Former EVGA Product Manager Brendon Ray Hedrick confirmed that NVIDIA's direct sale of Founder's Edition cards created real tension for EVGA. When NVIDIA launched the Pascal Founders Edition in 2016, EVGA worried as NVIDIA began selling reference designs directly to customers, competing with its own partners. Hedrick explained that NVIDIA often revealed GPU specs to customers the same day it boarded partners, creating information asymmetry.

For RTX launches, NVIDIA implemented a leak detection strategy using colored dots on images sent to retailers, allowing them to trace leaked materials back to specific sources. GPU margins were so slim that EVGA had to sell certain models at a loss to maintain NVIDIA's MSRP pricing and protect chip allocation. Premium models with better cooling and PCBs carried higher prices, making them prohibitively expensive for many consumers.