Gigabyte to Deal Only with ATI Chips?

by Anna Filatova
01/05/2002 | 04:49 AM

Many rumors on Gigabyte being about to stop the production of NVIDIA based graphics cards started spreading across the web. The company is said to be moving to graphics chips from another manufacturer, ATI. Moreover, these rumors arise from really diverse sources, which makes them look quite credible.
To tell the truth, we wouldn’t dare make any detailed comments on that, though we will still try to say a few things now:

• ATI graphics chips have become very popular among the graphics cards manufacturers recently. Take, for instance, the active promotion of the solutions built on ATI chips produced by such a “loyal” NVIDIA supporter as PowerColor. As for the reasons for this incredible popularity growth we could point out the relative logical completeness of ATI chips families as well as flexible pricing policy pursued by ATI.
• On the other hand, giving up NVIDIA chips completely doesn’t seem that logical to us, as it is always very risky to stake only one single manufacturer.
• It is quite possible that Gigabyte has some very promising info about the upcoming ATI solutions at its disposal (we mean ATI RV250 and R300), which gives them a good reason to give up using NVIDIA chips in the near future. however, you should bear in mind that ATI has always been pretty slow as far as the announcement of new products goes, so exclusive partnership with this company threatens to cause some serious problems.
• And in conclusion we would like to say that NVIDIA chipset families have usually been very accurately and logically built, while the situation with ATI proved just the opposite, which could be described with two attributes: indistinct and puzzling. For the graphics cards makers as well as for many customers this parameter is one of the most important when making their decision.