Taiwanese component manufacturer Foxconn has announced a range of Nvidia chipped cards that stretch from a GeForce 7950 GX2 down to a 7100GS, with the whole gamut of 7900, 7600 and 7300 models in between.

While it may be tempting to write this off as yet another company joining a graphics market that is straining at the seams with similar offerings, this would be very short-sighted.

Foxconn is an enormous company that turned over $16bn in 2004 and, besides the motherboards and cases that it sells under its own name, it also OEMs a ton of kit. Look inside your PC and there is a very high chance that you have some Foxconn hardware, even if it's only an IDE connector or PCI slot.

Make no mistake about it, graphics card prices will be coming down and balance sheets will be affected. ®

Related stories

• MSI sounds 'stolen' GeForce 7900 GS alert (21 September 2006)
• Nvidia ships 'first' 80nm mobile graphics chip (14 September 2006)
• Albatron takes off with speedy graphics card (8 September 2006)
• Computex 2006 Leadtek rebuts Foxconn handover claim (7 June 2006)
• Foxconn calls for new benchmarks (9 March 2006)