They could have gotten a good deal on binned HD+ ones where they just were able to lower the resolution instead. Wouldn’t really know unless you open one up and look at the parts.
This is clearly on NVIDIA. The PCI spec clearly shows that pins 5 and 6 are for SMBus, even if 99% of boards don’t include those pins you still need to follow spec if your card doesn’t support it or would have issues with it.
“MRP”… “hey Nintendo, don’t you mean MSRP?”… “no, there’s no suggestion about it”