Jiacheng Liu recently stumbled upon an engineering prototype of the NVIDIA GTX 2070 graphics card, possibly one of several prototypes NVIDIA was testing ahead of the card's official launch in October 2018. Nearly six years later, these pre-production prototypes feature different configurations. Somehow it got into the market.

The card Liu received is equipped with a TU106 GPU but its base numbers are lower than the final specifications. Instead of the standard 2304 cores, this card has 2176 cores. However, other settings remain constant. Leo restored the card to active working order by flashing the retail BIOS onto it.

The effort proved successful, though not without its challenges. Initially, out of the box, the card scored 8661 points in the 3DMark TimeSpy GPU test. However, after maximizing the power limit, the score increased to 9552 points. Only after force-flashing the unmodified RTX 2070 retail BIOS on this model did the card outperform the standard retail 2070, reaching an impressive 10064 points. It's worth noting that overclocking played a role in achieving this result, conclusively showing that the 2176 core configuration wasn't just a software restriction, but actually a physically handicapped core count.

Certainly, one of the most interesting aspects of this reveal is that the prototype retains the old GeForce GTX logo, while the final model embraces the RTX branding instead. This detail suggests that NVIDIA may have initially considered sticking with GTX branding, at least during the validation phase of these cards.

Leakers often provide different specifications for the same upcoming model, yet discrepancies in information do not necessarily discredit the leak. Instead, it may suggest that Laker had access to a variety of engineering artifacts. This scenario has happened before. For example, consider the case of the RTX 3080 Ti 20GB models, which were reported but never officially released by NVIDIA. However, they later appeared on the Russian second-hand market.

Source: Jiacheng Liu