Once you know a manufacturer has addressed the noise issue with MLCC caps, it’s really hard to know which is the better solution, 1 MLCC station, 2, or all the way to 6. Those capacitors don’t live in a vacuum. They are part of that entire circuit which includes the on-board power supply, many other components, the GPU, and even the circuit board itself. You can’t tell by visual inspection if one arrangement is better than another. It takes proper test equipment to really know.
As was pointed out, there are lots of different kinds of dielectrics and many more capacitance values. MLCC capacitors that small don’t have markings on them either. Once soldered down, about all you can say is it’s a cap and even that can be hard sometimes. The range of values and electrolytes/composition means boards that look identical can actually be very different. The poly caps and the MLCC caps are each good for certain frequency ranges and stored charge but it is important to remember other components and structures are also involved, and these are systems.
So without proper test equipment, our only handle on the situation is how well the board clocks. If EVGA guarantees a clock rate and the board hits it, it’s good. That’s the same for any manufacturer. With smaller and smaller transistors, we are moving into the regime where we don’t get to push the limits as much as we used to.
Without test equipment to see the actual noise and ripple, we have no way to say one board’s compliment of MLCC caps is better than a different model or manufacturer’s board. Again, these are systems and these MLCC and poly caps are part of that. The ASUS board may have more trouble with high frequency noise and need all those MLCC caps and not need the polys. The EVGA boards may be better off with a few polys in the mix to smooth the ripple. Both are probably looking for the steadiest, cleanest, and most stable power rails under the GPU.
And cost probably also factors in. Nobody likes to replace one component with 10. Ignoring actual component cost differences (probably a few pennies per board max) placing all those caps takes time and slows production lines, increases the chances of defects, etc. We have no handle on how important that is to manufacture decisions but it could be a complicating factor.
Just in general, as IC feature size gets smaller, voltages get more critical and can’t be boosted or lowered near as much as they used to. For those wanting to overclock, get the best regulated and filtered power supply you can and don’t run it at its limit. Clean power gets critical at the lower voltages these chips operate at and just helps the on-board power supplies and filtering.