[Hilbert Hagedoorn] - A few months just after the rumor and later statement of Creative pulling back from the videocard OEM segment of the market NVIDIA announced the GeForce3 line-up. We have seen a lot of companies announcing their model of this videocard yet it remained silent from Creative's side. Why did Creative decide to not manufacturer a videocard with this chipset at that time, what have been the primary reasons ?

[Eoin Leyden] - At the time of NVIDIA’s announcement we were right in the middle of finalising our business model. We decided that rather than just be another “me too” announcement of GeForce3 we would wait until we could make a meaningful announcement of our new product line up and business model.

At the same time I was very concerned about the proposed price point for GeForce3. Since Creative were the premier launch partner for GeForce2 Ultra we probably know more about the super high-end graphics market than anyone else. Rather than go into this at length I will simply say that as the SRP (suggested retail price) goes higher the target audience narrows so what you have is a large number of vendors chasing a very small number of customers ... I don’t need to tell you what happens under those circumstances :-)

I’ve very happy to see that NVIDIA re-thought their strategy prior to release and adjusting their pricing to enable us to hit much more aggressive pricepoints for GeForce3

[Hilbert Hagedoorn] - I'm glad to hear that you will launch a totally new product-line up based up-on NVIDIA chipsets. Can you specify which products are going to be launched.

[Eoin Leyden] - Sure .. our new line-up is as follows …

[Hilbert Hagedoorn] - You will launch a series of GeForce2 MX 200/400 & GeForce3 videocards, can you tell something more about the prices and features, also in the previous question you noted the availability of a PCI model MX videocard, can you specify why you did this ?

[Eoin Leyden] - At the moment we are trying to finalise our pricing so this is not final but as a guideline we hope to be as follows (excluding local VAT) …

The PCI model will only ship in certain countries that have a proven track record in selling PCI solutions. For example the two biggest selling graphics cards in the UK in 2000 were both PCI .. I believe that the strong demand is partially based on people with integrated AGP and also people being sold PCI as a safe option if they are unable to tell the sales person whether or not they have an AGP slot in their PC.