Why Are There So Many Different Brands For The Same GPU(graphics/video) Card?

Buying a video card confuses a lot of people because of the variety of video cards available. It is true that video card manufacturers name their video cards different from their competitors and this causes chaos. Why are there so many different brands for the same GPU card?

i.e. ASUS – GTX 1080 ROG STRIX GAMING vs MSI GTX 1080 vs EVGA vs Gigabyte – and so on…

The answer is simple. Nvidia or AMD provide the actual GPU chip, but you can’t buy or plug that chip into your computer. The chip sits on a board that plugs into a PCI slot. This board has to do a lot of managing -from the power, data transferring, memory, etc. This board can provide a whole a lot of different configurations for the GPU chip -which results in a lot different GPU cards in different price points.

So why doesn’t Nvidia or AMD just make the whole GPU card including the board?

They probably don’t want to get into the business of making the whole card, but rather focus on the making the chip which is the most important part of the graphics card. It’s the same reason Intel does not make all laptops or desktops. Focusing on the creating better chips is the priority for CPU/GPU maker.