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Comment by themitigating | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia only sets a MSRP not the selling price which the manufacturer sets.

That's not true. NVIDIA sets a min and max price range you can sell at (both to board partners AND to retail partners). LTT has talked about it at length in the past, including on last week's WAN Show. It was also cited by EVGA last week as one of the reasons they opted to stop selling GPUs.

Han told the YouTubers that NVIDIA had stopped treating EVGA as a true partner over the years despite their history. https://www.engadget.com/evga-is-leaving-the-gpu-market-and-...

1.NVIDIA had allegedly stopped informing EVGA about new product announcements and important information, such as suggested retail pricing and availability

2.NVIDIA's first-party Founders Edition cards undercut the prices of their counterparts from EVGA and other partners, forcing the vendors to mark down their prices.

Do you have a source?

Nvidia literally mandates the pricing their "partners" can sell each card ( it's an interval )

It's widely known Nvidia is a bitch to work with. It has been "fine" because Nvidia was pretty much the only game in town and because of Bitcoin/Covid/floods/locusts/etc the prices have been ridiculous for years and everybody made their sweet money, now things are starting to become sane and the usual crocodiles are starting to cry..

I don't feel pity for anyone, everybody other the the final real consumer made a lot of money.

> I don't feel pity for anyone, everybody other the the final real consumer made a lot of money.

And most of the final real consumers just lost out on inexpensively running Minecraft shaders in 4K or whatever, so eh, life moves on.

I heard in the recent coverage of EVGA ending their partnership with NVIDIA and pulling out of the GPU market that NVIDIA not only sets the MSRP, they also set floor and ceiling for the selling prices.

Also, EVGA CEO claimed that it wouldn't be feasible compete with NVIDIA's pricing for Founder's Edition cards, which are usually cheaper.

Sure, NVIDIA sets an MSRP, but that MSRP is a sticker price given to consumers and not representative of what the manufacturers pay for the chips themselves. Manufacturers need to make somewhat of a profit, but NVIDIA has encroached on this profit from its manufacturers since the 10-series came out. JayzTwoCents on YouTube recently discussed this while reporting on a meeting he had with EVGA's CEO about EVGA's recent break with NVIDIA [1].

When the 10-series came about, NVIDIA launched the a limited run of the founder's edition graphics cards at $100 above MSRP. Before the 10-series graphics cards, NVIDIA didn't sell cards themselves and went out of its way to make this seem as if this was a limited edition sort of product. Then the 20-series came out with a continuous run of founder's edition cards which were priced at MSRP, directly competing with their previous board partners.

Tie this along with the previous attempts to strongarm manufacturers via GPP and chip supply allocations, and I tend to give the gift of charity to the manufacturers and not NVIDIA.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12Hcbx33Rb4&t=61s

I love this alt-history, because the contemporary view at the time was that the 10-series MSRP was "fake", that it was impossible to find cards under the $700 MSRP, and that the whole thing was a scheme from NVIDIA to market a lower number than you could pay in practice and upcharge for the blower cooler.

Partner cards were stacking up in the $725-800 range for 6 months after launch, so they came in above the MSRP, which people justified because they were "premium cards". Very few vendors offered any products at the actual MSRP, EVGA had one that was "only" $20 above MSRP and Zotac had something similar and those two low-cost models were impossible to find for a long time.

Now it has gone from "NVIDIA wants to upcharge you for a blower cooler" and it's a dastardly plan from NVIDIA to undercut partners.

everyone is real riled up by that EVGA ceo's tantrum but even GN told you to take it with a grain of salt, and other board partners have confirmed that in the last 2 years they've been running 10x their usual profits due to mining. The EVGA ceo spinning it like partners been losing hundreds of dollars per card for years now is false and untrue. Being a partner is generally around 10% margin and even a smaller partner like EVGA should be able to get around 5%. Losing hundreds of dollars per card is something that happened in like, the last month, partners made very healthy margins selling into the mining boom, and the CEO is being disingenuous by pretending that they've lost a bunch of money on it/are running super low margins. Mining was great for margins.

https://www.igorslab.de/en/evga-pulls-the-plug-with-loud-ban...

Given the recent evga split, this is actually not the case. Nvidia has contracts to provide them with a great deal of control over end user pricing.

The point is MSRP used to be a relatively safe assumption of selling price (AFAIK it also has been for quite a while), and now it's way lower than what we actually end up paying.

Nvidia does set the price for Founders Edition cards sold under their own name though, although they only account for a small part of the overall card supply.

Nvidia sets the price for all cards that use their chips as part of their OEM agreements. Partners used to get around this by doing things such as adding more memory, OC, and other features which allowed them to charge a premium in those cases. Nvidia has clamped own on this over the years. It's gotten so bad that EVGA famously stopped all GPU development this year in reaction to the declining margins and increasing hostility from Nvidia.

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