Associate
No one is saying the cooler is special in any way, it's an unusual design but most of us know that's mostly for aesthetics and not really for the cooling. With most of the decent AIB cards running cooler. But there's been loads of reported estimates that the cooler/shroud itself is $150 on its own, and that's just to produce it, not the R&D that went into it. That was leaked and reported on by loads of mainstream PC/hardware sites. All of the speculation at the time, prior to release made people assume that due to this the FE cards would be uniquely expensive and the reality turned out that they weren't, not only were they price fixed but they were basically as cheap or cheaper than AIBs.
All the evidence taken together it's super obvious this is just marketing, they want to be able to show you the slide I showed above and be able to claim that while not getting sued for false advertising. And so produce just enough of the card to maintain that illusion and drip feed them out. Meanwhile keep a lid on how many have actually been sold. We did get to see some leaked numbers of expected deliveries to 3rd party retailers such as the one picked to supply the UK and they were extremely small in number and in very infrequent drops. Who on earth price fixes their own products when they could make a killing on them?
All the evidence taken together it's super obvious this is just marketing, they want to be able to show you the slide I showed above and be able to claim that while not getting sued for false advertising. And so produce just enough of the card to maintain that illusion and drip feed them out. Meanwhile keep a lid on how many have actually been sold. We did get to see some leaked numbers of expected deliveries to 3rd party retailers such as the one picked to supply the UK and they were extremely small in number and in very infrequent drops. Who on earth price fixes their own products when they could make a killing on them?
.
