ASRock to enter graphics card market as AMD partner

[HEXUS]

Unlikely to alleviate the GPU market shortage, but it is good business for the company.

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[Zhaoman]

Wasn't ASRock focusing purely on the budget segment as an Asus spinoff? They have grown enough recently that there must be a risk of cannabalising Asus sales now or are they completely separate now?

[Percy1983]

I believe they are seperate now and in competition with Asus (and the others of course).

I will say when it comes to motherboards asrock are one of the first I look at these days.

[GinoLatino]

I will say when it comes to motherboards asrock are one of the first I look at these days.

Yeah, me too!

[Sumanji]

Could you guys expand a little on the Gigabyte lapse mentioned in the article please?

[philehidiot]

I think this is just bad for the gaming consumer full stop. One because this means that there will be even fewer GPUs spread between more board partners and thus (whilst real world numbers of available GPUs of a single model will remain the same) apparent scarcity will increase as there will be even more pages full of red "out of stock" on any given website for any given board. Secondly these people have basically said "yep, mining is our market" and so it's quite possible they'll end up making mining tweaked boards to go with their mining mobos which are less suited to gaming and thus decrease the supply further. They're clearly capitalising on mining but with a backup plan most likely in place to just make some gaming cards if the mining bubble bursts before they get to market. Also bear in mind this is a great time to be doing that as, when the mining craze ends, new GPU prices may well readjust to higher than they would otherwise have been with natural inflation. Whilst this may be tempered by the number of 2nd hand boards on ebay, I personally wouldn't touch an ex mining board unless it was majorly cheap and I think that goes for a lot of people who have been into PCs for a while and have fried their fair share of components.

[DanceswithUnix]

I think this is just bad for the gaming consumer full stop. One because this means that there will be even fewer GPUs spread between more board partners and thus (whilst real world numbers of available GPUs of a single model will remain the same) apparent scarcity will increase as there will be even more pages full of red "out of stock" on any given website for any given board. Secondly these people have basically said "yep, mining is our market" and so it's quite possible they'll end up making mining tweaked boards to go with their mining mobos which are less suited to gaming and thus decrease the supply further. They're clearly capitalising on mining but with a backup plan most likely in place to just make some gaming cards if the mining bubble bursts before they get to market. Also bear in mind this is a great time to be doing that as, when the mining craze ends, new GPU prices may well readjust to higher than they would otherwise have been with natural inflation. Whilst this may be tempered by the number of 2nd hand boards on ebay, I personally wouldn't touch an ex mining board unless it was majorly cheap and I think that goes for a lot of people who have been into PCs for a while and have fried their fair share of components.

Possibly true, but there could be a gamer market for "green" graphics cards. Drop 5% performance, save 50W, perhaps fit in a single slot and/or make less fan noise. I don't remember seeing a green edition card since the 9800GTX cards years ago and without mining they seemed quite popular.

[Xlucine]

You can use an overclocking tool to drop the power target for a similar result (and use the baked-in power profiles in vega GPUs)

[darcotech]

This is a good thing. ASRock is really good company. Never had problem with their products.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Possibly true, but there could be a gamer market for "green" graphics cards. Drop 5% performance, save 50W, perhaps fit in a single slot and/or make less fan noise. I don't remember seeing a green edition card since the 9800GTX cards years ago and without mining they seemed quite popular.

You mean the 9800GT Green Edition,right?? It was pretty awesome for the time,to have such performance in a bus powered card!!

[DanceswithUnix]

You mean the 9800GT Green Edition,right?? It was pretty awesome for the time,to have such performance in a bus powered card!!

That's the one. Graphics card models typed in haste without googling can be slightly out, but I figured it was a memorable enough card people would know what I meant

[persimmon]

Yeah but maybe they are thinking long term , and the whole budget gamer card market is disappearing fast. The existing 2200g and 2400g are already competent performers and the next go round (maybe 1yr=) should raise the bar enough so that 1080p gaming on an apu will be fully playable.
That leaves only hard core gamers who will bother with the expense and power of a disctete card. Thus Both amd and Nvida lose a big chunk of gfx card sales. Intel loses out bigly to amd in the budget cpu market, and to Nvidia in the Machine Learning market. Asrock have always been good imo.

[DanceswithUnix]

Yeah but maybe they are thinking long term , and the whole budget gamer card market is disappearing fast. The existing 2200g and 2400g are already competent performers and the next go round (maybe 1yr=) should raise the bar enough so that 1080p gaming on an apu will be fully playable.
That leaves only hard core gamers who will bother with the expense and power of a disctete card. Thus Both amd and Nvida lose a big chunk of gfx card sales. Intel loses out bigly to amd in the budget cpu market, and to Nvidia in the Machine Learning market. Asrock have always been good imo.

It sounds like they are aiming for laptop style MSM format cards as they use those in existing SFF PC products. Sounds plausible.