While NVIDIA Corporation has not been too much successful in gaining its market share and expanding its list of partners over the last 9 to 12 months, there are some positive exceptions from this a bit alarming trend. In Fall 2003 Gigabyte Technology decided to produce graphics cards based on GPUs from NVIDIA, while today EPoX, a well-known mainboard maker, said it plans to roll-out a family of graphics products powered by NVIDIA.

EPoX today said it plans to introduce a comprehensive family of graphics cards based on variety of GPUs “from the GeForce4 MX440 to the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra” designed by Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA Corporation. The first SKUs in the product lineup will be EM440 and EM4000 built upon the GeForce4 MX technology.

In fact, EPoX has never produced graphics cards, but mostly concentrated on mainboards. To broaden the range of its clients and boost revenue, the company recently began to make PC barebones, industrial computers and even Bluetooth products.

Ironically, EPoX has had plans to bring its own graphics cards into the market back in early 2002, nearly two years ago. At that time there were rumours around the industry that this second-tier mainboards maker would adopt RADEON GPUs from NVIDIA’s rival No.1 – ATI Technologies. Nevertheless, after two years of thinking EPoX decided to further leverage its partnership with NVIDIA, the company, who supplies nForce2 chipsets to EPoX, and adopt GeForce GPUs instead of RADEONs.

Provided that new graphics cards from EPoX will be relatively popular on the market, NVIDIA may receive an opportunity to increase its sales after break up with ABIT earlier this month.

Any additional details about NVIDIA-based EPoX graphics cards are absent at the moment.