We received word that NVIDIA's partners are suffering another chip and/or board shortage, and that the situation is rather dire in some parts of the world. It seems that the back to school period emptied both chip and PCB warehouses and now partners are desperate to get more boards, since the demand isn't going away. According to several partners, almost the whole of GeForce 8 series is on back order, from the lowly GeForce 8500 to the higher GeForce 8800 series chips. This especially touches volume partners, as high-end AIB partners have a limited supply of the GeForce 8800 series boards, but the backlog is definitely long on more than one side. - The Inquirer

Again NVIDIA Suffers More Graphics Board Shortages

After AMD botched the release of Radeon HD 2900 XT with its decision not to go with more than one SKU, the company effectively surrendered high-end market to massive amount of GeForce 8800 boards on the market. A single Radeon HD 2900 XT cannot compete versus price flexibility ranging from the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB which still has problems with textures, 640MB version, GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra. This was additionally segmented by various overclocked versions of the cards, and the result is obvious, single GPU addresses around 10 price brackets, from $250 all the way to $900 for water cooled boards.

The current situation exceeded plans NVIDIA had for summer, and TSMC simply did not produce enough chips in June and July to satisfy the supply. As far as mainstream and low-end parts go, company did not win enough OEM deals, and Graphzilla is now beavering away with 65nm parts for the mainstream and low-end. Those markets are the ones where AMD put its iron grip on, and won more contracts that yours truly has fingers. You can expect that this situation will offsets itself in Q3 results for the company. The sky is green with dollars right now, but partners are operating on razor thin margins, not Graphzilla.