At the recently concluded German Open 2022 badminton tournament, the Malaysian duo of Goh Sze Fei and Nur Izzuddin Rumsani managed to beat their Chinese opponents Liu Yu Chen and Ou Xuan Yi in the men’s doubles finals, winning their first ever World Tour title. However, plenty of people online quickly pointed out that during their podium celebrations, their trophies were actually…. graphics cards? In fact, other winners were given these graphics cards too.
However, while it may seem pretty amusing to think that graphics cards have become so valuable that they’re now handed out as trophies, there’s actually another simpler reason behind it too. This year’s edition of the German Open is officially known as the Yonex Gainward German Open 2022 for sponsorship reasons, and while Yonex is widely known to badminton fans as a major sports equipment manufacturer, Gainward might not be such a familiar name to them.
PC gaming fans though will likely have heard of them, as Gainward is actually a pretty well known computer hardware brand that manufactures graphics cards. Since 2005, they’ve been a subsidiary of Taiwanese company Palit Microsystems. Palit themselves have plenty of brands under their belt, such as Galax and KFA2. The Gainward brand has predominantly been an Europe-only marque, but in recent years has been available in other regions as well. With Gainward as a sponsor of the German Open, it makes sense that they were given Gainward-branded graphics cards as part of their winnings.
The graphics card that Goh and Izzuddin won by the way were the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. It comes with 8GB of GDDR6X VRAM and has a boost clock of 1.77GHz with 6,144 CUDA cores. Specifically, Goh and Izzuddin got the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Phoenix, which on Shopee can be bought for RM3,979 and above. That’s a far bit higher than NVIDIA’s recommended starting retail price of RM2,850, but you will be getting a much more powerful cooling solution with a triple fan cooler and that sweet, sweet addressable RGB lighting too.
Regardless of what Goh and Izzuddin got as trophies though, it’s fair to say that we’re all proud of their achievements, and can’t wait to see the pairing do even better in the future. Congratulations again guys!
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