XFX Pushes the Marketing Envelope

A little over a week ago, an eBay listing went up that put a very desirable Radeon HD 5970 up for grabs. The exact model comes from XFX, and includes the cool gun case that’s been talked about for some time. As ordinary HD 5970’s generally go for $600 – $700 on the market, such an auction would have been tempting for a lot of people… if not for the $10,000+ price tag. But to be fair, the card does have 4GB of GDDR5!

Since auctions with extremely high prices are not uncommon, I pretty much ignored the listing. I did however re-tweet a post our good friend Terry Makedon at ATI made to his feed, which was what originally tipped me off to the auction. So what’s the scoop, and how on earth is any HD 5970 card worth $10,000 or more?

As last week progressed, a lot of bizarre “facts” came to light. The auction page states that the card is #68 of a lot of 1,000, making it rather rare. But despite that, even other very limited products rarely go so high in price. A watch or something fancy I could understand, but a graphics card? Nothing quite added up. Then, apparently news come to light that the card was actually stolen.

After this point, the story started to get really weird. A YouTube video was posted that showed two teens goofing around and raiding an XFX warehouse, and after facing death during a shootout, one of them gets away with the exact same card that’s up for auction on eBay. In the end, the entire thing was staged (the company admitted to it on the eBay auction page), and the auction is nothing more than a marketing ploy to both promote XFX and sell a ridiculously expensive graphics card.

The entire thing is rather humorous, but many are wondering if XFX crossed the line, since it claimed that the card was stolen only to prove later on that the entire thing was staged. What are your thoughts? Too far, or a case of “I should have thought of that first!”?

You have no idea how hard it was for me to get this card. I don’t even think it has an official release date yet! I don’t have a box, packaging, user manuals, or even drivers but I am sure they will be released online soon. It does come with a pretty awesome GUN CASE though… These are the only specs I could find on the XFX HD 5970 Black Edition Limited…