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Nvidia strong arms online retailers

Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 12:49 am
by cybereality
Nvidia is now dictating what prices online retailers can advertise their products at. Reportedly they threatened to pull funds from NewEgg among others:

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.h ... VzaWFzdA==

Are they just trying to piss everyone off?

Well that sucks!!!

Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 1:22 am
by android78
I have to say that I hope some company out there starts making cards that rival the NVidia cards (and does S3D) so that I can buy their cards in protest to this sort of behaviour. All I can see is that it will make the online advertised price of the NV cards all appear higher then the competition, making them less attractive.
I guess you've already figured out... I think this is a bad/stupid move by NV and hope it comes back and slaps them in the face! And then I hope they reduce their card prices by 50% and give me some free samples AND a working S3D driver... sorry, dreaming again!

Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 5:32 am
by LukePC1
I don't realy get this all :-(
What would change without the UMAP? 10% lower prices maybe?
Oh and I forgot: 10% more sales maybe :D
This might help ATI to win shares and develop better hard and (S-3D) software :lol:

Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 6:38 am
by Tril
Basically, this controls the price the online retailers can display on their website but not the price at which they sell. You have to add the cards to your cart to see the real prices. It's more of a hassle to get the prices but they are still as low as before.

Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 12:44 pm
by LukePC1
Maybe they could reduce shipping to get the original price again ;-)

Maybe this UMAP is good, because normal shops still get some customers :?

Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 3:11 pm
by android78
Tril wrote:Basically, this controls the price the online retailers can display on their website but not the price at which they sell. You have to add the cards to your cart to see the real prices. It's more of a hassle to get the prices but they are still as low as before.
Correct! But the whole point of the multiple vendor etailers is you get to the the summary which has the prices ranked on a single screen which makes it much easier to see which vendor is offering a reasonable price (compared with their competition). My personal feeling is that forcing the etailer to not display the price if it's below a certain amount is a way for NV to prevent a flooding of the market with low markup/high volume vendors sales which are very hard to compete with.
LukePC1 wrote:What would change without the UMAP? 10% lower prices maybe?
Oh and I forgot: 10% more sales maybe

I agree.
And this sort of behaviour by a company makes me feel they don't have the interest of the end user in mind = me concerned about fringe interest (S3D) support = me less likely to keep purchasing their products = NV not getting my money. I know I'm probably only 1/10000000 th their sales market, but I wonder if the rest of the market will care enough to make a dent in their profits?

Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 3:57 pm
by pixel67
No big deal in my opinion. You see this all the time on Circuit City and Best Buy website when purchasing TV's and stuff.

Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 7:02 pm
by cybereality
pixel67 wrote:No big deal in my opinion. You see this all the time on Circuit City and Best Buy website when purchasing TV's and stuff.
Yeah, there have been policies like this for a while. The important aspect is how Nvidia thinks they can just push the whole industry around at their whim.

Re: Well that sucks!!!

Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 8:41 pm
by nubie
android78 wrote:I have to say that I hope some company out there starts making cards that rival the NVidia cards (and does S3D)!
Wish Granted: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3338

$200 4850 from AMD rivals 9800GTX, (note this is the 4850, I wonder what a "4870" will do) According to GPUz it had 800 stream processors, that sounds pretty good to me.

As of today (June 19th 2008) Newegg.com is still selling 9800GTX cards for $270, and AMD 4850's for $199, damn how I wish I had that $199, would be neat to have a card that wasn't nVidia like my last 12 were (TNT2/GF2-GTS/FX5200AGP/GF6600AGP/6600GT PCIe/7900GS/8800GT 256mb/8800GTS 320mb Luckily I sold the last 2 cards immediately and didn't lose much money on them.)

Plus with the iZ3D support I hope to be up and running on current hardware with a Planar rig soon, couldn't justify owning a card past the 7 series if it won't do 3D.

Re: Well that sucks!!!

Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 9:44 pm
by android78
nubie wrote:$200 4850 from AMD rivals 9800GTX, (note this is the 4850, I wonder what a "4870" will do) According to GPUz it had 800 stream processors, that sounds pretty good to me.
Thanks for that. I'd be interrested to hear from anyone running the iZ3D drivers on these and if they are as compatible as the nvidia ones? Or more?

Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 11:41 pm
by mastRmind
Thanks for that. I'd be interrested to hear from anyone running the iZ3D drivers on these and if they are as compatible as the nvidia ones? Or more?
I just ordered this card with the computer I am building for my brother. I will try it out with my Iz3d monitor before I give it to him to see how well it performs. I am expecting good results :wink: