Brendon Ray Hedrick, who worked at EVGA from 2016 to 2019, says the company believed it had to keep at least one GeForce card available at NVIDIA's advertised starting price, even when that model sold at a loss. This was believed to be necessary to protect EVGA's GPU allocation from NVIDIA.
In a personal essay, he says failing to launch a GPU at NVIDIA's MSRP could lead NVIDIA to cut EVGA's chip allocation. However, he cites no contract establishing such a rule and does not claim to have witnessed NVIDIA explicitly punish EVGA over pricing. "As I understood the arrangement," he writes, EVGA needed a loss leader, adding that the company couldn't know whether a smaller allocation was actually retaliation for its pricing.
Some of my concerns began while I was still on the support team. When NVIDIA introduced the Pascal Founders Edition cards in 2016, I remember people at EVGA worrying about what that meant for us. We were used to selling NVIDIA's reference designs with our name on them. NVIDIA had sold its own cards before, but this was when the tension became clear to me: the company supplying our GPUs was also making a prominent pitch to sell finished cards directly to our customers.
Hedrick said these loss-leading cards sold out almost continuously. For the RTX 2080, NVIDIA advertised a starting price of $699, while its own Founders Edition carried a $100 premium. EVGA worried that its GPU supplier had suddenly become a much more prominent direct competitor.
EVGA historically differentiated itself with huge VRMs, custom PCBs, elaborate coolers, and products like the Classified and K|NGP|N cards. Hedrick adds that NVIDIA's clock management and improved reference designs made premium components matter less to everyday gaming performance.
"The models on which we did not lose money had better circuit boards and cooling of our own, but they also carried a substantial premium. To a customer comparing them with the advertised starting price, it could look as though EVGA was charging an enormous amount just for those additions."
The tension grew as NVIDIA's own Founders Edition cards put EVGA in direct competition with its GPU supplier.
Similar complaints resurfaced publicly when EVGA quit the GPU business in 2022. At the time, EVGA CEO Andrew Han complained that NVIDIA withheld important pricing and product information from partners until around public launch announcements, making it difficult to plan products and margins.
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By the time EVGA walked away in 2022, graphics cards accounted for nearly 80% of its revenue, yet GPU margins were reportedly razor-thin, falling to around 5% in some estimates. Hedrick's account suggests the tensions behind EVGA's eventual exit had been building for years, well before the company publicly severed ties with NVIDIA in 2022.
