As of late, it has become a general trend for everybody to talk about the hard times that NVIDIA is having in the chipset and graphics market. Rumors have gone so far as to claim that the Santa Clara-based chip maker was about to phase out of the chipset business, thus putting an end to future high-end SLI-enabled motherboards. Fortunately, this speculation was later infirmed by NVIDIA's Brian Burke. But there still are enough rumors going around and, in all fairness, they are certainly not casting a very favorable light on the company.

Some time ago, some of the NVIDIA's major board partners, including EVGA and XFX were reported as considering a departure from the green company. The rumors failed to specify clearly in favor of which other company the departure would take place, granted there was one to talk about in the first place, but speculations did include AMD and Intel. As an update to that story, recent reports say that EVGA has approached AMD in search for a partnership, as the former also wanted to become a Radeon-based graphics cards manufacturer.

Allegedly, things did not move further than that because AMD turned down the offer, claiming that it already had enough board partners. There are no details regarding XFX, the other NVIDIA board partner that is believed to be considering changing sides. Also, there's no word on whether EVGA also tried to partner with Intel for its upcoming Larrabee, so this is an issue that is still surrounded by uncertainty and speculations. One thing we do know for certain, though, is that long-time NVIDIA partner EVGA is still releasing GeForce and nForce-based products, most of which prove to be quite successful.

As mentioned above, these rumors surrounding NVIDIA are still pending confirmation so, until then, no one can say for sure whether they're based on hard cold facts or just speculations. If they do turn out to be true, the future for NVIDIA does not look that bright anymore. However, there is a chance things take a turn for the better, once the very first 55nm-based GT200 graphics cards are released.

EVGA