GALAX now has 187 custom GeForce RTX 30 designs, AMD and Intel board partners far behind

Custom card market report

We have something interesting for you. 

With the launch of new GeForce and Radeon cards soon, one might say that the existing series are no longer updated. This is not entirely the case with GeForce RTX 30 series. The introduction of new GeForce RTX 3060 models spawned an idea to check how many custom designs each board partner has. We collected data on GeForce RTX 30, Radeon RX 6000 and Intel Arc A-series for the most popular AIB/AICs.

NVIDIA board partners lead the pack with as many as 7 companies now with over 100 custom models. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, though, especially after the introduction of Lite Hash Rate models which copied many existing designs.

GALAX now has over 187 custom models and Colorful has just crossed 161. It should be noted that some companies have models never meant for the global market. This is the case with many brands listed below.

AMD partners have not reached 40 custom designs yet, but there are almost just as many brands with over 30 designs as NVIDIA’s board partners with 100. In that sense, one could say that AMD board partners produce 2/3 fewer cards than NVIDIA AICs. The biggest AMD partners are MSI and PowerColor, both with 39 cards based on RDNA2 architecture.

This is not the best timing to include Intel Arc series, however nearly 2 weeks since the launch of the series, we barely hear of any new cards. The most popular brand for Intel is GUNNIR with 7 cards announced.

Should things change with RTX 40 and RX 7000 series? That’s possible. There are only 52 custom RTX 4090 cards thus far, while RTX 3090 had as many as 125 throughout its life. Board partners will introduce enthusiast models soon, but it is entirely up to NVIDIA to decide how many SKUs the company really needs for this generation. For now, we are going the opposite way, the ‘unlaunching’ of RTX 4080 12GB rendered as many as 23 already announced models as canceled.

AMD is a big unknown. We would welcome board partners that produce Radeon and GeForce cards to introduce flagship series for both brands. This wasn’t always the case with RDNA2.

Disclaimer: the list above includes all confirmed models, including variants, canceled models and designs that we have been shown but never released.