Every chip is binned.
To be as you say fair random chips from the production run would be used , however Nvidia will be dispatching these special review packs direct , and they always play fair right???.
Every microchip is "binned". Binned just means it's sorted in bins. Cherry-picking/golden samples is actually kind of the "opposite"; it's sorting within the bin, or binning inside the bin.
Most reviews conduct testing differently from any built computer. Today's GPUs and CPUs do aggressive boosting and throttling, and small variation in cooling conditions can easily skew the results quite a bit.
Like him or not, his math stands up, companies are still sending cherry picked samples.
His math never hold up. This is typical conspiracy material, they always build a train of thought where the initial parts may seem not too far off, doing several fatal presumptions along the way. This theory is not even an apples-to-apples comparison, so it's worthless, there are numerous sources of error:
- Reviews do different stability tests to qualify a chip for a certain speed. One reviewer might say a chip is stable at 5.2 GHz, another does more stability testing and ends up with a more conservative 5.0 GHz on the same sample. I assume the guys at "silicon lottery" have a standardized routine, but this is not the same test reviewers do.
- Reviews do things under different testing conditions, but most do it on an open rig, which will achieve thermals completely different from a closed rig. The temperature and throttling of CPUs and GPUs can be quite different on various test setups, and adds easily a 5% variation.
- Vcore is across reviews is not reliable, it varies from motherboard to motherboard, and can easily vary 0.1-0.2V. GamersNexus did a whole video on this.
- Reviews are conducted under different environmental conditions. Not only ambient temperature, but also pressure and humidity affects the thermal capacity of air.
- Overclocking have many more parameters than just max clock and vcore voltage.
This is more than plenty to discard his "proof". The only way to prove the theory of golden samples to reviewers is to do an apples-to-apples comparison with a good sample size (>=10) under "identical" conditions, otherwise each of them will add a small margin of error, which will stack up and become a large error in the final result.
In conclusion; there is still no evidence that Intel, AMD or Nvidia is shipping golden samples to reviewers.
And just think about it, if they ship golden samples for reviewers for one generation, then they have to ship even better and better golden samples for the next generations, otherwise it will make the next generations look bad. None of these vendors are stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot like that, so myth busted.