I remember articles on the 3000 series where manufacturers were reporting that Nvidia was selling the chips themselves at higher price than the MSRP for the entire card. So ye, take that with a scoop of salt =P
https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/TW/ROCO/6150/financia...
https://www.igorslab.de/en/evga-pulls-the-plug-with-loud-ban...
Some people really do be seeing EVGA selling a 2080 Ti for $949 and Zotac for $999 and then argue the other partners magically can’t afford to sell for less than $1400. Or think that anything has changed since then.
We call them… gamers.
It’s honestly crazy to see techies embracing the digital-car-dealership model over the Tesla model. You really really want to fight against scalper-bots instead of just putting in an order on Steam for a 3060 Ti at MSRP and having it come in a month or two?
And then everyone acts like rma is only possible with partners… bruh I can rma a cpu to AMD or Intel just fine without a middleman involved.
Unironically you are buying into smoothtalk from brylcreemed CEOs who were scalping 3080s in their first-party webstores for triple MSRP and even scalping directly to Ebay (lol MSI) literally weeks before their media tour, they came crying directly after prices crashed as part of a media push to get NVIDIA to refund their excess mining orders. Gamers are the most credulous rubes on the planet, NVIDIA and EVGA can agree on that much.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/j6idky/msi_scalpi...
and conversely - partners love what NVIDIA is doing with the 30-series price fixing right now! Their margins on 30-series are great, they're not losing money on deep discounts like they are with RDNA2 products. That's not good for consumers, but hey, somehow they've convinced consumers they're on their side instead of a middleman with their hand out.
Again, as you can see from the 2080 Ti example, MSRP isn't "losing money" territory, in fact they can probably even go a bit under MSRP (EVGA knocked another 5% off), they just don't like it, at 5% under MSRP EVGA was probably running actual zero margin. It's when prices go 30-50% under MSRP that they lose money. And NVIDIA is doing a great job with 30-series keeping prices at or above MSRPs and making sure nobody breaks ranks and cuts prices. Trusts are super effective at maintaining margins, and consumers love making sure partners get their margins, right?
So.. during a year of highly inflated GPU prices, GPU vendors who sold everything far above MSRP made a bunch of money?
No shit, Sherlock. What does that have to do with Nvidia's well known, well sourced MSRP games?
And since you're so focused on the 30xx series, reminder that the MSRP of the 3070 was $500 and even now at the end of the product life it's still slim pickings below $600. 3080's MSRP was also $700. But again, even now at EOL there's very little at that price point. The major brands are all $900+
I provided actual sources and numbers here, "well-known, well-sourced" is just "trust me bro" if you don't provide those sources.
Again: 2080 Ti is a great example of how those claims aren't really true. There was nothing stopping the other partners from offering MSRP cards just like EVGA and Zotac. They could even have gone under MSRP, just like EVGA.
Partners won't do it because they don't make enough money, not because they lose money. EVGA and Zotac show they're not losing money doing it, they just don't want to.
It's car dealerships whining they're only making 5% on a budget car instead of 15% on a corvette.
So... No, other companies can't do what EVGA did just like EVGA couldn't keep doing what EVGA did. Hence why they basically went bankrupt doing it (rather, they obviously didn't drop 70+% of their revenue if it was a healthy profit margin as you are so insistent on claiming)
Anyway, I'd still love to see your sources, but, if you can't provide any then I think we're done here. I gave you real numbers and you've ignored them several times in favor of supposition and imagination.
EVGA quit because they knew the mining crash was going to lead to a couple of very slow years, just like after the 2018 mining crash. I've already stated my problems with their argument: they made tons of money during the mining boom, and the claims that they were losing money were limited to the deep clearance pricing they had to do after the mining crash.
You have acknowledged most of these individual points but just don't seem to accept the synthesis of the whole: the EVGA guy wasn't really presenting a fair and honest big picture, that's why GN told you to "take him with a big grain of salt" and Igor's Lab's partners said they didn't understand where he was coming from.
This may be difficult, but sometimes individuals will go to media and present a slanted narrative, especially when they have a financial interest in doing so or are generally upset. What the EVGA guy said wasn't really true, or was very narrowly true.
And to be fair, there is a lot to be upset about, NVIDIA definitely is not gracious to the partners. But if they play it right, it's a guaranteed 10% margin on all their sales. 200k cards a week times $500 ASP times 10% margin is quite a bit of money, and that's EVGA alone.