why different manufactures???

[theoneinventor]

you can buy a radeon or a gforce from like 50 different manufactures like evga, gainward, msi, asus, leadtek, saphire, and otheres why? what difference does it make??? couldn't ati just make all the radeon cards and nvidia gforce?

[9mmCensor]

nVidia doesn't make any, and ATI makes some. The reason why they do that is just money. They lisence their techknology to different companies (MIS, Leadtek, etc) and then make money. Why specifically do it instead of making them all, i dont know for sure.

[Th0r]

I suppose its all about funding really....

[9mmCensor]

Originally posted by Excelsior
I suppose its all about funding really....

I thought about that but it doesn't make much sense.

It doesn't cost much more money to market your product for the extra cards to sell, if they cut out the 3rd party manufacturers.

Same thing with setting up the equipment for making the boards. THey already make all the chips (GPUs), and to put more on boards (they already do some) it wouldn't be much more.

[Evnas]

Partially because its cheaper. The way they do it, they dont have to build expensive fabrication plants and constantly update them for new technology, etc. All nVidia and ATi do is design, they own no fabrication plants at all. TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) manufactures the cores for both companies, and for "Built By ATi" cards, ATi "hires" Sapphire to build their cards to their specifications, leaving Sapphire to pay for the costs of the fabrication plant itself, upgrading, etc and all ATi has to do is pay for the use of the plants. There are only a handful of comapnies that actually have the core fabrication plants for their own products, the largest of which are AMD, Intel, and IBM. Most other comapnies go to them, or others like TSMC, for their core manufacturing.

The other reason would be to give customers a choice. They may have had problems with one brand (lets use Gainward as an example). Well, the consumer goes to the store and immediatly stears away from the Gainward cards. But look, theres Asus/MSI/VisionTek/etc, and thinks "Well maybe I'll give one of those a shot." The average consumer hardly pays attention to what chipset is powering the device.