From what I understand, the main company responsible for the design sells the rights to manufacture to each of these companies, and provides them with a "reference" board design. They have a basic design to follow and have to include certain hardware per ATi's or Nvidia's request (like the GPU itself, memory types, etc.) and they can come up with the rest themselves. The color of the board, fan, location of the chip can all be different between each manufacturer as long as it still contains the actual Radeon or Geforce chip, memory, etc. So the main difference between the cards themselves is just the look and layout of them. Different manufacturers usually hand out different software and drivers with their cards though which is what makes you want to buy one over another usually. In most side-by-side tests that I have seen, the same card e.g. Nvidia GeForce Ultra 5900 made by different manufacturers, (Asylum, Creative, etc.) do not have a very noticable difference in performance. Some companies might use "cheaper" components such as the board its all soldered to, or its made in a country with cheaper labor, or offer a CD with only drivers on it instead of a bunch of free programs to be able to offer basically the exact same card only $100 cheaper. One time I tried to save money by buying an "OEM" (Direct from factory) Radeon 64 as opposed to a "Retail" (Store bought) Card. I later found out that while I saved around $70 buying the OEM card, the memory was set to a lower clock speed. This was easily remedied by getting the drivers to overclock it, but it was still sneaky to sell the same card with a slower speed just to make it cheaper. -- From what I know, ATi doesn't do this anymore. Hope this helps...

I think yes because the performance as well as the price i've seen like the radeon 9600. Naturally, I would always go for the factory direct cards.

Performance, and quality can differ greatly.