Chapter 471: Chapter 289: The Significance of Open Worlds

When Huang Qing conveyed Ba’s thoughts to the management at Mirage Electronics, the entire company was stunned.

What the heck?

Making peripherals like controllers, mouse and keyboard, and the Galaxy Set is unremarkable? If we’re going to do it, we should make hardware that can be installed inside the chassis?

Ah, this...

It’s probably beyond the wildest dreams of the management at Mirage Electronics, a company that makes controllers and keyboards, to produce and design graphics cards one day—it’s simply unbelievable!

If anyone else had said this, they likely wouldn’t believe it. Producing graphics cards isn’t as easy as picking cabbages, after all!

But the person saying it is Ba, so... that’s difficult to dismiss!

It is well known that consumer-grade PC graphics cards are distinctly categorized into reference and custom models.

The reference models are the "standard" solutions developed by NVIDIA and AMD themselves, while custom models are versions redesigned by downstream manufacturers based on NVIDIA and AMD’s designs and core layouts, enhancing materials, cooling, and frequency.

For Mirage Electronics, producing and manufacturing graphics cards certainly means taking the custom route.

This involves a few crucial questions: Where will you get the core chips to produce custom graphics cards? And where will the design plans come from? Will AMD and NVIDIA agree?

The most critical thing here is figuring out how to persuade upstream suppliers like AMD and NVIDIA.

No kidding!

In the realm of consumer-grade PC graphics card hardware, only A-cards and N-cards slightly compete with each other. If Mirage Electronics wants to enter the market, they must gain approval from at least one upstream supplier.

Once they secure one of the two, either AMD or NVIDIA, the remaining issues will naturally resolve themselves.

After all, once you have the core, the rest is merely redesigning the appearance and cooling solutions, along with tweaking the frequency to ensure the card maintains a balance between "performance" and "cooling."

Originally, Mirage Electronics had neither this idea nor the capacity, but since Ba has initiated the conversation...

Considering Ba’s peculiar influence in the "graphics card industry chain," the people at Mirage Electronics suddenly gained confidence and assurance.

No need to ask, it’s all about networking!

In the current landscape where brands like Daren Shuo, Refused Protection Jia, Desolate Rainbow, and other second- and third-tier brands are prevalent, creating a new graphics card brand is quite challenging.

With so many brands from various tiers and diverse product lines, you can find several versions of the same core graphics card at different prices on e-commerce platforms...

In such circumstances, both NVIDIA and AMD have actually started to tighten their licensing.

For instance, in the case of NVIDIA.

Consumer-grade PC hardware has never had a huge market, with few players interested in DIY setups.

Moreover, NVIDIA’s AI chips have become extremely popular, driving their stock price up, resulting in resources being allocated to more lucrative and promising AI chips.

The production capacity is prioritized for AI chips, while many smaller players are eagerly waiting for the latest 70-series and 80-series graphics card cores, leading to a situation where competition exceeds supply.

That’s why certain second- and third-tier brands, while their graphics cards are well-made and highly satisfactory to gamers, struggle to be available, making it feel like a monkey business.

This isn’t monkey business; rather, it’s because these second- and third-tier graphics card manufacturers receive too few chips, making it impossible to meet market demands.

Only manufacturers at the level of Daren Shuo are unlikely to face such issues.

From the perspective of AMD and NVIDIA, with a dozen or so graphics card brands, there’s no room for new additions, and on the contrary, reducing brands to four or five stable product lines seems more ideal.

Of course, this applies to others.

For Ba, this is not the case. As long as he speaks up, neither Old Huang nor Su will deny him face, and securing allocations won’t be difficult.

It’s not just about getting allocations; he might even receive significant allocations! After all, with connections like these, both A-cards and N-cards are manageable!

As expected!

Once Chen Ba stepped in, Mirage Electronics quickly acquired the qualification to produce graphics cards, and they managed to secure agreements with both A-cards and N-cards companies in one go.

However, to get back to the point...

Although they obtained the qualification, the debut of Mirage Electronics’ first graphics card will likely require some time for polishing.

No way around it!

Since Mirage Electronics has never produced graphics cards before, they seriously lack experience with cooling solutions and frequency adjustments, estimating the earliest completion to be by the end of the year.

"No rush, take it slow!"

Chen Ba advised over the phone: "For the first batch of graphics cards, quality must be stable and secure, aggressively enhance materials to protect reputation."

The freshly launched graphics card brand will surely face consumer trust issues, and this isn’t the time to rush for profits. It’s better to sacrifice a little profit to establish the name of the "Heaven-Dominating" series.

That’s right!

After discussions among Chen Ba, Huang Qing, and others, the first-generation products designed and manufactured by Mirage Electronics—namely the 7050, 7060, and 7060Ti mid-range series—are named "Heaven-Dominating Swordswoman."

The secondary flagship models, like the 70, 70Ti, 80, and 80Ti, are named "Heaven-Dominating Sword Saint" and "Heaven-Dominating Sword Demon!"

The top flagship models, 90 and 90Ti, are named "Heaven-Dominating Sword God!"

These names were coined by Chen Ba...

Don’t ask where the inspiration came from—initially, the name "Tianba" mentioned backward led to an association with a famous sci-fi skin series in LOL called "Heaven-Dominating Mecha."