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eVGA's 'Golden Sample' hunting down the 'bloodsuckers' ?

by Paul Dutton on 25 November 2005, 14:24

Tags: EVGA

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eVGA's 'Golden Sample' hunting down the 'bloodsuckers' ?

One company which increasingly keeps coming up on the HEXUS radar, is NVIDIA partner eVGA Corporation.

That said, we’ve been hesitant to post the fullness of the noise that eVGA has been making to us, and the reason for this is because there seems to have been nowhere in the UK to buy its products.

However, we’ve just heard that Huntingdon based Realtime Distribution Limited, has apparently reached agreement with eVGA Europe, to be its exclusive trade distributor in the UK.

The European operations of eVGA was recently established by Hans Wolfram Tismer, the former European Managing Director of Gainward.

Speaking from his car on a high-speed autobahn somewhere in chilly Deutschland, Hans Tismer, confirming our bean, said that a deal with Realtime is indeed now “signed and sealed”, and that eVGA products are soon to be listed with top UK retailer SCAN International.

Realtime Distribution also seems to be the trade supplier for NVIDIA based graphics accelerators from AOpen, Galaxy and – ironically - Palit.

The irony here is that the Taiwanese operation Palit, which recently purchased Gainward, seemed to be the primary reason that both Wolfram Tismer's driving seat was vacated at Gainward in Germany, and also that of Wayne Tritton here in the UK Gainward office.

For those behind the times, Wayne Tritton (also formerly of 3DFX) was infamously irresponsible for risqué Gainward adverts showing a nurse holding a ‘Golden Sample’, and is now a senior UK official for ATi graphics partner HIS.

Apparently Palit which manufactures both ATi and NVIDIA based products, was once described to a room full of execs by ‘KD’, the owner of Sapphire Technology, as “bloodsuckers”. The reason for this seemed to be his view that Palit wasn’t a “partner” that was exclusively loyal to either ATi or NVIDIA.

To our recollection - and perhaps because of Wolfram Tismer’s involvement, Gainward (as it was originally), seemed to be one of the few companies which remained loyal to NVIDIA during the troubled times it suffered with the ill-fated introduction of its GeForce FX 5800 Ultra (NV30); which unfortunately came on the back of Eric Demers R300, the ASIC which formed the basis of the hugely successful ATi RADEON 9700 PRO.

However, we still remember eye-witness accounts of the look on Wolfram’s face when he walked onto ATi Technologies’ exhibition booth at CeBIT 2005 as a representative of Palit partner ATi. We're not sure which was more red - the ATi booth or Wolfram's face...

We've seen bad-boy Wolfram do all this before - once with Hercules (before its take-over by Guillemot) and more recently with Gainward.

If Wolfram's track record of catapulting relatively mediocre or obscure graphics card companies onto the very top of PC enthusiasts buying wish-lists, and in turn to the top of various competitors hit-lists, then we guarantee that you'll hear a lot more about eVGA on HEXUS in the coming days...

Furthermore, now that eVGA seems to have started kicking, we'll be surprised if Palit owned Gainward can recover the position it lost to the dynamic XFX Graphics as NVIDIA’s premier partner, who currently seem to be on top of the game when it comes to enthusiast focussed NVIDIA GPU based 3D acceleration.

let us know your thoughts here on the HEXUS.community



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“relatively mediocre or obscure graphics card companies”
certainly in the USA I don't think that eVGA would fall into that category probably being on a par with BFG?