Gainward, a maker of high-end graphics cards and multimedia appliances, on Thursday denied it had formed strategic alliance with other graphics cards makers in order to cut down the manufacturing costs. The company’s spokesman in Munich, Germany, said Gainward works closely with NVIDIA and hardly needs to be a part of any alliance.

“We cannot confirm that there is an alliance between other reference design board vendors. However, we can confirm that Gainward is not part of any such alliances,” said Hans Wolfram Tismer, Gainward’s Managing Director in Europe.

Earlier this week Taiwanese web-site DigiTimes released a news-story claiming that Albatron Technology, Tul Corp., Chaintech Computer, Prolink Microsystems and Gainward have formed an industry alliance aiming to reduce the costs of their products to stay competitive with ASUS, who reportedly plans to launch cost-effective X-series graphics cards.

Frank Tseng, the chairman of Prolink, is reported to have said that the alliance aimed to leverage its combined bargaining power to gain better pricing for graphics chipsets from ATI Technologies and NVIDIA Corp.. However, in addition to graphics processors, makers of graphics cards should acquire some other components, such as print circuit boards or capacitors, that also affect final pricing of the products.

While the five companies have not yet finalized details of the alliance, at least one is denying that it joined the alliance, claiming that ties with NVIDIA Corp., a maker of graphics processing units, is essentially enough to prosper.

“We are independent in order to differentiate with the industry’s best graphics solutions and we are working very closely with NVIDIA without any need of participating in such an “alliance”. We also do not have the slightest clue how this wrong message could occur as we never even had the intention to team up with other board vendors,” claimed Mr. Tismer.

Other graphics cards makers had not responded to the inquiry seeking for comments at press time.