The peculiarity of my Aeolus 7800 GT

I was turning on my PC last night and as usual, the monitor will display the BIOS reading of the graphics card installed in the system. Initially I didn't notice this, it happened in a glimpse that somehow there's something strange about the VGA BIOS reading. I restarted the PC and with the virtue of 1 MP handphone camera, I took a snap at it real quick. Let's have a look :




There it is, one line that says it all, "Engineering Release - Not For Production Use". If I am one of AnandTech's hardware reviewers, I probably won't bother about this at all. Hardware reviewers are regularly being provided with engineering sample of a product to be reviewed.

Then how on earth that I could end up buying an engineering sample of 7800 GT in the retail market? This really boils my blood as this is the second time I think that I've been tricked into buying an 'unpure' retail graphics card. First one was the former Sapphire X800 GTO FireBlade, where I discovered that its BIOS has been tampered with. Why not? A default clock of 500/550 core/memory as reported by RaBIT? Malaysia PC retailers must have been fuggin' retarded! Not all of them, but enough to fool a few enthusiasts around! Talk about customer rights to curb unhealthy business ethique here? I must be dreaming!!

Anyway, I made some further investigation regarding the 7800 GT BIOS. I used NiBiTor from MKVTech to go into the details of the BIOS. Guess what I've found??



The 'Engineering Release' tickbox is ticked, which proves that my 7800 GT is indeed an engineering sample. I also made the same test with a few other 7800 BIOSes : reference NVidia card, XFX, Palit and ASUS. None of them indicated an engineering sample BIOS.

Another thing that I observed was that the BIOS revision, 05.70.02.13.00 seemed a bit odd since even the reference NVidia BIOS's revision itself was 05.70.02.13.01 while the other BIOSes were even reporting .02 and even .12 for XFX.

I guess this can be listed as the fourth reason why this card was sold very cheap for a 7800 GT.
Either the retailer or AOpen itself is responsible for this mess..