@@northwestrepair This is a good example of , " You pay peanuts, you get monkeys " . But now the question is, does the fake AD102 core , which you identify as a GA102 3080Ti actually works ??
Why ever they would buy from US? They have factories building nVidia cards in China where they can get easily them and near by countries. The whole US thing is total joke and i am from Europe.
@@XantheFIN They aren’t buying from the US, China is buying completed 4090 Graphics cards and removing the cores and RAM. They are repurposed into AI Server cards and the stripped PCB ends up for sale on the Chinese used market. People in the US and Europe are buying these parts boards to scam people.
Heh, I got burned by that one. I still have a Cyrix 5x86 (or something) on a motherboard with all fake cache. The market was so saturated with counterfeits that I stopped buying parts completely until it settled down. Of course then we got hit with the bad capacitors not long after.
Wait what!?🤨 Sure I was merely a teenager at that time..NONETHELESS I was still very interested in PC hardware. And even though it, for whatever reason, at least felt like the general release cadence of CPUs was a lot shorter. While it also very much felt like even recently launched products could get updated/upgraded/improved just as soon as they hit the damn store😳shelves😥😳.. OH!, and on a little side note, or tangent if u will and just a small, tiny one at that☺️.. So this formative time period in my life just so happens to be how, why and when I was forever instilled with a constant state of perpetual 😲f.o.m.o🤤. At least that’s what I’ve been telling myself since..🤔since..well since as of writing this comment I suppose😌. Anyhoo..What I was trying to get at before I digressed with that, at least somewhat, legitimate 😲s.o.p.f.o.m.o🤤 tangent I was gonna say that considering that I was not only alive but also very much (🤔well at least arguably so) semiconscious and/or even possibly semi-aware...of computer(s) and stuff. Well considering all that☝️🙄 written up there about back then. *TLDR* I can confidently say that I’m so much less of an idiot now than I was back then that your story about motherboards with fake sandals on them would just be such an embarrassingly🥹obvious😆…😳..🤔hang on a minute this is even more insane than I initially thought…because what..eh..I mean why would…OKAY, I guess what I’m trying to ask you about is what’s the real world difference between a real and a fake chip sandal on a motherboard? And, I do apologize but this is definitely the very, very last thing! It’s absolutely amazing if you’ve actually stuck with it till now🤯but🙏 Now, to that lastly thing then🧐.. 🤨why would anyone think to not only get the somewhat novel..let’s say, idea to put a chip sandal on motherboards..BUUUT they’d even go above and beyond that..idea..and in what might be the most brilliant stroke of genius in this entire endeavor, if I’m to believe it at all that is, which😑was to use fake ones🤨. Dude..I mean, to be honest it’s not really clear to me why someone would go through all the labor of producing motherboards with chip sandals and to then, allegedly, go ahead use fake ones..? It doesn’t make sense when even putting a real chip sandal already sounds like a huge gamble to me why ruin what minute potential for success they woulda had by sticking to the real deal. Were the 90’s just the hangover decade from the decadent decade of coke that numerically lined🤭(no pun intended) up with that of the 80’s, why yes, yes was. 90’s wacky sure but..hmm fake chip sandal crazy..? I don’t know man 🤷♂️
I received a piece of wood one time. the weight was exactly the same as my 2080ti that I bought. my mind was blown. Ebay took the side of the scammer and I was out $1200. I was so sad and then I filed a dispute against their decision and won.. Don't know how or why but it worked out.
well i have been IT for 30 years, and to date buying on ebay from 4900FE to 650ti and server parts, i had little to no problem, either seller does not respond(full refund). at worse ebay comes in and evaluate claim. , and never lost 1$ on ebay to date. saved a lot of $$$ vs brand new, just buy from seller with more then 3 item sold if you buy over 1k USD
Like other commenters have said, this looks like an enterprise level scam. That is to say, who ever is doing this likely already have the equipment and knowledge to pull it off. Maybe a contracted factory that’s assembled real cards currently or in the past. The pricing of 200 is likely intentional too. If they charged 2000 they’d probably catch way more heat from the market and law enforcement. If they charge 200 they make a smaller margin but at least can recuperate some of their costs of business with out catching as much attention.
Especially since used 3080 ti goes for about 200$.. almost seams like a click bat… between the time and money to make it appear as a 4090 then only to get less than it cost to make the fake one make no sense.
Looks like buying a 4090 from anyone but a big retailer is turning into an absolute minefield of risk. Those GPUs are worth too much, scamming is rife. The real confusing thing is this though: why go to the effort of re-engraving a GPU core? you can scam people by just selling an empty PCB... the thing was never supposed to work, you don't need to solder on a (dead?) 3080Ti core or different memory if you're going to rip someone off.
Wise advice! I know it's pointless to say as crime obviously pays, but wouldn't it be amazing to work hard doing honest work and get paid instead of harming many people through theft. Deplorable criminals. Thank you for sharing this important info with us.
Poor economical situation drives people into committing fraud and crime. Look around. Crime in the US is all time high 😮 While crime is not a big issue in China, poverty is and one way to get out of it and not go to jail is fraud on the US market.
@@northwestrepair After consideration, poverty doesn’t cause people to commit crime. In this case the better way of looking at it is the communist worldview definitely supports crime against any other worldview.
@@northwestrepair The problem with chinese is that if they would sell them products as they really are, all parties would be satisfied. They just prefer to scam..
You can tell right away the laser spot width, depth and font is different. Also the ground plane parts (all four were different). Then you are going to probably have to start looking at board more closely to see if its physically different from exterior... If its too good to be true... it is probably.
2 weeks ago I got scammed off of Amazon for a 4090 Gigabyte OC (partially my fault as I didnt look to into reviews) but thankfully they took care of it immediately. Why I say partially my fault is I believe they should have better standards for allowing peopke to sell from thier site. Quite alot of money to get scammed for and at then end of the day we are paying for it regardless by increased costs to justify those insurance claims.
@@ArtisChronicles It's an leftover board. Companies(likely non-chinese) bought the gpu, take out the ddr6 and the dice for their rigs, and then sell the board for scrap. Chinese guy bought the scrap, bought old gpu dice, transplant it on with fake prints and sell it.
I'm trying to think of reasons why they even bothered to solder a different core onto the board... maybe to try and fool x-ray inspection of packages? seems a bit excessively paranoid but I can't think of anything else. Would be curious to know where this was purchased from
Dishonesty just comes easy to some people. I worked in a computer shop back in late '98. The owner who was a year or two younger than me (I was 31) was constantly scamming everyone BUT the customers. He took a dead CREATIVE DVD drive and a newer model, swapped the faceplates on them so the new one was marked as old and the old was marked as new, then RMA'd the old one with the new face plate and got his money back while keeping the new perfectly functional drive. He also received stolen merchandise from some immigrant father/son criminals, as well as assisting insurance fraud to get someone's laptop replaced due to damage in an "automobile accident" that never happened. The two owners had their own side-clients and would get hardware through the shop at cost then pocket the profit while the shop made nothing. When my first paycheck bounced I walked. They still owe me, but they went out of business weeks after I left.
There is more than just the top pad position being wrong and matching a different series. (R) logo isn't the right size, the 'e1' logo also has a leftward shift inside of it's bubble. Also the Kerning (spacing between characters) is much larger on the bottom and top line, for the fake one.
I saw a bunch of these for like $200 and I was wondering what in the world was going on, I figured maybe the power delivery issues were so bad that they weren't expected to last too long so the resale value had tanked or something but this makes more sense.
3:15 - you say it's a good sign if the heatsink is still covered with protective film - do you mean a good sign it's not a fake or that it is a fake? Aka good sign or bad sign.
Scammers will do anything but make an honest living. Isn't it more time-consuming and more expensive to solder different memory chips and sometimes even an entirely new core just so you can make a few extra bucks? Solder and soldering machines (along with that expertise) is not cheap in the first place
So what I’m assuming is happening here is that you have 4090 dies and memory being pulled off of real cards to be made into those blower cooler AI cards that Chinese companies have been doing, and then either the same or a different group are putting dead GA102s and whatever memory they can on those stripped 4090 boards and selling them…
So interesting thing I just learned is that the 3090 and 4090 cores can go in either ones PCB due to their design. Some guys named Techlab in Brazil put a 4090 core into a 3090ti PCB recently. The 4090 shown here may have a broken 3090 core from a blown mining card. Since that 3090 was basically an e-waste part it means that they could have robbed the actual 4090 core and swapped it while also stealing some memory chips at the same time turning a huge profit.
@@leodf1 does 2 things, 1. Makes it less likely amazon will delist it as the product has to be visually inspected for certain components. 2. Gets rid of their e waste for profit. Profit they can re-invest into their mining rigs or to buy more of these cards and fake them for more profit. Think about it, if you had something like say an iphone 15 that somebody broke beyond repair but visually looked fine housing wise, would you not spend the 10 bucks for a fake screen replacement to resell it for 300+ ? It gets the iphone 15 that was bound for the trash off your hands and you make 290 bucks profit. People are gullible and dont think twice about cheap purchases, thats what these people prey on. This one is ridiculously sophisticated but when you put it in terms of "its a 200 dollar peice of garbage that I can resell for 1.8k to some sucker" it makes sense why these people do this. Obviously this one was not sold for that much, but someone out there paid full price for a fake at some point.
This type of thing happened to a repair return at Canada Computers. The guy ripped out the core, replaced and sent in for repair. After Nvidia opened it and saw the hack job they told the shop we will from now on never honour a repair from your store. So now they have to sell all new Nvidia products as 'final sale'. So I can't buy a gpu from them anymore lol. I couldn't live with myself if I bought a new gpu and couldn't get it fixed if it had an issue. Sure, there is always direct to Nvidia for warranty. But dealing with that process is the computer store I don't have time for that jazz
remember when you bought a scam GPU thinking it was a GTX 1060/70 and when you popped off the shroud it turned out to be a gt 650 or something? the amount of effort to fake this is crazy. and the amount of effort needed to actually identify it correctly (besides the price) is equally crazy..
To be honest, I am surprised that Nvidia would have made the chips socket compatible. Seems like a real oversight, given the costs involved. You would think that they would just have enough of a difference that you couldn't just slam any chip on there and have it work.
Damn. I was thinking who on Earth would go through all that trouble to counterfeit a graphics card... then I checked the price for a real 4090 😮 It's probably easier to counterfeit that 4090 than to cf $100 USD bills.
This is nothing new, when Pentium chips first came out they were doing the same. The best bit was the chip would work for a while, it was just being massively overclocked. I forget tyhe details but say a 75Mhz chip badged as a 125Mhz.
I alway buy expensive electronics from Amazon, they ask very little questions, and do zero verification and send a replacement. Its super stress free shopping.
There is actually another potential scam, I bet you havent seen, apparently the 3090ti has the same core pin out as a 4090, whats stopping someone from getting those cheap China 4090 empty pcbs and slapping on a 3090 core and claiming its a 4090.. it should technically still function, maybe flash a modified 4090 bios on board.. interesting..
So someone bought one of this core and memoryless cards from ebay, throwed onto it some parts he had in his parts bin and sold it full price? Thought that core was a lump of plastic first, have seen some repair videos, but never that weird glimmer from the bottom side.
@@f0x4nn3 That's what I'm wondering. Steal cores when they're fresh out of factory and before export, solder on fake core to try and fool any exporter/importer who may go to lengths such as x-raying or opening one up to inspect? Really don't know, if you're going to scam an empty PCB is the exact same as this but for some reason they've gone to a lot more effort with this one.
It is well known, that NVidia keeps messing around with the top models and remains changing things out of order to keep up with the market. And still.... People keep buying those 80´s ans 90´s because of the name.... The first time I did realize that was when the models 790 or so were on the market... It still was nothing "new" there....
yeah this type of stuff is why i could never bring myself to Buy Electronics from anything under the Ali umbrella. the Price looks really good because... well it's probably too good to be true.
Funny, how this stuff gets through the US QA buyer standards... It sort reflects the job and identities thieves getting jobs in US with MBA and/or no US degrees or Fake Foreign Degree to buy not the equipment but to get ahead of bills and standard of living. Don't know why AI generates content of Reballing GPU and etc... My identity has been stolen???? I do software engineering with video games/simulation...Must be "an easy job." In my experience, the id thieves move from one preceived easy job to another...Like repair...just get a new graphics card via warranty and etc..
Now... Would this even work? Did you get the card working? I... Even if it is a scam, I would be kind of interested in how this was expected to work...
I live in sothern cali. Some lil boys were talking about getting gpus from a train. New school RDR I guess. They got busted 2 weeks after home boy was trying to sell cards.
If you've watched enough Pawn Stars back in the day as I have, you might have learned a bit with comparing fake with authentic brand names... there was so much to see.. now I wouldnt know unless i take into my photoshop but the texts on fake is not symmetrical as it does not fill the same like the true.. also incorrect font specs.. letters on fake are too squished together.. look at the circle with "el" notice the letters on the true look as if it belongs. the trade mark letter R with the circle around it after NVIDIA.. you see a substantial size difference... the true will always look like the rest.. fake will always stand out.. a quick check to know if one is fake without having a comparison is to check the letter "e" in "el" and see if the letter sits nicely up against the circle, the same contour. while the fake lacks the symmetry. the real looks pleasing to the eye and the fake looks off.. put a ruler to it if need be.
The problem with this is unless you are a software engineer you will never know so this is not at all helpful for someone like me but then again I have no intentions on buying a 4090 anyway.
knew instantly there is no TUF writing on the backplate and the ventilation is the size of an 80mm fan later the side profile is even worse just look nothing like my card from the side shroud wrong heatsink wrong the lighting looks tagged on it is not it is the shroud it is molded into it heatsinks are the size of noctua d15 madness
No. ASUS released "OG" models of RTX 4090 using 3090tu style heatsinks. look up "TUF-RTX4090-O24G-OG-GAMING" and it'll come up on asus website, looks like old gen but it is new gen core. They had extra 3090ti heatsinks laying around so they used them so they wouldnt have to throw them away.
@@northwestrepair is that dead because it has fake chips and was shipped as non functional or dead because one of them failed and nobody noticed before?
@@____________________________.x Dead because it's fake and dead. Fake chips. Dead chips. There's nothing more to add because it's not worth investigating further.
my question would be this, did the owner of that card get it direct or through a 3rd party? like did they pick it up at a PC parts store or order it from a reseller like a newegg listed seller?
If its a 3090/ti core, did still function (doubt), and had all memory it actually could with a custom bios flash. 3090/ti and 4090 cores have the same pinouts on either ones PCB afaik.
@@autismo3201 some of them do show an image theres a guy on ebay that bought one and is complaining abut it on ebay community page sadly mean doesnt even turn on just has fans spinning
I remember when these scams first started becoming common place, back when the 2080 Ti came out. I wanted another one for SLI and came across a ton of these very inexpensive and obviously sketchy af cards listed as 2080 Ti’s. A bit of common sense applied and scam avoided 😂
This is why I will never buy a GPU from any other source other than the manufacturer itself. My first ever purchase of a GPU was the 1070 when it released, then bought a prebuilt with a 3070ti and finally my current one 3090ti direct from nvidia at half price because the 40 series was about to come out. These scammers have 0 shame.
but why the trouble to laser etch these chips with new labels? i have no explanation but likely this Chinese seller was scammed by another and probably more up there, they just passing it to someone else
More likely they removed the essential 4090 components to use for AI and put together something else they could sell that looked legit. It's also likely the online store closed and reopened with a different name already, probably every few days or so, so there's no recourse for those getting scammed.
If you buy a 4090, the reasonable thing to do is to get it from a trusted distributor and avoid suspiciously good offers. You can do that for budget components but for a 4090... come on.
The 4090 saga is never ending from fake GPUs, to burning 12 pin power, to crazy prices. I’m glad I got mine in the beginning at msrp and it hasn’t burned up… yet 😅
That’s a lot of work and expensive equipment being used to make a fake card. More than likely the seller is making dozens of these, how else do make this profitable for the time spent making it look legit?
And the hope is gone. Magical.
And the 2nd mansion came. Magical.
Wow 😅
@@MiriadCalibrumAstar 🤣
if the rest of the card is fine you just need to solder memory and a new di on? hmmm how much was that card?
@@HarmonRAB-hp4nk board costs practically nothing compared to the core and memory brother.
That's beyond horrible. I hope the buyer didn't pay too much 😢
About 200 bucks 😅
@@northwestrepair Well, I think we found one way to tell it's fake without looking at it.
@@northwestrepair 😅😅
I paid that much for a used 5700xt during the rona. You are scamming yourself buying anything modern at that price, let alone a 4090.
@@northwestrepair This is a good example of , " You pay peanuts, you get monkeys " . But now the question is, does the fake AD102 core , which you identify as a GA102 3080Ti actually works ??
The fact that china itself by law cannot buy any 4090 chips from the US should say something...
They are removing the 4090 cores from these boards to use in AI training servers. The populate them onto a Server style PCB.
Why ever they would buy from US? They have factories building nVidia cards in China where they can get easily them and near by countries.
The whole US thing is total joke and i am from Europe.
@@XantheFIN They aren’t buying from the US, China is buying completed 4090 Graphics cards and removing the cores and RAM. They are repurposed into AI Server cards and the stripped PCB ends up for sale on the Chinese used market.
People in the US and Europe are buying these parts boards to scam people.
Yep they have many pawn countries
@@XantheFIN All of NVIDIA main chip is manufactured in taiwan.
Reminds me of the fake L2 cache chip sandal on motherboards in the late 1990's.
Heh, I got burned by that one. I still have a Cyrix 5x86 (or something) on a motherboard with all fake cache. The market was so saturated with counterfeits that I stopped buying parts completely until it settled down. Of course then we got hit with the bad capacitors not long after.
@@_droidAtleast with cap plauge if you got soldering skills it's easy to replace the junk parts but it shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Wait what!?🤨 Sure I was merely a teenager at that time..NONETHELESS I was still very interested in PC hardware. And even though it, for whatever reason, at least felt like the general release cadence of CPUs was a lot shorter. While it also very much felt like even recently launched products could get updated/upgraded/improved just as soon as they hit the damn store😳shelves😥😳..
OH!, and on a little side note, or tangent if u will and just a small, tiny one at that☺️.. So this formative time period in my life just so happens to be how, why and when I was forever instilled with a constant state of perpetual 😲f.o.m.o🤤. At least that’s what I’ve been telling myself since..🤔since..well since as of writing this comment I suppose😌.
Anyhoo..What I was trying to get at before I digressed with that, at least somewhat, legitimate 😲s.o.p.f.o.m.o🤤 tangent I was gonna say that considering that I was not only alive but also very much (🤔well at least arguably so) semiconscious and/or even possibly semi-aware...of computer(s) and stuff. Well considering all that☝️🙄 written up there about back then.
*TLDR*
I can confidently say that I’m so much less of an idiot now than I was back then that your story about motherboards with fake sandals on them would just be such an embarrassingly🥹obvious😆…😳..🤔hang on a minute this is even more insane than I initially thought…because what..eh..I mean why would…OKAY, I guess what I’m trying to ask you about is what’s the real world difference between a real and a fake chip sandal on a motherboard? And, I do apologize but this is definitely the very, very last thing! It’s absolutely amazing if you’ve actually stuck with it till now🤯but🙏
Now, to that lastly thing then🧐..
🤨why would anyone think to not only get the somewhat novel..let’s say, idea to put a chip sandal on motherboards..BUUUT they’d even go above and beyond that..idea..and in what might be the most brilliant stroke of genius in this entire endeavor, if I’m to believe it at all that is, which😑was to use fake ones🤨. Dude..I mean, to be honest it’s not really clear to me why someone would go through all the labor of producing motherboards with chip sandals and to then, allegedly, go ahead use fake ones..? It doesn’t make sense when even putting a real chip sandal already sounds like a huge gamble to me why ruin what minute potential for success they woulda had by sticking to the real deal. Were the 90’s just the hangover decade from the decadent decade of coke that numerically lined🤭(no pun intended) up with that of the 80’s, why yes, yes was. 90’s wacky sure but..hmm fake chip sandal crazy..? I don’t know man 🤷♂️
Only a tiny bit better than buying a 4090 and getting a brick in the box.
i guess if you are a scammer its a 100% good way to make it pass. nobody would remove the chips or have that knowledge to know its a fake.
I'd consider it worse. If you get a brick at least you immediately know what's up without the blood, sweat and tears of trying to troubleshoot a dud.
I received a piece of wood one time. the weight was exactly the same as my 2080ti that I bought. my mind was blown. Ebay took the side of the scammer and I was out $1200. I was so sad and then I filed a dispute against their decision and won.. Don't know how or why but it worked out.
Same as 25 years ago, selling Pentium 100's for 120's, it even worked for some time. Difference was the font used and height.
Yeah, GPU Galaxy made a video about this few years ago.
wow nice catch, we need more people like you keeping us safe from scammers. Thanks!!!
Always buy from a brick and mortar store for electronics this expensive. I got my burnt 4090 replaced same day it caught fire!
looks like he did buy a brick from a mortor store :D
*Mordor
well i have been IT for 30 years, and to date buying on ebay from 4900FE to 650ti and server parts, i had little to no problem, either seller does not respond(full refund). at worse ebay comes in and evaluate claim. , and never lost 1$ on ebay to date. saved a lot of $$$ vs brand new, just buy from seller with more then 3 item sold if you buy over 1k USD
AND also , for the love of god if price is too good to be true its NOT! unless its for parts!
@sy5tem you missed a word in there.
Shaving the core and chips, polishing and laser etching. Wow. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make $200.
Like other commenters have said, this looks like an enterprise level scam. That is to say, who ever is doing this likely already have the equipment and knowledge to pull it off. Maybe a contracted factory that’s assembled real cards currently or in the past. The pricing of 200 is likely intentional too. If they charged 2000 they’d probably catch way more heat from the market and law enforcement. If they charge 200 they make a smaller margin but at least can recuperate some of their costs of business with out catching as much attention.
remember, it had a 4090 core and GDDR6X Vmem chips from new that they removed, so they made more than 200usd
Especially since used 3080 ti goes for about 200$.. almost seams like a click bat… between the time and money to make it appear as a 4090 then only to get less than it cost to make the fake one make no sense.
@@MIkeOlah-mi9tu 3080ti for 200$? Second-hand goes MINIMUM 400$ buddy
@@jadkaranouh404 that just proves my point even more… Why would somebody then spend 400$ plus time and labor to resell it as a 4090.
Looks like buying a 4090 from anyone but a big retailer is turning into an absolute minefield of risk. Those GPUs are worth too much, scamming is rife. The real confusing thing is this though: why go to the effort of re-engraving a GPU core? you can scam people by just selling an empty PCB... the thing was never supposed to work, you don't need to solder on a (dead?) 3080Ti core or different memory if you're going to rip someone off.
Anyone who thinks, that you can get a card like this for 200 bucks, also thinks that fried chickens can lay eggs.😆
I don't always buy 4090s, but when I do...
@Medio2507 Scotch chickens of course. 🤣
So that isnt where fried eggs come from??
@@johnt.848 Where do the scotch chickens come from then?
yup i see 500$ cards on ALI all day all scams that dont work or missing cpu etc.
Wise advice! I know it's pointless to say as crime obviously pays, but wouldn't it be amazing to work hard doing honest work and get paid instead of harming many people through theft. Deplorable criminals. Thank you for sharing this important info with us.
Poor economical situation drives people into committing fraud and crime. Look around. Crime in the US is all time high 😮
While crime is not a big issue in China, poverty is and one way to get out of it and not go to jail is fraud on the US market.
@@northwestrepair After consideration, poverty doesn’t cause people to commit crime. In this case the better way of looking at it is the communist worldview definitely supports crime against any other worldview.
@@northwestrepair The problem with chinese is that if they would sell them products as they really are, all parties would be satisfied.
They just prefer to scam..
@@northwestrepair "While crime is not a big issue in China"
when you got no finances to eat, you start doing scams. everyone wants to survive. not defending scams, i hate this . but thats how it is.
You can tell right away the laser spot width, depth and font is different. Also the ground plane parts (all four were different). Then you are going to probably have to start looking at board more closely to see if its physically different from exterior...
If its too good to be true... it is probably.
2 weeks ago I got scammed off of Amazon for a 4090 Gigabyte OC (partially my fault as I didnt look to into reviews) but thankfully they took care of it immediately.
Why I say partially my fault is I believe they should have better standards for allowing peopke to sell from thier site. Quite alot of money to get scammed for and at then end of the day we are paying for it regardless by increased costs to justify those insurance claims.
The amount of effort they went into faking this 4090 is ridiculous.
The board seems real tho, just the most important parts that are fake 😅
@@ToTheGAMES Hence it was high effort just to scam someone
@@ArtisChronicles It's an leftover board. Companies(likely non-chinese) bought the gpu, take out the ddr6 and the dice for their rigs, and then sell the board for scrap. Chinese guy bought the scrap, bought old gpu dice, transplant it on with fake prints and sell it.
@@anhduc0913 they bought dice ? xD
@@ToTheGAMES I guess labourers in a Chinese sweatshop are cheap...
Was about to buy a 4090 CND locally for $1500. That was until I came across video. Now I’m not so sure I should.
enterprise-looking scam.
I'm trying to think of reasons why they even bothered to solder a different core onto the board... maybe to try and fool x-ray inspection of packages? seems a bit excessively paranoid but I can't think of anything else.
Would be curious to know where this was purchased from
In this type of tech work you have to have a sense of humor and yours is awesome
Dishonesty just comes easy to some people. I worked in a computer shop back in late '98. The owner who was a year or two younger than me (I was 31) was constantly scamming everyone BUT the customers. He took a dead CREATIVE DVD drive and a newer model, swapped the faceplates on them so the new one was marked as old and the old was marked as new, then RMA'd the old one with the new face plate and got his money back while keeping the new perfectly functional drive. He also received stolen merchandise from some immigrant father/son criminals, as well as assisting insurance fraud to get someone's laptop replaced due to damage in an "automobile accident" that never happened. The two owners had their own side-clients and would get hardware through the shop at cost then pocket the profit while the shop made nothing. When my first paycheck bounced I walked. They still owe me, but they went out of business weeks after I left.
That's actually wild. Man I don't think I'd like working there.
There is more than just the top pad position being wrong and matching a different series. (R) logo isn't the right size, the 'e1' logo also has a leftward shift inside of it's bubble. Also the Kerning (spacing between characters) is much larger on the bottom and top line, for the fake one.
If you look closely, you can see subtle differences in the typeface etched onto the chips. For example, compare the "D"'s in the "NVIDIA" logo
I saw a bunch of these for like $200 and I was wondering what in the world was going on, I figured maybe the power delivery issues were so bad that they weren't expected to last too long so the resale value had tanked or something but this makes more sense.
Thanks for the warning and good information great work 🙂👍
3:15 - you say it's a good sign if the heatsink is still covered with protective film - do you mean a good sign it's not a fake or that it is a fake? Aka good sign or bad sign.
That font on the fake is also slightly off, especially noticeable on the e1 with a circle around it.
The plastic is not a good way to tell if it's fake. I work on computers all the time and lots of people leave the plastic on their coolers.
they leave the plastic on? :-O
there's some serious scam going out there. Thank you for bring this to the public. 😁
you have mastered the art of engaging content, well done!
So what exactly is that card? Did it ever work at all?
appreciate the insight into spotting fakes.....as far as "fools and their money", good luck with that one
Was a bunch of Gigabyte RTX 4090 Aero cards being sold fast on an merchant store on Amazon last night for $1100, even that threw red flags.
Scammers will do anything but make an honest living. Isn't it more time-consuming and more expensive to solder different memory chips and sometimes even an entirely new core just so you can make a few extra bucks? Solder and soldering machines (along with that expertise) is not cheap in the first place
That is why i never buy Nvidia GPU's, They are packed with fake gimmick features. Including the card itself.
So what I’m assuming is happening here is that you have 4090 dies and memory being pulled off of real cards to be made into those blower cooler AI cards that Chinese companies have been doing, and then either the same or a different group are putting dead GA102s and whatever memory they can on those stripped 4090 boards and selling them…
So interesting thing I just learned is that the 3090 and 4090 cores can go in either ones PCB due to their design. Some guys named Techlab in Brazil put a 4090 core into a 3090ti PCB recently. The 4090 shown here may have a broken 3090 core from a blown mining card. Since that 3090 was basically an e-waste part it means that they could have robbed the actual 4090 core and swapped it while also stealing some memory chips at the same time turning a huge profit.
Why would they go through the trouble of faking a broken card?
If it was $200 I'd buy one as long as it worked.
@@leodf1 because sadly some people are gullible and will fall for it being so cheap.
@@autismo3201 That doesn't make sense. Why don't they just send them an empty box?
@@leodf1 does 2 things,
1. Makes it less likely amazon will delist it as the product has to be visually inspected for certain components.
2. Gets rid of their e waste for profit. Profit they can re-invest into their mining rigs or to buy more of these cards and fake them for more profit.
Think about it, if you had something like say an iphone 15 that somebody broke beyond repair but visually looked fine housing wise, would you not spend the 10 bucks for a fake screen replacement to resell it for 300+ ? It gets the iphone 15 that was bound for the trash off your hands and you make 290 bucks profit. People are gullible and dont think twice about cheap purchases, thats what these people prey on. This one is ridiculously sophisticated but when you put it in terms of "its a 200 dollar peice of garbage that I can resell for 1.8k to some sucker" it makes sense why these people do this.
Obviously this one was not sold for that much, but someone out there paid full price for a fake at some point.
This type of thing happened to a repair return at Canada Computers. The guy ripped out the core, replaced and sent in for repair.
After Nvidia opened it and saw the hack job they told the shop we will from now on never honour a repair from your store.
So now they have to sell all new Nvidia products as 'final sale'.
So I can't buy a gpu from them anymore lol. I couldn't live with myself if I bought a new gpu and couldn't get it fixed if it had an issue.
Sure, there is always direct to Nvidia for warranty. But dealing with that process is the computer store I don't have time for that jazz
remember when you bought a scam GPU thinking it was a GTX 1060/70 and when you popped off the shroud it turned out to be a gt 650 or something? the amount of effort to fake this is crazy. and the amount of effort needed to actually identify it correctly (besides the price) is equally crazy..
They finally found the use of those laser engraving machine.
To be honest, I am surprised that Nvidia would have made the chips socket compatible. Seems like a real oversight, given the costs involved. You would think that they would just have enough of a difference that you couldn't just slam any chip on there and have it work.
Damn. I was thinking who on Earth would go through all that trouble to counterfeit a graphics card... then I checked the price for a real 4090 😮 It's probably easier to counterfeit that 4090 than to cf $100 USD bills.
If something seems to good to be true, it usually is.
The N from NVIDIA is slightly different, thinner on the fake chip
seen so many of these scams now
The world just needs to remember that if a deal seems too good to be true...
...It probably is!
Absolutely I.N.S.A.N.E !!! You really MUST buy from a trusted vendor at ALL times.
This is nothing new, when Pentium chips first came out they were doing the same. The best bit was the chip would work for a while, it was just being massively overclocked. I forget tyhe details but say a 75Mhz chip badged as a 125Mhz.
Yeah, if a graphic cards more than $2000, you can expect things like that.
Damnnn.... 😅😅😅😅😅😅 Thank you for the warning and video! :)
I seen 4090's new on ebay for half the price. Every seller that had one had no reviews or ratings. I wonder if those are the same is this.
Thats why i never buy from outside of my country and never on online markets, always in person.... tested and working.
I alway buy expensive electronics from Amazon, they ask very little questions, and do zero verification and send a replacement. Its super stress free shopping.
There is actually another potential scam, I bet you havent seen, apparently the 3090ti has the same core pin out as a 4090, whats stopping someone from getting those cheap China 4090 empty pcbs and slapping on a 3090 core and claiming its a 4090.. it should technically still function, maybe flash a modified 4090 bios on board.. interesting..
That's one way to dodge import controls.
the real question here is: does it somehow work? or rather, could it work? (not as a 4090 of course, as a 30XX)
Its got 10% of the memory it should have..
some show and image but all of them are trash because the memory isnt good in one way or another and the majority have dead cores
So someone bought one of this core and memoryless cards from ebay, throwed onto it some parts he had in his parts bin and sold it full price?
Thought that core was a lump of plastic first, have seen some repair videos, but never that weird glimmer from the bottom side.
Nah, most likely the core already got swapped before the card left China.
@@f0x4nn3 That's what I'm wondering. Steal cores when they're fresh out of factory and before export, solder on fake core to try and fool any exporter/importer who may go to lengths such as x-raying or opening one up to inspect?
Really don't know, if you're going to scam an empty PCB is the exact same as this but for some reason they've gone to a lot more effort with this one.
Cant you check in device manager or somehere else in the OS?
Good work!
It is well known, that NVidia keeps messing around with the top models and remains changing things out of order to keep up with the market. And still.... People keep buying those 80´s ans 90´s because of the name.... The first time I did realize that was when the models 790 or so were on the market... It still was nothing "new" there....
yeah this type of stuff is why i could never bring myself to Buy Electronics from anything under the Ali umbrella.
the Price looks really good because... well it's probably too good to be true.
There is a difference between buying cheap stuff and a whole ass GPU lol
No problem buying stuff with lots of reviews etc.
Just use common sense, if it's too cheap to be true then well... It is.
@@AdvancedGamingYT
i was meaning more complex Electronics, sorry.
Great to get 4090 from a reliable place/source
Wow!!! Good job sir!
Thanks for the heads up!
Funny, how this stuff gets through the US QA buyer standards... It sort reflects the job and identities thieves getting jobs in US with MBA and/or no US degrees or Fake Foreign Degree to buy not the equipment but to get ahead of bills and standard of living. Don't know why AI generates content of Reballing GPU and etc... My identity has been stolen???? I do software engineering with video games/simulation...Must be "an easy job." In my experience, the id thieves move from one preceived easy job to another...Like repair...just get a new graphics card via warranty and etc..
Wow... Yeah that's pretty bad. You or Nvidia needs to come up with a test that doesn't require complete disassembly!
If something sounds like it is too good to be true...
Now... Would this even work? Did you get the card working? I... Even if it is a scam, I would be kind of interested in how this was expected to work...
I live in sothern cali. Some lil boys were talking about getting gpus from a train. New school RDR I guess. They got busted 2 weeks after home boy was trying to sell cards.
If you've watched enough Pawn Stars back in the day as I have, you might have learned a bit with comparing fake with authentic brand names... there was so much to see.. now I wouldnt know unless i take into my photoshop but the texts on fake is not symmetrical as it does not fill the same like the true.. also incorrect font specs.. letters on fake are too squished together.. look at the circle with "el" notice the letters on the true look as if it belongs. the trade mark letter R with the circle around it after NVIDIA.. you see a substantial size difference... the true will always look like the rest.. fake will always stand out.. a quick check to know if one is fake without having a comparison is to check the letter "e" in "el" and see if the letter sits nicely up against the circle, the same contour. while the fake lacks the symmetry. the real looks pleasing to the eye and the fake looks off.. put a ruler to it if need be.
At least there wasn't a GF116 under the cooler.
The laser etching is all the wrong fonts.
Someone is stealing from the Asus RMA lab and selling botched franken cards from the discarded pile after they have been stripped for usable parts
The problem with this is unless you are a software engineer you will never know so this is not at all helpful for someone like me but then again I have no intentions on buying a 4090 anyway.
Where did they buy this from?
I would guess the culprits are component thieves on the production floors.
knew instantly there is no TUF writing on the backplate and the ventilation is the size of an 80mm fan later the side profile is even worse just look nothing like my card from the side shroud wrong heatsink wrong the lighting looks tagged on it is not it is the shroud it is molded into it heatsinks are the size of noctua d15 madness
No. ASUS released "OG" models of RTX 4090 using 3090tu style heatsinks. look up "TUF-RTX4090-O24G-OG-GAMING" and it'll come up on asus website, looks like old gen but it is new gen core. They had extra 3090ti heatsinks laying around so they used them so they wouldnt have to throw them away.
Its wild how scammers will work harder to scam then they would just working a normal, honest job
So what does system config say the board is? This should be easily detectable by software
It's dead
@@northwestrepair is that dead because it has fake chips and was shipped as non functional or dead because one of them failed and nobody noticed before?
@@____________________________.x Dead because it's fake and dead. Fake chips. Dead chips. There's nothing more to add because it's not worth investigating further.
my question would be this, did the owner of that card get it direct or through a 3rd party? like did they pick it up at a PC parts store or order it from a reseller like a newegg listed seller?
could you make it work as a Frankenstein card? Or does the pin-out on the core they generously provided not match the circuitry on the board?
no, the chips are dead and the VRAM isn't even compatible to begin with.
If its a 3090/ti core, did still function (doubt), and had all memory it actually could with a custom bios flash. 3090/ti and 4090 cores have the same pinouts on either ones PCB afaik.
@@autismo3201 some of them do show an image theres a guy on ebay that bought one and is complaining abut it on ebay community page sadly mean doesnt even turn on just has fans spinning
Were they selling it as a working 4090 or a dead one that user buys at their own risk?
I remember when these scams first started becoming common place, back when the 2080 Ti came out. I wanted another one for SLI and came across a ton of these very inexpensive and obviously sketchy af cards listed as 2080 Ti’s. A bit of common sense applied and scam avoided 😂
I wonder if the MSI repair does this too. How can we tell if we really have a 4090?
This is why I will never buy a GPU from any other source other than the manufacturer itself. My first ever purchase of a GPU was the 1070 when it released, then bought a prebuilt with a 3070ti and finally my current one 3090ti direct from nvidia at half price because the 40 series was about to come out. These scammers have 0 shame.
must be nice being rich
Always get stuff from an official dealer. I did that with my AMD graphics card.
So, I'm pretty sure we got those in Brazil too. People are selling dead cards, with fried GPUs, for like 2/3 of value. lol
99,999 % das placas de vídeo compradas no Aliexpress para países de terceiro mundo são assim
@@infni 😥
but why the trouble to laser etch these chips with new labels? i have no explanation but likely this Chinese seller was scammed by another and probably more up there, they just passing it to someone else
There is a fake industry in China 😂
More likely they removed the essential 4090 components to use for AI and put together something else they could sell that looked legit. It's also likely the online store closed and reopened with a different name already, probably every few days or so, so there's no recourse for those getting scammed.
4090 passed through CN at some point and had core+mem removed and switched for fakes. ai race is tough shit
No worries I just picked up an Arc card. It's great!
Couldn't you just check the device manager or the Nividia app to see if you have a legit card?
If you could get the core to work with something it could show what it really is or it could be spoofed I guess if they go that far in faking.
If you buy a 4090, the reasonable thing to do is to get it from a trusted distributor and avoid suspiciously good offers. You can do that for budget components but for a 4090... come on.
The 4090 saga is never ending from fake GPUs, to burning 12 pin power, to crazy prices. I’m glad I got mine in the beginning at msrp and it hasn’t burned up… yet 😅
will it show on msi afterburner as a different card or say 4090!!?
That’s a lot of work and expensive equipment being used to make a fake card. More than likely the seller is making dozens of these, how else do make this profitable for the time spent making it look legit?
What song by LukHash is the outro?
I'm actually really curious how Amazon/Ebay would handle this type of return or scam from a third party seller.
That’s why I always buy USED BUT TESTED VERIFIED GPUS 😟
A pretty good indicator would be the fkn performance of the card...
I cannot find the shorts.
Про второй канал не забывай выкладывайте ролики .
easy to spot it will never update the official drivers and show as 4090 once you have it ofcourse , gpu-z might report it as fake too