AMD Sends Us ‘Verdetrol’ Performance-Enhancing Pills (Yes, Really)

If there’s one thing we’re certain of about AMD, it’s that its press relations department has a good sense of humor. Often, I’ll receive an e-mail from someone there and end up cracking up laughing, and the same thing could be said about what hit our doorstep late last week. In a UPS bubble envelope, it sounded like a pill bottle inside – and that’s exactly what it was. 

You see, AMD likes to celebrate its upcoming launches in weird ways, and for its upcoming Cape Verde-based GPUs, we were sent… performance-enhancing “Verdetrol”. These are 1GHz tablets that, as instructed, should be given to a graphics card (in the fan intake, of course) four times daily. Rx # 1337-2012, and unfortunately, no refills.

Things get interesting on the back. The top band states, “CAUTION: You should avoid prolonged or excessive exposure to direct or artificial sunlight while taking Verdetrol. All of the cool gamers are doing it, anyhow.” The second band, “Prolonged periods of 1GHz are perfectly fine. Have you tried going faster?“

The third band is my favorite, as it says, “WHEN ADMINISTERING THIS MEDICATION DO NOT hesitate to combine with another graphics card.” Finally, the last band states the uncomfortable message of, “FOR EXTERNAL USE ONLY (Let’s not get weird)“

At the front of the bottle is a QR Code, which when scanned, brings you to Verdetrol.com, a teaser site for the upcoming GPUs. Want to bet that one of them will be clocked at 1GHz?

Update: After posting, we were tipped-off to the fact that NVIDIA did something extremely similar back at the launch of its nForce 600i chipset launch in 2007. Many images of the company’s “Overclocking Vitamins” can be found in Google.