NVIDIA moving into direct sales?

[Rob Williams]

Alright... this is interesting. Kyle from [H] went to his local Best Buy and happened upon a couple of NVIDIA GPUs for sale, and no, it's not what you think. These were -direct- cards, as in, in NVIDIA boxes. No EVGA, no XFX... just NVIDIA.

http://www.hardocp.com/news/2010/10/04/nvidia_moves_into_direct_retail_sales_video_cards

I'm not sure what to make of this yet, but Kyle promises an editorial on it soon. I can't see too many of the company's partners being too pleased with this move. Not surprisingly, the GPU coolers look identical to the reference samples sent out to the media, so the company didn't seem to change too much up.

What do you guys think of this? The main thing I'm wondering is whether this is going to go widespread, and perhaps also why the company has been so quiet about it. If any of you guys go to Best Buy over the next day or two, be sure to keep an eye out

 

[DarkStarr]

It's odd. I don't know what to make of it.

 

[Optix]

The only Nvidia branded item on the BestBuy.com website is Nvidia's 3D glasses. There is nothing listed on BestBuy.ca so I'm thinking this is an in-store only promotion for the time being.

I can't say as I am really surprised that Nvidia is doing this if things turn out the way they are looking. The way they run things forced BFG to close up shop although there may be other underlying reasons, and caused XFX to switch teams. Two out of three of your biggest North American partners are out of the picture with EVGA being the hold out along with PNY, Palit and a few others sprinkling their video card pixie dust here and there.

Then you have your fence sitters like Asus and MSI who release cards for both camps.