HardOCP said that Nvidia has demanded that its AIBs (add in board vendors)  tell Nvidia who will be reviewing the custom RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti cards. It also wanted their personal details such as phone numbers and email addresses.

While non hacks might think this is OK, in fact it really isn’t. From these lists of reviewers submitted to Nvidia , it has put together its own list of "approved reviewers" who are allowed to sample review cards.

Nvidia has forbidden the distribution of drivers with their review cards unless the reviewer has signed an Nvidia multi-year NDA to log into a protected site which is most likely a secured version of GeForce Experience in order to obtain the driver, and download from there into a specific machine with the new RTX card being present.

This means that if any leaks tip up it is likely not seeing cards benchmarked with its launch driver.

Anyway that NDA is rather unsignable by a real reporter. Legal experts say that it is so broad you could land a 747 on it sideways. They ignore any exclusions which are provided for in common law. In short a reporter is signing away their soul for five years to Nvidia.

“While we do think it is possible to source 2080 hardware, our review would be irresponsible without the correct drivers. Good job, NVIDIA, good job. That is exerting excellent control”, HardOCP wrote.