One Redditor has bought an engineering sample (ES) of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX Titan X graphics card, which was one of the best graphics cards. While it is quite easy to get ES samples of Intel or AMD processors on the second-hand market, it is not every day that you get to see an ES sample graphics card, much less one from the Titan family. 

The rare GeForce GTX Titan X has all the dressing of a retail sample except for the display outputs. While the original consists of a DVI port, an HDMI 2.0 port, and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs, the ES sample only retains the HDMI 2.0 and one of the DisplayPort outputs. The lack of video outputs made the Redditor think that someone had scammed him with a fake Titan graphics card. But an Nvidia forum representative has clarified that the graphics card is an engineering sample, after making a judgment by the part number that starts with 699. 

A reply from an Nvidia representative in the Reddit thread says, they are unaware of the source but they sometimes seed engineering cards to partners and it occasionally winds up on some marketplace. 

Launched in 2015, the GeForce GTX Titan X leveraged the GM200 (Maxwell) silicon, which measures 601 mm2 and housed up to eight billion transistors. TSMC produced the GM200 for Nvidia on the 28nm process node. The Redditor’s GPU-Z screenshot did not disclose anything spectacular regarding the engineering sample. It still has 3,072 CUDA cores operating at 1,000 MHz and 12GB of GDDR5 memory at 7 Gbps. Being an engineering sample, the graphics card boosted up to 1,076 MHz, 13 MHz lower than on the retail GeForce GTX Titan X. 

The GeForce GTX Titan X is too long to be a gaming monster if we consider today’s standards. The graphics card performs in the same ballpark as the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. The Redditor tested it in Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1080p (1920x1080) with maximum preset, and the graphics card only managed to provide an average framerate of 37.95 FPS. The GeForce GTX Titan X is a nice collector’s item and belongs on a wall. The Redditor did not share the cost he paid for the ES graphics card, only that he purchased it on eBay. 

Nvidia launched the GeForce GTX Titan X at $999 seven years ago. It is hilarious to see how times changed when one grand could get you a flagship graphics card back then. These days, you cannot even purchase a GeForce RTX 4080 for the same price.