No Nvidia for XFX

[krazy_olie]

ati and nvidia do produce cards, that's what stock cards are, nvidia sells them to partners who stick there own brand stickers on them and stuff them into pretty retail boxes.
This way the partners have something to sell on release and time to develope custom pcb's and coolers.

The list of current nvidia partners is currently
http://www.nvidia.com/object/pf_boardpartners.html
Asus, EVGA, Zotac, MSI, Palit, galaxy, gigabyte and pny
XFX pulled out of nvidia because nvidia was upping the costs of partner status, not because (granted there was probably a falling out too)

yup, selling and producing are very different things

[LuckyNV]

ati and nvidia do produce cards, that's what stock cards are, nvidia sells them to partners who stick there own brand stickers on them and stuff them into pretty retail boxes.
This way the partners have something to sell on release and time to develope custom pcb's and coolers.

The list of current nvidia partners is currently
http://www.nvidia.com/object/pf_boardpartners.html
Asus, EVGA, Zotac, MSI, Palit, galaxy, gigabyte and pny
XFX pulled out of nvidia because nvidia was upping the costs of partner status, not because (granted there was probably a falling out too)

I'm quite sure Nvidia only supplies the core chips (the GPU, any decoding chips etc..) They use TSMC and similar companies to produce all their chips.

AMD have their own fabs to produce chips, I believe they may use TSMC too.

What you probably mean are companies like PC Partner who actually produce the entire card, who then supply it to others who either have specified changes at manufacture or just stick a label on the stock cooler.

So do Nvidia have no exclusive parters now? TBH I don't understand why Nvidia/AMD don't sell reference cards themselves? I mean they design reference PCBs anyway -is it just a cost thing?

If you see that list, there are a number that I can see, EVGA, Palit, Galaxy, PNY, Inno3D and Zotac only produce/supply Nvidia cards.
Some may have a sister company that supplies AMD cards though (Sapphire/Zotac, Force3D/Inno3D)

[watercooled]

Yeah I wasn't sure if any of those were exclusive partners.

I thought it was that way - AMD/Nvidia would supply the chips, possibly cooler plus PCB designs (but not physical PCBs). And yeah TMSC do produce AMD's GPUs, I'm not sure if they produce all of them though.

[krazy_olie]

didn't amd sell off their FABs?

[scaryjim]

didn't amd sell off their FABs?

Yes, and they've never produced their own discreet graphics cards - that's always been the domain of TSMC. They do now produce their own graphics cores on the A-series APUs, which are the first "GPU" they've fabbed themselves (or rather, had GLOBALFOUNDRIES fab for them) - the E and C series APUs were fabbed at TSMC on the 40nm bulk process (and I believe the next batch of E and C are also going to be made by TSMC on a 28nm bulk....)

[watercooled]

Well, kind of - they spawned another company, Global Foundries and still use those fabs for most of their production but it gives both companies the freedom to work with others. I.e. GloFo can produce chips for other fabless companies and AMD can have their chips produced by the likes of TMSC for varying reasons.

[Pob255]

Ok produce might of been a misleading word, but how far back the production chain do you want to go? back to the man who dug up the sand that was used to make the silicon wafers?

Both Ati (sorry I still refuse to call the graphics arm amd) and nvidia do supply finished, unbranded cards, as well as just gpu's, pcb designs and cooler designs, to their partners.

However recently some models have not had reference production runs. although these are mainly the binned chip models eg gtx465 or hd5830 and some of the lower end models as well.
With these models ati/nvidia just ship gpu's and pcb designs which are normally an existing reference pcb design with a couple of minor component changes.