A bizarre mix-up has left two owners of brand-new ASUS TUF graphics cards with a rare out-of-the-box experience you must see to believe. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, a man walks into a bar. . . well, in this case, two people and one at a MicroCenter, while the other reported getting their card from Canada Computers, and each had a somewhat unique story to tell after unsealing and opening their new purchases.
First up is Redditor Fantastic-Ad8410, who stated they had recently had some problems with a newly purchased ASUS TUF AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT. After attempting to resolve those issues, they decided to take advantage of MicroCenter’s well-known customer service and returned the card for a replacement. However, after getting back home and unpacking the new card, it was quickly discovered that something was afoot. Somehow, the card ended up with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX cooler instead of its own cooler, or at least the shroud, hence they ended up with an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT RTX Edition.
“I went back to microcenter to exchange, got home to unbox it and got this. You can’t make this up.”
-Fantastic-Ad8410
This is not the end of the story. While the above was covered by VideoCardz, it was discovered in their forums that another mix-up with an ASUS TUF graphics card had also been reported. Redditor Blood-Wolfe posted a shot a month earlier of an NVIDIA graphics card that had an AMD Radeon cooler/shroud, hence they in turn got an ASUS TUF GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Radeon edition.
“I just got a new Asus Tuf GeForce RTX 5070ti card and I opened it and on top it says GeForce but on the side (that’s visible looking at my computer) it says Radeon.”
-Blood-Wolfe
It would appear that someone is asleep at the wheel at an ASUS assembly plant somewhere. In each image, it’s clearly seen that while the GPU backplates are correct, their cooler/shrouds have somehow been mismatched. Both posters said they installed their graphics cards, and each worked as expected and were identified by their PC’s as being the correct model, a relief for sure given some of the scam/shenanigans which have been on the rise with swapped parts.