> It seems to me this is part of a strategy to get intel and AMD tripping over their dicks to get EVGA working on their GPUs
To doubt, margins are slim on GPUs. Intel & AMD have enough infrastructure to not need AIBs.
The problem is the limited availability. They just don't want to sell a lot of them, sadly.
I always game with headphones on anyway, so the noise is not an issue either way. But it's really not bad. On this generation at least the cooling solution is fine IMO.
For 10x series, Nvidia decided that AIBs are parasites that leech on Nvidia success and started designing their own "good" cards called Founders Edition that has a good cooling and power delivery. That was not related to the reference design card given to AIBs.
10x series was still meh in terms of cooling, better than reference, but meh compared to say EVGA FTW or really any other AIB card that isn't a reference design. Nvidia, kept nice things like Titan to themselves.
For 20x and 30x they doubled down on their own cards, both had good cooler and power delivery. Again, certain consumer chips for only available in Nvidia made cards.
Note: in all cases, some AIBs sell generic reference design cards under their brand.
> Surely they make more money if they sell the whole thing to customers themselves?
It's about who takes the risk. Yeah, their margin for cards is probably better than margin for chips, but:
- Nvidia had much smaller supply chain - Nvidia didn't have to deal with distribution - Nvidia didn't have to deal with end customer - Every was sold in bulk - Logistics were not as complicated