GoKawiil
Tech News
Former EVGA product manager Brendon Ray Hedrick published an account describing how Nvidia's 2016 Founders Edition cards put it in direct competition with board partners like EVGA. He also says Nvidia required partners to sell at least one model at the announced MSRP even at a loss, threatening reduced chip allocations for those who didn't comply, forcing EVGA to offer loss-leading cards alongside pricier premium versions.
Former EVGA product manager Brendon Ray Hedrick, who worked there from 2016-2019, described how Nvidia's Founders Edition cards forced EVGA to keep a money-losing 'loss leader' model at Nvidia's advertised price to preserve chip allocations. He said profit had to come from pricier custom cards, but as Nvidia's own designs and clock management improved, the performance edge of those premium cards shrank while the cheap models sold out fast. Hedrick also described learning specs alongside the public and Nvidia tracing leaks via colored dots on retailer images.
CyberPowerPC is offering pre-built gaming PCs containing Nvidia RTX 5070, 5080 and 5090 Founders Edition GPUs on Walmart, timed to Nvidia's GeForce Week promotion running September 21-27. The builds are discounted between roughly $580 and over $1,300 off their listed prices, though supplies are limited.
CyberPowerPC's SLC8500WST prebuilt pairs AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor with Nvidia's RTX 5080 Founders Edition graphics card, 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory, and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, all for $2,299 at Walmart. The CPU and GPU alone typically cost over $2,000 when bought separately, making the bundled memory and storage essentially free by comparison.
An RTX 5090 Founders Edition owner reported that Nvidia rejected an RMA request after 30 days, citing an unreadable serial number printed on the card's metal bracket. The user says the card wasn't tampered with, and several other Reddit users report similar warranty denials tied to the same faded serial number issue.
An RTX 5090 Founders Edition owner reported that Nvidia rejected their RMA request after keeping the crashing GPU for over a month, citing an unreadable serial number on the card's metal bracket. The owner insists the card was never opened or tampered with, and other Reddit users say they've noticed similar fading on their own Founders Edition cards' printed serial numbers.