relevant brand, as they have been offering lower quality and more expensive products for a while (even in the ATI line, you can see gigabyte offering better, cheaper and cooler alternatives).
The fact that they are unable to provide nvidia products will just diminish their market share even more, while better quality card makers like gigabyte and evga will enjoy their ex-customer’s business.
All in all, Nvidia dropped XFX and XFX is trying to look like they dropped Nvidia (although it is a huge blow to them) – pretty childish indeed.
Maybe they just wanted to take the opportunity to speak to a journalist to be in the news – a big loss to them either way.