Second-tier makers unlikely ship NVidia Fermi cards until April

There is an interesting post over at Digitimes about the pending Fermi launch.

Second-tier graphics card makers are unlikely to start mass shipments of their Nvidia GeForce GTX 480/470-based (Fermi) graphics cards until April despite that Nvidia plans to announce the GPU on March 26 since most of the them have not yet received complete reference board designs, according to sources from graphics card makers.

The sources expect Nvidia will give supply priority to first-tier makers or makers that only produce Nvidia cards. Makers including XFX and PNY are already offering pre-orders for these upcoming cards with GTX 480 priced at around US$679.99 and GTX 470 at about US$499.99.

Its kind of interesting to see XFX on the list offering pre-orders. It was said that they completely dropped nVidia from their lineup.  The question now is, who are the First Teir companies?  (pretty easy to answer), and who is left that "only" does nVidia stuff?

EVGA seems to be the only one.

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