At NVIDIA’s GeForce 20 series launch back in August 2018, the company’s CEO Jensen Huang jokingly mentioned something about announcing a GTX 1180 graphics card. The rumors at that time were talking about a GeForce RTX branding which was soon to debut. This GTX model never made it to market, however, we do have reason to believe that it wasn’t just a joke but NVIDIA was in fact planning to launch the GTX brand after all.
A Reddit user recently stumbled across what appears to be an engineering sample of the GTX 2080 graphics card. The card has the same reference cooler design, with the GTX branding. There is no logo on the front or backplate which says it is 2080.
It appears as if the card has been bought off eBay for only $360. The prototype looks similar to the card which has been posted on Reddit by the user. The seller has been using these cards for crypto-mining. The sticker on the back mentions that it is a PG180 board which is the same board which is on the RTX 2080 graphics card.
It is not often that we see NVIDIA prototypes; they are extremely rare, particularly for the gaming series and the Founders Edition. The card’s performance matches that of the retail unit so the gamers would just treat it like any other GPU while enthusiasts would value it like a collector’s item.
Via Reddit