Former EVGA manager alleges NVIDIA pricing rules pushed some GeForce cards into loss-leader territory

A former EVGA product manager is alleging that NVIDIA’s pricing structure left the company feeling obligated to keep at least one GeForce card at the advertised entry price, even when that meant selling the card at a loss. In a report from VideoCardz, Brendon Ray Hedrick, who worked at EVGA from 2016 through 2019, said EVGA believed failing to match NVIDIA’s advertised starting price could jeopardize how many GPUs it received.

A loss leader to protect supply

Hedrick said EVGA understood the arrangement as requiring at least one model at NVIDIA’s starting price. He alleged that if EVGA did not do that, NVIDIA could reduce its GPU allocation, leaving the company with little room to prove whether any cutback was tied to pricing. In Hedrick’s telling, that pressure effectively forced EVGA to keep a loss-leader GeForce card on sale to protect access to chips.

He also said those lower-priced cards were frequently sold out. That left EVGA leaning on more expensive versions with its own higher-end circuit boards and cooling systems, which he said carried enough margin to make up for the cheaper cards. As a result, shoppers comparing EVGA’s lineup with NVIDIA’s advertised floor price could see a sharp jump from the entry model to the company’s more profitable custom cards, .