ASUS and MSI Accused of Sampling Review Units of GPUs With Higher Clock Speeds Compared To Retail Units
The "secret" boost is very small. This is nothing totally new. This type of thing has been going on for years. For example, ASUS used to always overclock motherboards I was interested in by about 1 percent -- to "seem to be" the fastest and best.
The examples mentioned in the above article were Nvidia 1080 and 1070 cards from ASUS and MSI. They've done it with AMD parts in the past. So, if ASUS or MSI is just a bit faster, its not necessarily better technology -- it easily could be a minor overclock (relative to standard).
To repeat a point about RX-480 versus Nvidia 980 parts: RX-480 closes some of the gap in DX12 and Vulcan (versus DX11 benchmarks) -- due to the circuitry (not due to the drivers alone). Some older AMD cards also contain circuitry that does better with the new graphics software (DX12).
So, if one is buying to play the latest DX12 games over the next couple years, pundits are saying RX-480 "should" (not guaranteed) close some of the gap with the 970/980 products (compared to the DX11 benchmarks published so far). For completeness, Nvidia 1080 and 1070 circuits are up to date.
Bottom line: We have to wait for the full RX-480 test reports in actual games before we know what to buy (and what to avoid).
