NVIDIA’s Quadro Cards are not Discounted, After All

We’ll have to file this one under, “Whoops, we bet NVIDIA wished that didn’t happen!”. That’s a file that’s starting to get a bit fat, and this recent “issue”, if you can call it that, didn’t help things. On Monday, we linked to a story that claimed that NVIDIA had dropped the pricing of its entire Quadro Fermi line-up by 50%, and it now looks like that wasn’t the case at all.

The site that originally broke the news, KitGuru, followed up with a word from NVIDIA’s Director of Quadro Marketing, Danny Shapiro, who made it a point to clear the air and state that Quadro is healthier than ever. The issue turned out to be one of a textual error. In an e-mail sent out to certain partners and developers, NVIDIA (or rather, PNY) was offering a (as in one) Quadro card at a 50% price reduction.

The “s” added to “purchasing boards” was a huge mistake, as it lead people to believe that multiple boards could be purchased with that discount, when in fact the limit was one. Even further, NVIDIA states that the offer was not for public consumption, but rather its pre-selected partners and developers. So, the lonely Joe hoping to build the ultimate workstation PC for a budget price is out of luck.

Although price drops for consumers would be a great thing, in this case, I’m glad to hear that it was an error, because as it was, things weren’t looking too great for the company. After all, price-drops on both desktop and workstation cards in a single week, along with a high-profile launch from a competitor… it didn’t bode too well in some eyes.

All is well! Now we can sit back and wait for NVIDIA’s true answer to AMD’s Radeon HD 6800.

Thanks to Mike from our forums for bringing this update to our attention!

Admittedly this offer is confusing. The promotion is in response to overwhelming requests from our resellers and developers for demo samples. We have chosen to enable new resellers and developers to acquire a single “not for resale” sample at a discount off list price – this is a common practice professional markets. This promotion is not available to the general public, and unfortunately propagating this outside the reseller and developer community has created confusion.