It seems there were a few hand-made cards and someone shared info, pics and hardware. You can buy a lot of interesting things on the Asian grey market, also engineering PCB or pre-production samples. You remember the Afox HD 6850 Single slot card that I've orgaized a few years ago? Same thing. A partially deactivated chip, looking like a "HD 6830", but this has never reached the final market. But it was still existing
I came from the industry and moved to media a few years ago with an own lab. And I'm not Intel, AMD, Nvidia or whatever biased and I was it never, but I hate bad products or better: the way how a few guys inside this companies made/make really good things at the end totally worse. Nearly 15 years in German quality management characterized me a little bit. This isn't any kind of nitpicking - this is only the respect for others work and the resulting product. And finally also the respect for the customers (our readers) to help them to get the best possible stuff for the money.
It was the same thing with Cooler Master / AVC and their crappy pump for the Fury X. I know a lot of people in the OEM business to collect inside info and it was me a pleasure to hit this companies a little bit. Nobody has controlled the quality. AVC made a bad product, Cooler Master hasn't controlled it, PC Partner closed the eyes and mounted this pump unit onto the PCB and AMD sent us the final boxes without any own quality control in the whole processs. This is a no-go, sorry.
I reviewed so far six 1070/1080 from four different companies and not one card was free of problems or issues. Bad or missing hysteresis, the stupid positioning of two very hot shunts on the back side of a PCB, directly below the PWM controller on the front side (big hotspot), erroneous fan modules (they stopped the mass production after my measuring of the PWM signals and changed the models) and a few other things... Don't tell me that a product is perfect. It looks only good...