1 Editor (opens in new tab) unknowingly purchased an engineering sample (ES) of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titan X graphics card, one of the best graphics cards ever. It’s common to find ES samples of Intel or AMD processors on the second-hand market, but it’s rare to see ES sample graphics cards, let alone the Titan family of graphics cards.
The rare GeForce GTX Titan X has all the decorations of the retail sample except for the display output. While the original has a DVI port, an HDMI 2.0 port, and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs, the ES sample retains only HDMI 2.0 and one DisplayPort output. Due to the lack of video output, the Redditor initially believed someone had been scammed with a fake Titan graphics card. However, a rep on the Nvidia forums has clarified that the graphics card is an engineering sample, judging by the part number starting with 699.
“I don’t know where this came from, but sometimes we seed our partners with engineering cards, and unfortunately, sometimes it hits the market,” he said. Nvidia representative (opens in new tab) on a Reddit thread.
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Launched in 2015, the GeForce GTX Titan X utilized GM200 (Maxwell) silicon and housed up to 8 billion transistors in a size of 601 mm². At the time, TSMC was manufacturing his GM200 for Nvidia on his 28nm process node. Redditor’s GPU-Z screenshot (opens in new tab) It didn’t reveal anything spectacular about the engineering sample. It still has 3,072 CUDA cores running at 1,000 MHz and 12 GB of GDDR5 memory at 7 Gbps. Being an engineering sample, the graphics card was boosted up to 1,076 MHz, 13 MHz lower than the GeForce GTX Titan X on the market.
The GeForce GTX Titan X is way too long to be a gaming monster by today’s standards. Graphics card performance is about the same as the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti.lady editor tested (opens in new tab) that is red dead redemption 2 At the maximum preset of 1080p (1920×1080), the graphics card was only able to deliver an average frame rate of 37.95 FPS. The GeForce GTX Titan X is a great collector’s item and hangs on your wall. The Redditor did not disclose the price paid for the ES graphics card, only stating that it was purchased on eBay.
Nvidia launched the GeForce GTX Titan X seven years ago for $999. It’s interesting how times have changed when you could have a flagship graphics card in one grand back then. Today, for the same amount he can’t even buy a GeForce RTX 4080.
