Look at this:
ASUS and MSI accused of sending modified cards to the press
http://videocardz.com/61121/asus-and-msi-accused-of-sending-modified-cards-to-the-press
Source: http://www.hardware.fr/news/14693/gtx-10x0-asus-msi-bios-special-presse.html
According Damien Triolet, a known and respected GPU reviewer (who, as you might remember, helped to unravel the secrets in GTX 970 memory allocation problem), ASUS and MSI are sending cards with modified BIOSes to the press. Such software enables more power on review samples, which leads to increased frequencies and better results overall.
Damien reports that those ‘optimized’ BIOSes are a very common problem in GPU industry. Manufacturers often encourage GPU reviewers to enable special overclocking presets before attempting to review those cards. Luckily, with little success.
The alternative is to supply optimized BIOSes to the press, so such settings are enabled by default. This usually means a gain of few MHz. Something that you won’t get on retail sample.
For such reason Damien asks manufacturers to supply retail BIOSes for his tests. Obviously manufactures are not eager to supply such software.
The problem was discovered with MSI GTX 1080 GAMING X and ASUS GTX 1070 STRIX, so might want to take reviews of those cards with a grain of salt. Gigabyte on the other hand does not use such practices with its G1 GAMING Series.
UPDATE: Guys over at TechPowerUP have just confirmed that the problem is present with their MSI sample as well:
Great, now we do not only have to worry about biased reviews, but also about "fake" cards sent to reviewers :-/
Please excuse my bad English.
Currently gaming on a PC with an i5-4670k@stock (for now), 16Gb RAM 1600 MHz and a GTX 1070
Steam / Live / NNID : jonxiquet Add me if you want, but I'm a single player gamer.
