by Anton Shilov
11/29/2002 | 06:02 PM
Elitegroup Computer has greatly expanded its product portfolio for the year passed by and continues to add new kinds of products to the lineup. Besides desknotes, peripherals and various computer components, the company also wants to sell mainstream and high-end graphics cards in addition to their cost-effective family of Xabre GPU powered solutions.
Although the current graphics chips supplier SiS does a great job in the entry-level graphics solution field, ECS these days considers ATI’s and NVIDIA’s offerings for the middle- and high-end markets. <%BANNER[article]%>
ECS plans to ship about a million of graphics cards per month, according to this Taiwanese web-site, hence, it seems to be a great business opportunity for either ATI and NVIDIA (or maybe both?). Nevertheless, everything is not that easy at all. We should keep in mind the fact that ECS is known for its low-price policy that seems to be the reasone of their massive success all around the world. If they start to produce graphics cards based on, say, NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 GPU, a lot of other partners of the Santa Clara, California-based graphics chip developer will have to cease the supplying of certain competing solutions because ECS will offer the same for lower price. Moreover, some partners may consider the decision to change the supplier of the graphics chips, thus, NVIDIA (if ECS decides to utilise their GPUs) may loose some of their clients, who will afterwards turn to the arch-rival ATI Technologies. On the other hand, cheap graphics cards based on a GPU not only competes with the products based on the same GPU, but also with the rival’s products.
All in all, there are a lot of things to consider for both graphics card maker as well as it potential GPU suppliers at the moment.