NVIDIA Claims No Planned Partner Reduction

NVIDIA has been having a rough year… not many people could argue that. From a dampened product launch to product issues to financial hits to rampant rumors – NVIDIA’s had it all. The latest rumor that’s been lingering around for a while is that the Santa Clara-based company is preparing to cull a few of its launch partners. Included in the culling were ECS, Biostar, Albatron and Foxconn.

According to DigiTimes, the rumors are not at all true, according to their contact at NVIDIA, who’s not quoted in the article. It’s noted that the relationship between NVIDIA and their second-tier partners is strong, and they have no plan to reduce supply to them. How’d the rumor start? Who knows, but it could very-well be true that the company was pondering the idea at one point in time.

In related news, the same website also found out that the partners to include SLI support on upcoming X58 motherboards will be ASUS, eVGA, MSI, Gigabyte and DFI. We’ll be taking a look at two such boards in the weeks to come, including the ASUS P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition (which we previewed here) and Gigabyte’s EX58-EXTREME, so as usual, stay tuned.

While no maker confirmed that they had heard directly from Nvidia about a plan to downsize its base of graphics card partners, some makers said they heard about such a plan in the market some time ago but with the news spreading through the market, Nvidia would probably adjust any strategy that could damage its brand name.