Well, LTC has been double today's price before, but yeah, triple would be a stretch.
Regarding Bitmain, I've seen from several people that they got machines that had dust on the fans when taken out of the box. Haven't had this myself, but I'm not a hardware buyer. Plus there have been reports on spikes in difficulty up to a month before shipping was scheduled for the first batch. No hard evidence, at least not of recent date.
From a QC perspective, you'd want each machine to run at least a day to verify nothing is the matter, the question is how long they "take" this "day" for testing. I could argue 7 days is a reasonable testing period too for quality control with mining machines like these.
Then, from a business perspective, it would be insane not to have machines you promised to deliver 3 weeks from that day run as part of the "quality control" when they're basically printing money at a 4 times higher rate than any other machine on the market.
So summarizing, I'd be surprised if they didn't do any runs before shipment.