Author: Michael Crider / Source: reviewgeek.com
When you shop for a graphics card, most of the time you’ll settle on a specific model you want, then look for the best price—but you’ll find that multiple manufacturers make the same model. Do the differences between them matter?
Why Are There Different Manufacturers, Anyway?
It’s an odd situation—almost like if you went shopping for an F-150 pickup truck, and the salesperson asked you if you wanted the Ford, Chevy, or Dodge version. For example, a quick search for a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 card on Newegg reveals models made by EVGA, MSI, Zotac, ASUS, and Gigabyte—all on the first page! ATI Radeon graphics cards have a similar variety of suppliers. But within the same specific card design, pretty much all of them have the same capabilities. What gives?
The reason is the somewhat unique business-to-business relationships in the GPU market. You see, while NVIDIA and ATI sell their chips directly to electronics manufacturers for inclusion in all sorts of stuff, from laptop and desktop computers to game consoles, mobile phones, and even cars, they also sell to third-party graphics card manufacturers like EVGA or Sapphire.
These third-party companies take the GPU chips and boards, package them with the necessary extra parts like video ports, coolers, and plastic cases, and then sell them to consumers at retailers like Amazon and Newegg.
There doesn’t necessarily need to be a “middleman” seller—NVIDIA’s “Founder’s Edition” cards are manufactured by NVIDIA itself (or more likely a partner that doesn’t brand its own cards) and sold direct. But the GPU designer/manufacturer/retailer relationship has been going strong since the 1990s, and it looks like it’s going to be the status quo for the foreseeable future.
What’s The Difference Between Manufacturers’ Cards?
So all the different card manufacturers get the GPUs from the same place, NVIDIA and ATI. But when selling to consumers, you need to differentiate your product, either on price or on features. There isn’t a lot of wiggle room in the retail prices. If one company goes significantly lower than the others, everyone tends to follow suit, and with costs like manufacturing and distribution essentially set, there’s only so much they can do to remain profitable.
So consumer-focused brands will differentiate in other areas. Some might offer blower coolers or open air coolers, some will make their cards shorter so they can fit in more compact cases. Some will try to make their cards stand out with flashy-looking fans and lights. A common technique is to make a few minor changes to the design of the card itself, like a small “factory” (pre-installed) overclock on the card’s GPU or V-RAM. These variations get a lot of ink on the boxes that the GPUs come in, with marketing phrases like “Overclocked Edition,” “FTW,” or “AMP.”
But with the exception of a few major tweaks, like a pre-installed water cooling setup or the installation of extra memory modules, these changes usually don’t result in more than a percent or two of performance…
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