One manufacturer's boo-boo is another person's GPU of the decade.
When PC hardware manufacturers make mistakes, it’s usually in the form of a problem. It might be a loose-fitting cable, a fan that spins too slowly, or thermal putty that oozes everywhere. Either way, it’s rarely a good thing, and when it happens, you’ll want a replacement asap. Not so in the case of one lucky Redditor, who suffered this exact scenario, only to be issued with the ultimate in rare graphics cards: An AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT plastered with Nvidia RTX logos and branding.
It’s a tale that many of us have experienced at some point in our PC gaming lives. Well, the first part at least. Reddit user u/Fantastic-Ad8410 bought a new Asus TUF Gaming Radeon RX 9070 XT, only to find that it wouldn’t recognise when a second monitor was plugged into it.
So, they did the natural thing, returned to the retailer and picked up a like-for-like replacement. But upon opening the box, it wasn’t another Asus TUF Gaming Radeon RX 9070 XT staring at them. No, it was an Asus TUF Gaming Radeon GeForce RTX RX 9070 XT graphics card.
It’s clearly just a manufacturing hiccup, where something has gone amiss with the production line that churns out the many thousands of heatsink shrouds that adorn every graphics card. If you look at Asus’ listing for its TUF Gaming Radeon RX 9070 XT and compare it to that for its TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, you’ll see that it’s the same shroud.
The Scooby Doo mystery here is whether it was meant to be an RTX shroud first, before getting the extra Radeon stamp of approval on the back, or the other way around. Mind you, the bigger mystery to me is why the Reddit user is wondering (at the time of reading their post) about whether they should return the card or not.
Sure, a printing error like this is essentially worthless, but I’d keep it forever and maybe even look to see if I could tweak the card’s BIOS, so that the model name was permanently an AMD Radeon Nvidia GeForce RTX RX 9070 XT. Then just mess up every benchmarking database with countless runs of my mythical, multi-manufacturer GPU.
I have to say, out of all the production cock-ups that Asus could do to a graphics card, I’d take this one every day of the week. And heck, it’s a million times better than opening your graphics card’s box and getting to stare at a backpack instead of two thousand dollars’ worth of GPU.
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