A user wanted to buy a special Titan graphics card from Nvidia. But back then he was broke and couldn’t afford the GPU. Now he took the chance and managed to get it for a particularly low price.
A gamer really wanted a Nvidia Titan Xp a few years ago. When the graphics card was released in 2017, it was quite expensive, as Nvidia charged 1,200 euros for it. However, that was too much for the user back then. Now, 6 years later, he got it for 300 euros, as he told on reddit.com.
But why is such a graphics card so desirable? It’s mainly due to its unique design. And you can briefly see the design in the official video from Nvidia:
The Titan xp was considered the fastest graphics card of its time, but wasn’t a good value for money
What kind of graphics card is it? The special thing about the graphics card is not the performance, but the design. Nvidia sold its graphics cards as special Collector’s Editions (via Gamestar.de):
- Nvidia sold a Titan Xp as “Galactic Empire,” featuring the symbols of the Empire in a black showcase.
- A second edition was sold as “Jedi Order” with the symbols of the Jedi Order in a white showcase.
- Additionally, the graphics cards illuminated in the corresponding colors: The Empire card glowed red, the Jedi card green, and it looks really stylish in old pictures.
Besides the unique design, the graphics card didn’t offer any more performance or other advantages: Inside, it still had the same graphics chip as a Titan Xp, and other technical features, such as the video memory, remained the same.
How good was the graphics card? The Nvidia graphics card was one of the fastest graphics cards in 2017 and ranked at the top in many benchmarks.
Nonetheless, it wasn’t really recommended even at release. This was mainly due to the price: Because at the release of the Titan Xp, you could buy the Geforce GTX 1080 Ti for half the price of the xp, which offered about 5% less performance on average than the Xp.
Many gamers preferred the almost equally fast but cheaper GTX 1080 T and invested the remaining 600 euros in other hardware.
Manufacturers regularly show limited graphics cards
Are such graphics cards unusual? Basically, many manufacturers like to use marketing tricks to convince gamers with special offers of their products. And this is also the case with graphics cards time and again.
For instance, ASUS has introduced a hardware series in Evangelion design (via asus.com). This is an anime series that is very popular in Asia.
Other developers also offer such collaborations with PC games, series or films. Such products often exist in very limited quantities to increase the players’ interest. In some cases, such graphics cards are also raffled and thus become unique collector’s items that later are worth a lot of money if they are not installed in computers.
One of these unique graphics cards was recently raffled by the developer CD Projekt Red for the “Cyberpunk 2077” release. But even here there was a catch for German users:
