I once had a Biostar GF7050V-M7 which also booted up with an 'engineering release' of a BIOS. The motherboard was just a normal production model. Not sure why they flashed an engineering release but apparently it's not 'uncommon'.

Interesting, I wanted to remove the metal shielding (cooler) from the board but I doubt my boss would approve 🤣

Seen it many times, but cant remember on which boards (could be winfast). They just were too lazy to get new bios or edit it.

I saw the same message on an early GeForce3 BIOS. In that case, the date codes were quite early and the revision stamped on the GPU was older than what one of the early review articles mentioned. I never noticed anything wrong with the card though, it just worked like any other card.