that's not were the money is going, that's a drop in the bucket, the one getting great margins is Nvidia not the ones building the card or selling the card.
And it would be more costly for Nvidia to do all the R&D and negotiate prices with everyone, back then as a small niche company as opposed to now as one of the largest companies in the world and diluting costs with other segments that are even more profitable.
Not sure I agree with this. First of all Nvidia do build and sell cards, which is what makes this fascinating, as it really does show up the AIB's for the liars that they are.
As Dr Dro stated, Nvidia funds the research, provides software, firmware etc. The AIB's for the most part are just slapping on a cooler which are usually rehashed from previous gen, branding it, and have own distribution and marketing channels.
Looking at Nvidia's UK site right now.
4080 Super FE is £950 aka MSRP. This is a fully built card, the cooler is very likely more expensive to manufacturer vs the cheap plastic stuff AIB's use..
Asus 4080 Super TUF is £1100. Given this is only a TUF, there was likely a previous even higher cost card from Asus. But delisted from most places now.
Asus have a 4090 thats £900 higher vs a gigabyte 4090. nearly 3000USD.
I brought my 3080 FE for £650 aka MSRP from Nvidia, at the time, EVGA and co were making big profits selling direct to miners (for some reason people thought Nvidia was doing this, but was the AIB's), the few that made it to retail, they were like the wild west, a retailer would order say e.g. 500 of a SKU at XX price, then the AIB would relent and say we can only give you 100 because we sold rest to miners, and the price is now YY if you still want them, then would be bidding wars for the stock, this was made very public by a UK retailer. They allowed a Founder Edition thread on their forums to help people buy FE from their main competitor (who is Nvidias authorised retailer). I remember seeing a Gigabyte 3080 card for nearly £1500 retail, when I paid £650 for my FE.
Nvidia also forced the retailer to make technical adjustments to try and not sell to scalpers, one unit per address, one unit per payment card, no foreign addresses, no post boxes, this was total lifetime units, you couldnt e.g. order one, and then later order another. No other retailer made this kind of effort that Nvidia did. Nvidia also later mine limited AIB chips, as they knew AIB's were taking the mickey. Because of this FE cards were considerably easier to get than AIB, and they were way cheaper, better built to boot.
