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No, ASUS and MSI haven’t been sending reviewers juiced-up cards

By Koh Wanzi - on 23 Jun 2016, 3:23pm

No, ASUS and MSI haven’t been sending reviewers juiced-up cards

Image Source: ASUS

Controversy has been roiling the waters in the graphics card market over the past week. TechPowerUp first broke the news that ASUS and MSI had supposedly sent it review units of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 that were tweaked to run faster than cards sold through regular retail channels, which led to accusations that both manufacturers were attempting to “game” reviews with cards that were not accurate representations of actual retail performance.

EVGA – never one to miss an opportunity – even piled on, sending out a press statement highlighting that “With EVGA, what you see is what you get”. The bottom line was that EVGA didn’t deliver graphics cards with boosted clock speeds to reviewers, and review units from the company were clocked exactly the same as retail cards.

But as it turns out, ASUS and MSI may have been unfairly pilloried, even if there is some truth to the accusations. The crux of the matter lies in the fact that the review units don’t feature cherry-picked GPUs or anything like that, and customers can still enjoy the same performance from retail units. In other words, the two are essentially the same.

The problem lies in the fact that these ASUS and MSI custom cards actually support a few different clock speed profiles, which can be selected using their respective software utilities. The highest clocked profile is referred to as OC mode by both, and review cards were set to this mode by default.

Unfortunately, retail units ship in the lower clocked Gaming mode, so reviewers were technically not getting the same experience as regular customers (they need to manually enable OC mode in the software).

Image Source: MSI

Having said that, the difference in clock speeds is minuscule. In the case of the ASUS ROG Strix GTX 1080, it has a 1,759MHz base clock in Gaming mode, which increases slightly to 1,784MHz in OC mode. Even if you consider the differing boost clocks, which have a larger 38MHz gap between them, the difference is only just over 2 percent.

Both ASUS and MSI have also admitted that they deliberately set the cards to ship in OC mode, and even explained the rationale behind the move. ASUS said it did this to “save media time and effort”, and also because its cards were often “reviewed primarily on maximum performance” anyway.

MSI went with the reverse argument, saying that it enabled OC mode by default because it found many reviewers never bothered trying it out.

Ultimately, the only concern would be reviewers not testing cards from other brands in the highest clocked mode, which might give the ASUS and MSI cards an unfair edge. But while we do believe that there should be no difference between review and retail units, it’s also important to point out that there really aren’t any “special” review cards floating around (they only have different settings).

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