Confused about Video Cards - Geforce, ATI

From who it's best to buy - Sparkle, Pixelview, Sapphire...

[damlag]

Could you help me to figure out what's going on in video card market. I heard about ATI's Radeon and NVIDIAS Gerforce for a long time. But when I go to any online store, I see a list of these cards and next to each a different name:
Sapphire, Sparkle, BFG Technologies, ASUS and so on...

So who are these companies?

Resellers of ATI or Nvdia cards or these companies actually create these cards?

I don't get it.

Which one should I buy? From ASUS, Pixelview, Sapphire or directly from ATI or NVIDIA website? Is there a difference?

[shigamoto]

I'm hunting for a new graphics card as well, mainly because the fan has started to give up on my ATI Radeon.

If I got it right ATI and Nvidia are letting third party manufacturers make graphics card that uses their chip, that way they can collect license money. This means that they don't need production of their own.

As for quality I don't quite know if the third party ones are any better. I would go for ASUS because I had a stable ASUS Geforce 2 MX years ago. But that's just my personal opinion.

[damlag]

So ATI and Nvidia make only chips? I saw that it's possible to buy graphics cards from their websites as well.
P.S. BFG Technologies have good recommendations.

[supermanjnk]

You are correct, ATI and Nvidia allow third party's to use their GPU's, out of the list you gave, BFG's are pretty good, and Asus, You really won't notice to much difference between the different third party cards, one might have more mhz here, and less there. any differences between will be very slight (they could also be slightly different in the output/input ports they have)

[damlag]

Ok, thanx for clarifying.