Posted on Tuesday, June 17 2008 @ 0:40 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
HardOCP
dug up some dirt on NVIDIA, the site reports NVIDIA is attempting to control the price that is advertised to you via their Unilateral Minimum Advertised Price Policy (UMAP). Several major etailers like Newegg and TigerDirect have enrolled into UMAP, they can still charge you whatever they want for a GeForce card but they are forced to show the "minimum advertised price". To check the actual price you'll have to do a few more clicks.
If you went to TigerDirect towards the end of May you would have noticed that all of a sudden, pricing on almost all SKUs across the 9600 GT, 8800 GT, and 9800 GTX families were the same in their respective group. This was TigerDirect following the above policy in order to not have its supply of NVIDIA video cards cut off at the source. TigerDirect’s shopping cart implementation has changed greatly since then. And yes, even though NVIDIA is not directly selling to Newegg or TigerDirect they can impact whether or not they get NVIDIA GPU video cards. Newegg told NVIDIA to “go pound sand,” or at least that is how it was communicated to HardOCP.com, then when NVIDIA threatened to cut off marketing funds paid directly to Newegg, the company changed its tune and followed the policy.
