Home Gaming The GPU review conspiracy: are vendors sending overclocked review samples?

The GPU review conspiracy: are vendors sending overclocked review samples?

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GPUs

There’s nothing quite like unboxing a brand new bit of computer hardware, installing it – and then running your first new game or benchmark and seeing higher number or better frame rates. For a PC gamer, it’s genuinely one of life’s greatest pleasures.

The sort of hardware that will give you that sort of joy is, admittedly, terribly expensive – so it’s generally best to do a lot of research, checking up on reviews and benchmarks from your favourite online hardware sites, or even magazines.

But if, through no fault of their own, those sites were lying to you? That seems to be what’s been happening, with reports from both hardware.fr and techpowerup  (via WCCFTech) suggesting that Graphics cards vendors have been a little dishonest. How?

They’ve apparently been sending out review samples that are clocked higher than their retail counterparts. Two of the most prominent manufacturers seems to have been implicated, and they’re probably my favourite vendors: MSI and ASUS.

Take a look at this comparison shot from Techpowerup, showing the clock speed differences between retail and review sample units of a 1080.

MSI-GeForce-GTX-1070-Overclocked

While the differences in clock speeds are marginal really and by themselves aren’t enough to cause controversy, they are just high enough that outlets might suggest they’re better cards than competitor ones. It’s worth noting that these higher frequencies are in the card BIOSEs, and not just soft overclocks enabled through software.

Says Techpowerup:

“The cards TechPowerUp has been receiving run at a higher software-defined clock speed profile than what consumers get out of the box. Consumers have access to the higher clock speed profile, too, but only if they install a custom app by the companies, and enable that profile. This, we feel, is not 100% representative of retail cards, and is questionable tactics by the two companies.”

And it’s been happening for a while, too.

MSI-Boosted-Clocks-For-Graphics-Cards

It’s such a minor boost that I don’t see there being any grand inquiries or anything, but if this is all true, it is a little murky – and at the same time, sad and honestly, unnecessary.

 

Last Updated: June 17, 2016

5 Comments

  1. Alien Emperor Trevor

    June 17, 2016 at 13:09

    MSI pulling a Volkswagen?

    Reply

  2. Hammersteyn_hates_Raid0

    June 17, 2016 at 13:29

    Maybe the reviewers gets to use the Nvidia cards that has the full 4 gigs?

    Reply

    • Deceased

      June 17, 2016 at 19:44

      XD

      Reply

  3. Raptor Rants

    June 17, 2016 at 13:40

    That’s a bit suspect.

    Reply

  4. Spy Master Tokashi

    June 17, 2016 at 14:21

    *puts on tin foil hat*

    AMD has white agents in MSI and Asus that set the profile higher. The reviewers looked at the history of Jan Van Riebeeck that arrived at the Southern Africa coast 2000 years ago and thought something was strange, not strange enough to take a deeper look into it but when Apartheid started they realised that THIS WAS A SETUP!

    Reply

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