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by vladvasiliu 242 days ago
> 3) MSRP meant something

I'm not in the market for a 5090 or similar, but the other day I was looking at a lower-end model, an AMD 9060 or Nvidia 5060. What shocked me was the massive variation in prices for the same model (9060 XT 16 GB or 5060 Ti 16 GB).

The AMD could be had for anywhere from 400 to 600 euros, depending on the brand. What can explain that? Are there actual performance differences? I see models pretending to be "overclocked", but in practice they barely have a few extra MHz. I'm not sure if that's going to do anything noticeable.

Since I'm considering the AMD more and it's cheaper, I didn't take that close a look at the Nvidia prices.
2 comments
yourusername 242 days ago
> What can explain that?

Looks. I'm not joking. The market is aimed at people with a fish bowl PC case that care about having a cooler with a appealing design, a interesting PCB colour and the flashiest RGB. Some may have a bit better cooling but the price for that is also likely marked up several times considering a full dual tower CPU cooler costs $35.

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vladvasiliu 242 days ago
I was thinking about cooling, but basically they all have either two or three fans, and among those they look the same to my admittedly untrained eye.
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yourusername 242 days ago
The manufacturer can use better fans that move more air and stay more silent. They can design a better vapor chamber, lay out the PCB in a way that VRMs and RAM gets more cooling. But still all that stuff should not account for more than $30-50 markup.
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xethos 242 days ago
Hey, c'mon now - some of that is flooding the market so hard that it's ~8:1 nVidia:AMD on store shelves, letting nVidia be the default that consumers will pay for. That's without touching on marketing or the stock price (as under-informed consumers conflate it with performance, thinking "If it wasn't better, the stock would be closer to AMD").
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ProllyInfamous 241 days ago
>What shocked me was the massive variation in prices for the same model [AMD v. nVidea]

I am not a tech wizard, but I think the major (and noticeable) difference would be available tensor cores — that currently nVidea's tech is faster/better in the LLM/genAI world.

Obviously AMD jumped +30% last week from OpenAI investment — so that is changing with current model GPUs.

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gs17 241 days ago
They were talking about within one model, not between AMD and Nvidia.
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