NVIDIA to make its own motherboards

NVIDIA plans to release its own high-end motherboards to cut prices and shorten development times. NVIDIA plans to do the same as it does in the graphics market: create a reference design and let motherboard makers resell it under their own brand.

Tom Peterson, NVIDIA’s Director of Technical Marketing, indicates since the high-end market is less demanding but challenging to manufacturing technology, the high cost of development embarrasses some of manufacturers to provide high-end motherboards. To lower the cost as well as shorten the time to make the products be available, NVIDIA has a plan on providing high-end motherboards manufactured by NVIDIA itself to manufacturers such that they can sell the boards under its brand. The pioneer of this plan will be NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI.

“As the designer of nForce 680i chipset, NVIDIA definitely is the one know the most. Motherboards designed from NVIDIA will provide a full potential of nForce 680i. Especially for overclocking enthusiast, NVIDIA has much of optimized settings for overclocking,” said Tom Petersen.

BFG, Biostar, ECS, EVGA and XFX will sell the motherboard manufactured by NVIDIA under their own brandnames.

Other motherboard makers like Abit, Asus, DFI, Gigabyte and MSI are less happy with NVIDIA's decision. They will design their own motherboards and will need more time to deliver them to the market, their motherboards will probably only appear on the market by mid-December. Rebranded NVIDIA motherboards will be available much sooner.