In the past it has been made clear to me how uninformed some computer consumers are about pricing of products they they need, love and will pay extraordinary amounts of money for in order to obtain. Gamers especially need to be weary of what they buy, why and how.

In this blog post I will talk about graphics cards and the reason they are priced differently even if they look the same and why some retailers get away with pricing them wrong (in other words expensively so) when they shouldn’t.

There are two main brands in the gaming GPU chip set industry. AMD’s ATI branded range and the competing Nvidia branded range. Under these you will find consumer gaming chip sets and industrial accelerators for the guys who do stuff like engineering and 3D modeling.

The main two brand names namely ATI and Nvidia are chip manufacturers. They design graphics accelerator chip sets that are then sold to different manufacturers like Gigabyte, ASUS, Sparkle, XFX etc.

These companies then design their boards according to industry standards and slap some of these chips on the boards, put their own cooling technology on it like heat pipe or the classic fan technology and sell it to us under their name. That is why you will find Gigabyte 8600 GT and ASUS 8600 GT cards for instance. There are plenty of manufacturers, they can all have the same chip set but come from a different manufacturing company. Because there are different manufacturers, quality and production costs vary and therefore some similar products can cost disparately different.

Whether there is a massive quality difference is debatable but I believe there is still value to be held in sticking to known quality brands. The important thing to remember if you are a newbie in the graphics card buying business is to find out which brands are reputable and which are not. Then it is your job to compare apples with apples. Reputable manufacturers will inevitably be a little more expensive, but it might just be worth your while to invest a little extra in some cases.

Obviously if you plan on building an SLI or Crossfire system then you might want to consider a cheaper brand so to speak to split the difference if money is a bit tight, but there is room for all the manufacturers to make a dime. However this creates room for doggy companies to rip unknowing customers off by making them pay premium prices for not so premium brands.

Get to know your brands! I have found some brands at the entry level which are clearly trying to make a move on the bigger guns quality wise. Look out for them. The smaller dogs can sometimes bite harder than the big ones…

Most importantly, HAVE FUN!

PS. Folks can freely leave brand opinions in the comments.