Jiacheng Liu recently stumbled upon an engineering prototype of the NVIDIA GTX 2070 graphics card, potentially one of several prototypes NVIDIA was experimenting with before the card’s official launch in October 2018. Nearly six years later, these pre-production samples, featuring different configurations, have somehow surfaced in the market.
The card Liu acquired is fitted with a TU106 GPU but has a lower core count than the final specifications. Rather than the standard 2304 cores, this card has 2176 cores. However, other configurations remain consistent. Liu proactively restored the card to working order by flashing the retail BIOS onto it.
The endeavor proved successful, though not devoid of challenges. Initially, fresh out of the box, the card achieved a score of 8661 points in the 3DMark TimeSpy GPU test. However, after maximizing the power limit, the score rose to 9552 points. It was only after forcefully flashing the unaltered RTX 2070 retail BIOS onto this model that the card surpassed the performance of a standard retail 2070, reaching an impressive 10064 points. It’s noteworthy that overclocking played a role in attaining this outcome, conclusively indicating that the 2176 core configuration was not simply a software restriction but indeed a physically disabled core count.
Certainly, one of the most intriguing facets of this revelation is that the sample retains the old GeForce GTX logo, whereas the eventual model embraced the RTX branding instead. This detail hints that NVIDIA might have initially contemplated adhering to the GTX branding, at least during the validation phase of these cards.
Leakers frequently provide varying specifications for the same forthcoming model, yet the disparities in the information don’t necessarily discredit the leak. Instead, it could suggest that the leaker had access to various engineering samples. This scenario has occurred previously; for instance, consider the case of the RTX 3080 Ti 20GB models, which were reported but never officially released by NVIDIA. However, they later surfaced on the Russian second-hand market.
Source: Jiacheng Lio