If you've been following the news and leaks on the upcoming freshly released EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti K|ngp|n, you will have noticed the community excitement around the graphics card. In a press release posted by Hexus you can find all new marketing and product features that come with the card.

One particular feature that caught my attention is the "Ultimate OC Project". It's not a product feature, but a whole new way of looking at selling overclocking products. To quite EVGA's official website:

"With this new card EVGA is also introducing a brand new way to purchase, by allowing you to select the best card to suit your needs. For the first time ever, EVGA is introducing a way to select your approximate GPU ASIC (approximate OC performance) Quality before purchasing. Every single piece of silicon, whether it be a CPU or GPU, varies when it comes to maximum overclocking. On GPU's, ASIC quality is one way to determine potential overclock performance. Please note this ASIC Quality* DOES NOT guarantee any specific overclock performance, it is merely a guide. The higher the ASIC Quality, the higher the potential overclock performance and the rarer the GPU. Of course, this can and will vary."

In short: there are different price points for the card, depending on the (alleged) overclocking potential based on the ASIC quality. The price difference varies from EUR €930 / USD $850 for a 72% ASIC to EUR €1150 / USD $1050 for a 80%+ ASIC card. Note: the GTX 780 Ti K|ngp|n card launched around EUR €880 early last year.

With emphasis on potential overclock, it's interesting to see such a radical new approach to selling retail overclocking products. I can't recall any other major hardware vendor doing anything like this. Whether this will be a successful or failed approach at up-selling overclocking hardware remains to be seen, but it's good to see companies try to diversify approaches to entice people to buy higher quality products. It's good to see something else than the race-to-the-bottom approach!

What do you think?