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One lucky Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 buyer thought they’d scored an unexpected upgrade after unboxing their new Founders Edition graphics card to find an RTX 5090 inside. However, while the branding on the card says it’s an RTX 5090, it looks like Nvidia might be at fault by shipping out a card with the wrong GPU shroud installed, in a somewhat unfortunate quality control error.
While this is a bit of an embarrassing error from Nvidia, it’s a small blip on an otherwise fairly successful launch of its new RTX 50-series GPUs. As our RTX 5090 review shows, these cards are already among the best graphics cards on the market, even if getting your hands on RTX 5090 stock right now is tricky. Small QC errors like this one aren’t usual, but high production demands will lead to human error from time to time.
This unusual RTX 5080 story came via a post on the Linux Tech Tips subreddit by Reddit user EssDee3D. In the post, EssDee3D showed off a picture showing the open packaging for an RTX 5080, but with an RTX 5090-branded GPU inside.
While EssDee3D didn’t immediately provide evidence to back up this odd error, they did post a YouTube short video a few hours later, showing the 5090-branded card installed and running on a PC. In the video, the Redditor goes on to show that the card is detected as an RTX 5080 inside Task Manager on Windows 11.
No extra luck for this Redditor, then. He didn’t bag himself an RTX 5090 by surprise, and the card he did receive is still the RTX 5080 he ordered, even if it does have the wrong label on the card. No other reports of mislabeled cards have been reported, and Nvidia hasn’t commented on the issue itself. For now, we’re chalking this up to be a rare manufacturing process failure – no harm, no foul.
If you’re interested in the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 yourself, you might want to check out our RTX 5080 review for our thoughts on this brand-new $999 card. With stock shortages expected to continue for some time, you’ll have to check out our where to buy 5080 guide for the latest daily updates on where to grab one for yourself.
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