Why doesn't EVGA "do" networking? Asus seems to make a good go of it.

[VirtualLarry]

Just realized that I've never seen an EVGA networking product.

Gotta admit, it's (mostly) a low-margin business (I assume?). Maybe if EVGA rode the wave of Gigabit ISP connections, and used some mini-PC or ITX design, and used a high(er)-end x64 CPU, to REALLY push some packets, beyond what most consumer routers can do, then they could charge a heavy premium.

 

[Gryz]

You seem to think that any company can build any product.
In reality, you need some expertise to build a product.
A router is just not a piece of hardware. It's not just an Intel CPU, some RAM and 2 ethernet cards.

Anybody can make hardware.
As long as we're not talking bleeding-edge CPUs or GPUs, it seems there are a lot of chip-designers in the world who can make ASICs. The trick is to know what your ASIC is supposed to do.
But then, if you go build a router with a x64 CPU, you'll find that:
1) it gets too expensive
2) it gets too hot. you'll need cooling. never good for a device that's supposed to sit out of sight, maybe inside a cupboard of some kind. doesn't get proper ventilation.
3) cpu-speed is less important, what's probably more important is I/O of your bus, can you copy bytes (packet minus headers) straight from ethernet-card to ethernet-card. And do your feature allow to do this, or do you have features that require you to copy/buffer packets into RAM first ?

And what are you gonna do with a high-end router ?
If low-end routers can do 200 Mbps bidirectional, you probably have covered 90% of the current residential market. If your low-end router can do 1 Gbps, you have probably covered 99.5% of the residential market. Even if you make the best high-end router in the world, you're gonna have a limited market to sell your product.

I think it's unlikely you can make a profit here.

And then there's the software.
Do you have people who understand all the ins and outs of various DSL and cable flavors ? Who understand all the finesses of NAT ? And then there's the rest of it all. You can go fetch some open-source networking software. But if you do that, what do you have to differentiate your product from any other product ?

There are lots of companies that will not enter a market, new or old, if they don't think they can be #1 or #2 in the market. If you start in the residential-router market now, it's unlikely you beat the existing players. If EVGA is like other companies, they won't even start thinking about starting.

 

[FreshBross]

Growing into completely different products requires lots of cap ex - capital expenditure. And they have to measure the upkeep cost of the new engineering teams. I would say EVGA probably had a couple of great record breaking years thanks to GPU mining. Not only because of selling more GPUs, but their PSUs have been the number one quality go to option for GPU mining. If I had to assume, I would say they sold way more power supplies than ever before, shortages and price spikes happened on them at the same time as GPUs, so even if AMD outsold for mining purposes, EVGA got to ride two waves at once.

Maybe all the extra revenue will be put into something, but I don't know that home networking devices would be in EVGA's best interest, there's other higher selling components closer related to their motherboards and GPUs for example, maybe AI computing devices for those chipsets. Time will tell.. but the real giants like NVIDIA are those leading the way.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Companies are able to Branch out into other sorts of products, when their name becomes synonymous with awesome. That's why you used to be able to buy a Ferrari co-branded laptop.

Asus is synonymous with awesome, so whatever they make, people will buy. EVGA is not.

Networking equipment is an oversaturated Market without a lot of room for innovation.