The silly thing is there are a lot of cases of manufacturers just cutting the extra pipelines etc. and selling the card for less.
Makes a lot of sense.
It's far more likely that the cheaper card has a GPU chip that failed one or more tests. Rather than write it off as a total loss, they figure out if it can be salvaged for use in a lesser card. Intel has done this for years with their CPU's, at least since the days of the 486SX. That was a 486DX that didn't pass its floating point tests. Intel would just disable the floating point processor and slap a different ID on the lid. Getting 70% of the manufacturing cost recovered, instead of losing 100% on that chip moves a lot of cash to the top line.
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