I have just came across a very interesting unofficial fact over here. Based on the information from Friedman Billings Ramsey, NVIDIA Corporation has lost a large design win at Micro-Star International to ATI Technologies.

There is no precise information about the matter at the moment, though, the consulting firm now believes that allocation for NVIDIA-based products at MSI is at risk, given that the Taiwanese computer components maker had been an NVIDIA-exclusive customer. No one wants to break favourable partnership unless there are some major problems with hardware or in relations between two companies. The reason of loss is unclear, but the most obvious supposition is that the new GeForce FX line of products ramps more slowly than expected due to low yields on both discrete and board-level products. There may be other reasons of design loss, I assume.

Note that MSI produces a lot of graphics cards for its big customers, including Dell Computer. We know from a lot of industry sources that large personal computer vendors always choose which graphics cards to install in upcoming PCs based on the scores in popular synthetic benchmarks, such as 3DMark and 3DWinbench.

At the moment NVIDIA’s largest customers are Microsoft, MSI and ASUSTeK.

Note that all facts published above are fully unofficial, so it may appear that the information here may eventually be considered as misleading.