Difference between Aftermarket, Stock(OEM?) and FTW cards?

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amtseung
The difference between them all is binning. The GPU cores in the FTW cards (or G1 gaming or Gaming Z or top tier, most expensive cards) are cherry picked for performance and thermals. The tier below them, a.k.a. the average aftermarket card (SC or SSC, Windforce, Gaming X, etc.) are the GPU cores that weren't rock bottom, but weren't good enough to make the cut and be top bin. Stock, like the reference, SORRY, Founder's Edition were not sorted at all.

The price difference will show, usually around $75-100USD between bottom of the pyramid and top binned chips.

The performance difference is negligible unless you plan on chasing world record overclocks on LN2. If the GPU is being used "as intended", there is absolutely no difference...
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amtseung

amtseung

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Jan 28, 2014
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The difference between them all is binning. The GPU cores in the FTW cards (or G1 gaming or Gaming Z or top tier, most expensive cards) are cherry picked for performance and thermals. The tier below them, a.k.a. the average aftermarket card (SC or SSC, Windforce, Gaming X, etc.) are the GPU cores that weren't rock bottom, but weren't good enough to make the cut and be top bin. Stock, like the reference, SORRY, Founder's Edition were not sorted at all.

The price difference will show, usually around $75-100USD between bottom of the pyramid and top binned chips.

The performance difference is negligible unless you plan on chasing world record overclocks on LN2. If the GPU is being used "as intended", there is absolutely no difference whatsoever besides aesthetics and cost, and maybe a backplate.
 
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ApprenticePCBuilder

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Nov 29, 2016
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Theres cards with "FTW" in their name, for example "EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 FTW", then theres aftermarket which I do not know what the difference is from regular cards that you can get off ebay, newegg ect. Same with "reference" cards.
 
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amtseung

amtseung

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I see, another victim of far too many names and far too few actual products.

EVGA is one of the "manufacturers" of these aftermarket cards. So are MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, Gainward, PNY, Galax, Zotac, VisionTek, Powercolor, etc. On newegg, you can see the list of manufacturers. Anything not made by Nvidia (or AMD) themselves is considered aftermarket. Graphics cards made by the manufacturer of the GPU core itself (NVidia or AMD) is "reference", since that one graphics card design is used by all the aftermarket companies as reference to make their aftermarket cards. I know this is grossly oversimplified, but I hope you get the idea.

The "tiers" of graphics card are typically listed after the useful information. For example, within EVGA's lineup, the FTW is at the top, followed by the SSC, then the SC. Calling a graphics card "FTW" is an EVGA trademark. Other companies come up with other names to show the difference between their average cards and their top-tier cards. So a GTX 1080 FTW is supposedly better than a GTX 1080 SC, so it costs more to buy one.

I won't even get into the whole ACX 3.0 thing here. It needs to stop. It needs to be removed from listings.
 
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