Nvidia Corp.'s surprising decision to start selling graphics boards under its own brand probably caught its partners unaware when the first Nvidia-marked graphics adapters emerged in Best Buy last week. However, it looks like for at least EVGA it was not a complete surprise as Nvidia had discussed appropriate plans before. As result, EVGA believes that Nvidia is not a direct threat.

"No comment. It is something [Nvidia] has always talked about, and now it's finally here," said Joe Darwin, a spokesman for EVGA, a premium supplier of Nvidia GeForce add-in boards, in an interview with Cnet News.com web-site.

It is natural that EVGA will not attack its supplier of graphics processing units and it given the relationship between two companies will even maintain exclusive relationship with Nvidia and will not start offering graphics cards based on Radeon graphics processors. Still, Nvidia's own-brand graphics adapters can hardly make EVGA or other suppliers of graphics boards glad, even when Nvidia's initiative is limited to U.S.-based Best Buy stores.

On the other hand, in the recent twelve months Nvidia lost two significant partners in the U.S.: BFG Technology ceased operations, whereas XFX ceased to sell Nvidia-based graphics cards. As a result, it is natural that market share of EVGA is about to increase, whereas market share of Nvidia GeForce has decreased over the past year, partly due to lower number of partners and mostly because of massive delays of Fermi-generation graphics processing units.

EVGA hopes that level of support and quality it provides will differentiate it not only from other vendors, but also from Nvidia itself.

"We are going to keep building Nvidia cards, and we're going to keep offering the best service. [...] Definitely our level of customer service and our programs and our community. All of our tech support is in house, 24-7. There are actual EVGA employees that do the support here; it's not sourced out. They get all the training from our product team. Our RMA service averages two to three days to turn around products coming in to us [for repair]. We haven't seen anyone else that can compete on that level," added Mr. Darwin.

At present Nvidia has no plans to sell its own built graphics cards in Europe, which is a good news for EVGA as well as other vendors.

Tags: EVGA, Geforce, Nvidia, Fermi, BFG, XFX