Friday, July 7th 2023
EVGA Withdraws from the Motherboard Market?
In what could be the beginning of the end for EVGA after its spectacular withdrawal from the graphics card market that it held leadership position in; the company is reportedly winding down its desktop motherboard business, too. Korean overclocker Safedisc, writing on Coolenjoy tech forums, stated that the company's entire 170-strong workforce in its Taiwan office involved in the motherboard business, have resigned, including KINGPIN. EVGA could withdraw from the motherboard business just like it did with graphics cards—by halting sales and recalling products from the channel, and retaining them to serve as warranty stock in case existing customers claim RMA or warranty service. We have reached out to EVGA for comments.
Update 07:45 UTC: We've heard from workers at EVGA Spain "it's just another day at the office". So maybe it was only Kingpin/the OC team in TW that has resigned, or the whole story is completely untrue.
Update 16:41 UTC: We just received the following statement from EVGA:
Sources:
Safedisc (Coolenjoy forums), Wccftech
Update 07:45 UTC: We've heard from workers at EVGA Spain "it's just another day at the office". So maybe it was only Kingpin/the OC team in TW that has resigned, or the whole story is completely untrue.
Update 16:41 UTC: We just received the following statement from EVGA:
We saw those message and they are rumors.
Our Taiwan office is still operating and Kingpin is still with EVGA.
EVGA is still doing business and supporting its customers.
Thanks for reaching out
96 Comments on EVGA Withdraws from the Motherboard Market?
Screenshot as backup:
Mobo's are going the same way.
I remember BFG with lifetime warranties back in the days closing out also. Dunno if that played a role here but seems like every company with long warranties turn out to close eventually
And I fear EVGA isn't the only company on the edge. There are rumors that more AIB manufacturers (or rebadgers) are in the red and are patiently awaiting for the market to make a miraculous turn for the better.
Now, AMD doesn't have a very strong brand in GPUs and it needs to constantly drive prices down, away from the equivalent competing Nvidia models, which I don't know how that translates with it's partner profits. And that's because AMD doesn't offer the strongest GPUs neither has the strongest marketing. That means EVGA wouldn't have the room to sell expensive models. I mean a special super WOW overclocked RX 7900 XTX can't be priced much higher than the average cheapest RX 7900 XTX model without coming too close to RTX 4080.
Intel on the other hand is still in a beta stage and EVGA would had to do overtime in support until drivers fix everything a current buyer expects. Also a super duper WOW overclocked ARC 750 or 770 is DOA against AMD and Nvidia offerings if it comes at even a slight higher price than the current price of ARC GPUs.
Just some thoughts.Nvidia is moving prices up the last 10 years, with the introduction of the first Titan that was marketed both as a semi pro and as the best gaming card.
AMD just follows because it can't do otherwise. And we seen it these days. RX 7900XTX drops for the first time under $900 (in some retailers) and Nvidia responds with RTX 4800 at under $1000 (in some retailers).
I mean, let Nvidia sell their 4080 and 4090 at $1,000+ and sell your 7900XT and XTX at the old $500-600 price points. They would sell them in droves.
They were always late to the party. No wonder they couldn't stick around when they released their products half way through the lifecycle of the platform. Margin $ are long gone by then.
As Jensen said:
"A 12-inch wafer is a lot more expensive today than it was yesterday, and it's not a little bit more expensive, it is a ton more expensive," "Moore's Law is dead … It's completely over, and so the idea that a chip is going to go down in cost over time, unfortunately, is a story of the past."
Lisa Su of course said AMD doesn't believe that, but also stated more or less the similar.
So welcome to the fixed or even rising price / performance with the new releases down the road. Are you excited about RTX 5070? You might as well buy an RTX 4080 right now, use it for two years , and when the RTX 5070 releases it will be barely faster than RTX 4080 AND MORE EXPENSIVE!
- Nvidia enjoys higher capacities than AMD from TSMC. Nvidia can flood the market with cheap GPUs, AMD can't, except if it decided to take capacity from Instinct, EPYC and Ryzen. Not gone happen for obvious reasons.
- Nvidia enjoys the marketing advantage and a much stronger brand. We see RTX 3050 selling much better than RX 6600 while RX 6600 is killing RTX 3050 in benchmarks. If AMD was lowering prices, Nvidia would follow. We see it now with RTX 4080. AMD in the end will manage nothing more than hurting itself. Nvidia will keep selling with lower margins, but still higher margins than AMD. AMD is at 50% profit margins, Nvidia will pass 70% if it hasn't done it already.
The mentallity of "Please AMD lower prices so I can buy cheaper Intel and Nvidia hardware", is a thing of the past. And that's a consumer choice, not AMD's fault.
AMD needs at the same time stronger hardware than Nvidia, more favorable press coverage than Nvidia, higher TSMC capacity from Nvidia to lower prices and try to get some market share. And even then it's not certain that people wouldn't continue buying based on brand.
This is 1+1 = 2. Really analysing the obvious here.
Nvidia was, in a way, forced to go this route. They added RT which really needs more compute power, so that's what they've been pushing. AMD, in the meantime, pretends RT is a gimmick, but they have also followed the trend of going for more and more HP (and higher prices).
I was talking about motherboards. Hard to name a single EVGA board that was available for purchase sooner than 6 months after platform release. When product launch cadence is 12-14 months and you only release $$$ tier SKUs this is doomed to fail business recepie.
So why are the AIB partners in such financial problems right after the biggest haul of profit since the beggining of PC?
Graphics cards are expensive and integrated graphics had long ago killed low end cards. Especially now that AMD integrated an iGPU in it's AM5 CPUs, who really needs a low end card? That means much less sales and when selling much less product a single digit profit margin wouldn't be enough to cover the costs.
In motherboards we see both AMD and Intel motherboards costing much more than the past. While people can't avoid buying a new motherboard, probably they aren't doing as much upgrades as before. Also compute power today is more than enough for years to come, so someone buys a PC today and replaces it in 5+ years not in 2-3. That means companies that don't sell the numbers that ASUS, MSI, ASRock or Gigabyte achieve, could have a problem.
The same with PSUs. Most PSUs today are 600W+ with at least an 80+ Bronge logo in their side. So again, one buys a PSU today, waits until that PSU explodes before replacing it.
In other words, people buy less because of prices and specs that cover them for many years. Big companies will survive, small companies maybe not. So, maybe the owners of EVGA decided to take those crypto/pandemic profits and invest them elsewhere or just eat them in holidays instead of suffering years of losses.