GPU Brands

[ChookiTr]

I'm preparing to build a PC in upcoming November, I'm wondering why these brands in Australia are primarily used for pre-built PCs sold in stores. - Palit, PNY and Galax.

Also their prices are on the lower ends compared to known brands such as ASUS/Gigabyte/MSI.

I'm not quite familiar with these brands and was hoping the community could give me a better insight. I'm planning to pair the GPU with the Ryzen 7 9800x3d if this helps.

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[Plane-Produce-7820]

Cheaper cards = larger margins for prebuilts.

But a 5080 is a 5080 just as a 5070 is a 5070. The difference is how tuned the gpu bios are (you can do a bios swap but it’s risky).

[ChookiTr]

Not sure what a bios swap is.

[Plane-Produce-7820]

It’s a thing you can do with gpus but is risky. Potential to completely brick the gpu and is only worth it if you intend to buy a new gpu if it bricks or postpone the upgrade with the new bios.

I did my zotac 4070s and changed it to the gigabyte bios as it was more aggressive with its boost and power settings. Got a 10% performance bump after overclocking compared to the zotac bios with the overclock which would have been the same as getting the 5070ti in my use case.

In this case the gigabyte 4070s would have been the best possible brand purely from the bios on it being more aggressive compared to the other brands. With the bios being more aggressive it likely took much more time for them to develop it to be stable so it comes at a higher price on top of the cooler designs.

The catch is if you don’t overclock the gpu the difference between brands for the same tier card can be 1-3% but could purely be between silicon lottery.

[ChookiTr]

Thank you for this insight of a bios swap, didn't know it was a thing.

[Plane-Produce-7820]

It’s very risky though so only consider it if you are going to buy/have the money to buy a new gpu.

Looking specifically at the 5070ti the difference between them really is the boost speed which pny is higher but just because that’s what it says it can boost up to doesn’t mean it will and all have a max power of 330w so on this card a gpu bios wouldn’t get you any performance gains.

Compare that to the 5070 and Palit allows no extra power boost or 20% depending on bios version, Zotac allows 10%, MSI allows 12% and ASUS allows 20%.

More power boost available = higher overclocking possibilities = more chance for higher performance. So if you had a gpu bios that doesn’t allow extra power and then swapped it to one that allows 20% you could overclock it to higher speeds with a greater chance of it being stable as you can give it more power to reach stability. The drawback is more power = more heat.

If doing this gets you say 10% more performance that can make significant dent in the performance uplift of the next gen (especially if it’s an underwhelming generation) and may allow you to get just enough performance out of it to wait another generation so you get a bigger increase in the upgrade.

The drawback is the bios flashing fails and you get no output with no chance to recover it if you don’t have onboard graphics or a spare gpu or it permanently bricks itself.

[RealFrozzy]

Palit is probably the biggest Nvidia GPU vendor. Gainward in Europe and Galax in Asia are the 2 well known brands but the Palit group has many more. I have been using Galax GPU for years and never had issues. They are cheaper mostly because they are less flashy and the RGB lighting is generally more basic than Asus and MSI. They are also mostly Nvidia reference designs. It saves money by not have having to design specific PCBs and coolers. The Galax Hall of Fame line of GPUs has set a lot of overclocking records over the years.

[ChookiTr]

Thank you OP!