Friday, May 18th 2018
EVGA Says Goodbye to Driver DVDs
Jacob Freeman, Global Product Management Director at EVGA, has confirmed via a Tweet that future EVGA motherboards (H370 Stinger included) will no longer come with a driver DVD. Instead, the consumer will receive a sleek 8 GB USB 2.0 flash drive with all the necessary drivers and software. While some users might argue that it's good practice to get the latest drivers from the motherboard support page, you still need to install the network driver to access the internet after a fresh Windows installation. EVGA's decision is a well thought-out one as not all system builders include an optical drive in their builds or want to spend $15 on one just to install a driver. The included flash drive is re-writeable, so users can store other things on it if desired. Jacob commented that the cost of including a standard 8 GB USB 2.0 flash drive is about twenty times that of an old-school DVD. Nevertheless, EVGA motherboard prices will not increase to cover the cost.
Source:
Jacob Freeman's Twitter
45 Comments on EVGA Says Goodbye to Driver DVDs
Other manufacturers should honestly follow suite. even just a crappy 2-4GB one, so long as you can run a linux distro off it after you've copied all the mobo software off it, it'll be put to good use.
And I love what EVGA is doing.
The cheapest blank DVD on Newegg costs $1.49, while the cheapest flashdrive costs around $3.35 (2GB). $5 can actually be enough to get a decent brand-name drive 8GB stick in retail.
Also add a cost of keeping the old, loud, expensive and power-hungry DVD cloning rig and spending lots of time on writing data comparing to USB, printing company's logo on an envelope, and you've already passed the break-even point.
I'm pretty sure that an OEM bulk of 2GB drives w/ read-only lock capability can be bought for less than a buck in bulk from China, so I really like this move.
Last week I even gave away the last remnants of laptop DVD drives from my office parts pile to an old guy across the street. He's a 70-something electronics enthusiast, so he's gonna use those for parts for a DIY home security system and cheap stepper motors.
5.25" bay has some other useful things to put into it, like a cheap chinese card reader with extra 4 usb ports, eSATA and volume control for FP_AUDIO.
Or even let you plug the drive into another internet connected computer, and run an update program to update the flash drive automatically.
Now that is something I'd like to see.I'd believe that number is close to accurate actualy. My mother-in-law worked for Sony DADC in the disc factory up until about a year ago. The manufactured discs for all types of clients, and I believe the going rate for a manufactured DVD in a paper sleeve was something like $0.12-0.15 a piece depending on the number of colors in the label. I can also believe that a custom printed 8GB flash drive with data pre-loaded on it could cost in the neighborhood of $3 a piece.
Also, I've got probably a good 100+ blank DVDs I tend to make use of from time to time to back up data - so I'll probably forever have a DVD burner on my computer.
I'd call "bunk"... that EVGA is saying the CD/write/artwork/envelope is that much less. There all kinds of promotional things like these or credit cards type that are super cheap even when printed with a Logo and loaded with a say companies catalog. I've seen such promotional Chiclets be like 3 cents apiece at like 1k volumes. Heck here the best part they buy them "unloaded" and during production flash the particular files instead of buy tons of CD then have to inventory control the stocking levels, or have to throw a bunch in the trash when they EOL the motherboard.