Nvidia also doesn't make the "core" (i.e. the actual chip). TSMC and Samsung make those. Nvidia designs the chip and (usually) creates a reference PCB to show how to make an actual working GPU using that chip you got from e.g. TSMC. Sometimes (especially in more recent years) they also sell that design as "founders" edition. But they don't sell most of their hardware directly to average consumers. Of course they also provide drivers to interface with their chips and tons of libraries for parallel computing that makes the most of their design.

Most people don't realize that Nvidia is much more of a software company than a hardware company. CUDA in particular is like 90% of the reason why they are where they are while AMD and Intel struggle to keep up.

It seems that they have been tightening what they allow their partners to do, which caused EVGA to break away as they were not allowed to deviate too much from the reference design.

That was mostly about Nvidia's pricing. It's basically impossible to compete economically with the founders editions because Nvidia doesn't charge themselves a hefty markup on the chip. That's why their own cards always sell out instantly and then the aftermarket GPU builders can fight to pick up the scraps. The whole idea of the founders edition seems to be to make a quick buck immediately after release. Long term it's much more profitable to sell the chip itself at a price that they would usually sell their entire GPU for.

This years founders edition is what I really want from a GPU. Stop wasting my 2nd PCIe slot because you've made it 3.5/4 slots BIG! It is insane that they are now cooling 575W with two slots in height.

I would suggest getting a case that has a set of inbuilt (typically vertically-oriented) expansion card slots positioned a distance away from the regular expansion card slots, mount your graphics card there, and connect it to the motherboard with a PCI-E riser cable. It's what I did and I kicked myself for not doing it years prior.

I have no experience with PCI-E 5 cables, but I've a PCI-E 4 riser cable from Athena Power that works just fine (and that you can buy right now on Newegg). It doesn't have any special locking mechanism, so I was concerned that it would work its way off of the card or out of the mobo slot... but it has been in place for years now with no problem.

Can you link to an example case and riser cable?

I shouldn't have to link to the cable given that I said "Athena Power" and "Newegg", but sure, here you go. [0] Their Newegg store is here. [1] (They also sell that cable in different lengths.)

The "away from motherboard expansion card slots feature" isn't particularly uncommon on cases. One case that came up with a quick look around is the Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2. [2] I've seen other case manufacturers include this feature, but couldn't be arsed to spend more than a couple of minutes looking around to find more than one example to link to.

Also, there are a few smaller companies out there that make adapters [3] that will screw into a 140mm fan mounting hole and serve as an "away from motherboard" mounting bracket. You would need to remove any grilles from the mounting hole to make use of this for a graphics card.

[0] https://www.newegg.com/athena-power-8-extension-cable-black/...

[1] https://www.newegg.com/Athena-Power/BrandStore/ID-1849

[2] https://phanteks.com/product/enthoo-pro-2-tg

[3] Really, they're usually just machined metal rectangular donuts... calling them "adapters" makes them sound fancier than they are.

Man, things are getting really large and unwieldy with these giant GPUs we have nowadays.

My theory is this is one of the ways nvidia is trying to force ML users to buy the $$$$$ workstation cards.

Can't put four 4090s into your PC if every 4090 is 3.5 slots!

You can do single slot 4090 cards using water cooling, so having enormous coolers is not forcing anyone to buy workstation cards to fit things. Alternatively, there are always cases designed for riser cables.

It is an ever uphill battle to compete with Nvidia as a AIB partner.

Nvidia has internal access to the new card way ahead of time, has aerodynamic and thermodynamic simulators, custom engineered boards full of sensors, plus a team of very talented and well paid engineers for months in order to optimize cooler design.

Meanwhile AIB partners is pretty much kept in the blind until a few months in advance. It is basically impossible for a company like EVGA to exist as they pride themselves in their customer support - the finances just does not make sense.

Which is why EVGA stopped working with Nvidia a few years ago... (probably mentioned elsewhere too).

https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded/artic...

Yeah I should have said design, embarrassingly I used to work in a (fabless) semiconductor company.

Totally agree with the software part. AMD usually designs something in the same ball park as Nvidia, and usually has a better price:performance ratio at many price points. But the software is just too far behind.

AMDs driver software is more featureful and better than NVidia's offerings. GeForce Experience + the settings app combo was awful, the Nvidia App is just copying some homework, and integrating MSI Afterburner's freeware.

But the business software stack was, yes, best in class. But it's not so for the consumer!

I think they mean CUDA

I've bought multiple founders editions cards from the nvidia store directly. Did they stop doing that recently?

They still make reference founders editions. They sell them at Best Buy though, not directly.

Reference cards make up the vast minority of cards for a specific generation though. I looked for numbers and could not find them but they tend to be the Goldilocks of cards if you can grab one because they sell at msrp IIRC.

Yep, I scored a 3070 Founder's at launch and was very lucky, watching other people pay up to the MSRP of the 3090 to get one from elsewhere.

Didn't Nvidia piss of some of their board partners at some point. I think EVGA stopped making Nvidia based graphics cards because of poor behavior on Nvidia part?

Also aren't most of the business cards made by Nvidia directly... or at least Nvidia branded?

The founders edition ones that I had were not great gpus. They were both under cooled and over cooled. They had one squirrel cage style blower that was quite loud and powerful and ran bascially at no speed or full blast. But being that it only had the one airpath and one fan it got overwhelmed by dust or if that blower fan had issues the gpu over heated. The consumer / 3rd party made ones usually have multiple fans at lower speeds larger diameter, multiple flow paths, and more control. TL;DR they were better designed, nvidia took the data center ram as much air as you can in there approach which isn't great for your home pc.

Founders cards being worse than board partner models hasn't been true in like 8 years. They switched to dual axial rather than a single blower fan with the 20 series, which made the value of board partner models hard to justify.

Since then, Nvidia is locked in a very strange card war with their board partners, because Nvidia has all the juicy inside details on their own chips which they can just not give the same treatment to their partners, stacking the deck for themselves.

Also, the reason why blowers are bad is because the design can't really take advantage of a whole lot of surface area offered by the fins. There's often zero heat pipes spreading the heat evenly in all directions, allowing a hot spot to form.

good to know, I have a 980gtx, I had to rma it after a summer of overheating. good to know they've gotten better on their own cards.

  it's not worth it.

I wonder how much "it's not worth it". Surely it should have been at all profitable? (a honest question)