Former EVGA employee recounts company’s degrading relationship with Nvidia before 2022 blow-up

In 2016, EVGA product manager Brendon Ray Hedrick began to express concerns about the relationship between EVGA and Nvidia. This was due to Nvidia's decision to sell its reference graphics cards directly to consumers, bypassing traditional board partners. This move posed a significant threat to EVGA's business model, as Nvidia's graphics cards began competing directly with EVGA's offerings.

Hedrick noted that while Nvidia's Founders Edition cards were more profitable, EVGA's add-ons, such as superior circuit boards and cooling systems, carried a substantial premium. This pricing strategy made EVGA's offerings less appealing to customers who could simply purchase Nvidia's reference cards at a lower cost.

Hedrick believed that Nvidia's decision to enforce MSRP pricing on its partners, even if it resulted in losses, would ultimately lead to a conflict between the two companies. He worried that EVGA would struggle to absorb the financial impact of producing loss-leading products, as demand for high-performance GPUs grew. When he left the company in 2019, Hedrick predicted that the partnership between EVGA and Nvidia would end within four to five years.

In 2022, EVGA announced its exit from the GPU market, a decision that was largely predicted by Hedrick. At the time of its exit, EVGA was reporting that Nvidia GPUs accounted for 78% of its revenue, but contributed very little to the company's overall profit. The challenges EVGA faced were attributed to Nvidia's pricing policies, as well as the company's own decisions to contract manufacturing to third parties, provide extensive customer service, and focus primarily on North American and European markets.

Despite its reputation for customer-centricity, EVGA's strategies ultimately left it vulnerable, and it ultimately exited the GPU market.