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> And trying to make your own board in that moment, was just an incredible self own.

ATI built their own boards too at the time (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R100_series#/media/File...), so the strategy of wanting to control more of the value chain doesn't sound that misguided to me. Not sure when ATI stopped doing that - was it after they were acquired by AMD in 2006 or before?

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The problem is, they already had a large group of board providers, it was a big market advantage for them.

If you listen to the Computer History Museum interview, many of these providers jumped ship.

Also the bought a board provider that wasn't very successful, and their resulting boards weren't very successful either.

The same article also has another photo of a Creative-branded card. Other card brands also definitely marketed cards with ATI chips. I remember I had a R200-based card from some third-party manufacturer. ATI and Nvidia also had reference cards but I don't know if those ended up being sold in the mass market or not.

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