so I want to buy a GPU let's say a GTX 1660 how is this the top page of results
on newegg.com I mean seriously who is
sirona MIL C manie 51 risk canology I
haven't even heard of half of these Brands and Amazon is flooded with them
too I mean the prices look great we're talking as much as 40% off of a
recognized brand and they're still shipped by Newegg but the last time I
checked NVIDIA isn't selling gpus at a discount so what are they refurbished
crypto gpus are they outright scams like we've covered in the past where the
company pops up defrauds a bunch of customers then vanishes only to appear
again under a new equally random name in
either case with such prominent placement on reputable websites Shoppers
could easily be enticed by the savings and choose one of these over a more
established br brand which I don't know
might not be such a bad thing unless it's a scam I was determined to get to
the bottom of this so I tasked our Labs team with buying and testing as many of
these Rando gpus as they were comfortable with and what they
discovered well let's just say the answers aren't as straightforward as
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joke check out build Redux at the link below the script doesn't actually call
for me to react to the packaging here but some of these are too funny to
ignore this one is upside down if you turn it around this is just a low
resolution ripoff of NVIDIA's old Founders Edition packaging along those
same lines keny's artwork is original but these talking points are absolutely
ancient 3D Vision this GPU doesn't support SLI and in spite of being one of
the two Brands I do recognize here this isn't exactly confidence inspiring I
have so many questions right now but one thing we know for sure is that based on
the featured status of these gpus they must be as profitable for New Egg as
selling a more expensive card from a premier brand but how could that be well
here's the thing shipped by New Egg isn't the same thing as sold by Newegg
like many other online retailers these days newegg.com is actually a
marketplace now that allows other businesses to sell items through their
platform New Egg collects and distributes payments manages
Communications between buyers and sellers and perhaps most importantly
trades on their position as a known entity effectively lending their
credibility to little sellers that you've never heard of some marketplaces
also offer warehousing shipping and even customer support so that sellers don't
need to maintain their own facilities or staff the fees that these marketplaces
charge for these services quickly add up to more than the profit that they would
earn by selling the same product themselves want proof look no further
than our sample search we go sold by New Egg W we're literally three of the more
than 15 results are actually sold by New
Egg themselves and I'm not counting this
same card but with a game bundle now obviously New Egg still wants to move
their own stock out of the warehouse before it gets too old so those three
list things do appear toward the start of the results but this is nothing like
the old days when they would stock loads of gpus from all the major manufacturers
to ensure a consistent customer experience in total then we ordered
eight cards from these unfamiliar Brands as usual we're going to have them Linked
In the video description below but I would watch the rest of the video before
you run out and buy them you see in spite of our search being GTX 1660 we
ended up with only one of those since New Egg mostly returned results for 1660
supers and also this lowprofile 1650 so
we picked that up as well just to see what was going on with that of these
cards most of them arrived as quickly as you would expect with the exception
being this 1660 super from Elsa that
took so long to arrive that we actually opened a support case looking for a
refund it did get here but not in time
for the full test Gauntlet since it was actually only a few hours ago that might
not matter though as it turns out more on that later our first stage was the
physical inspection the lab's team checked the cards over for signs of
where with special attention paid to the PCIe connectors the fan bearings and the
thermal pads along with a quick evaluation of other factors like heat
sink design and overall cleanliness based on that physical examination we
found that there were only three cards here that we can confidently say are new
those are the 1660 supers from yes and
milc along with our 1650 from from
sirona these all show no signs of previous use they have good strong fan
bearings and nice new thermal pads the 1660 supers both included warranty cards
and the 1650 even had a surprisingly good installation manual in the box now
I had a quick look at the Elsa before we started filming and I didn't see any
obvious signs of where but it wasn't looked over by the Labs team so take
that for what it is as for the rest of them it turns out that none of these are
quite what they claim to be first off we've got the kology 1660 super that
appears to be a totally different design from the corn brand one that we ordered
though we did spot the same canology stickers on the corn product page make
of that what you will but maybe it doesn't matter because the Labs believes
that this card may have been refurbished due to wear on the PCIe pins oily
residue from the thermal pads and what seems to be some uneven wear in the fan
bearings next we've got a pair of cards from manna jie a base model 1660 and a
1660 super the base 1660 in particular
has some concerning indicators this sticker here above the PCIe connector
for example is yellowed and starting to
fade compared to the other sticker that's on the back of the card there's
also wear to the PCIe pins and most importantly it looks exactly like the
iafe GTX 1660 from colorful a brand that
I have heard of before except they've what maybe pulled off the back plate and
put new stickers on the fans man's second attempt isn't much better either
this 1660 super shows similar signs of wear and wait a second this looks
exactly like the Elsa these two cards
are completely identical even down to the positioning of the QC sticker on the
back of the cards they're even stamped for the same month these may have come
out of the exact same badge and even
more incriminating both of them happen to look an awful lot like a Galax GTX
1660 super that we found over on Tech PowerUp though with a much lower cost
heatsink design Under The Identical plastic shroud last up we've got this
1660 super from 51 risk it too shows
signs of lightwear but 51 risk unlike
the others actually acknowledges this with a note about it in their manual
stating that the wear on the card is due to their extensive testing processes
seems a little sus especially given that the cooling setup is almost identical to
the base model manui 1660 that we looked at a moment ago just with different
coloring on the Shroud or rather a lack of it so I'm willing to bet that like
the manie colorful is the actual manufacturer of this card in summary
then three of our eight cards are almost certainly brand new one is probably
brand new and of the other four the sellers appear to have simply slapped
their logos onto a possibly refurbished
cart made by someone else and in some cases didn't even manage to get the
brand on the site consistent with the sticker on the cardart now it's time to
pop these into a machine and see what software can tell us about their
origin and yeah not a lot of these
fields change as we scroll through our 1660 supers they're all clocked at 1530
MHz with 1785 MHz boost and other than the BIOS version the variables seem to
be pretty much the brand of the RAM and the subvendor where we get MSI which
makes sense that's our control card along with a mix of colorful Galaxy and
generic NVIDIA this combined with our mismatched BIOS versions seems to
confirm our refurb and Rebrand hypothesis for the cards from manaji 51
risk and kinology now to be clear a generic identifier isn't suspicious on
its own Elsa for example has been around for a long time and appears to contract
their manufacturing out to Other Board makers which might explain their
non-unique designs of course for many buyers anyway this is all irrelevant and
the only thing that matters is performance I mean who cares what stickers on it right so we tested every
card again except the Elsa along with two controls an MSI 1660 super and this
ASUS 1650 with a careful eye for any
observed anomalies surprisingly in gaming the 1660 supers were very
consistent across the board with only the milc lagging slightly behind the
rest of the pack the manui 1660 meanwhile remember that's the rebadged
colorful was also just about able to keep up with the supers a pretty good
showing but the sorria 1650 ended up
performing considerably worse than our ASUS control though that kind of makes
sense if you consider how much less power it drew power consumption for our
1660 supers meanwhile was quite consistent which makes sense given their
performance moving on the spc.org productivity tests we ran showed similar
results with the 1660 supers being very consistent with each other and our
control and only the mulc lagging behind
while our manui 1660 does an admirable job trying to keep up with the supers
and once again the sir HRA 1650 is
underwhelming in the test that it managed to complete and just straight up
fails to complete the solid works test so wherever they're getting these gpus
from they're legit they're made by NVIDIA you can't counterfeit that which
raises the question well why not buy them then to answer we devised a final
test where we reached out to each seller with a simple support request and we
were pleasantly surprised to get fast helpful responses from each and every
one of them that's obviously not a guarantee that you're going to get proper warranty support 11 and a half
months down the road but I'm a bit too honest to just pry capacitors off these
things with my noct to Edition LTT screw driver to see how they deal with a dead
card by the way sign up for a stock notification on this thing now at LTT
store.com with the average price of a 1660 super from Brands like ASUS MSI and
Gigabyte hovering around $250 then are these lesser known Brands
worth the risk I mean I'm not going to give an outright thumbs up to any of the
ones that appear to be just slapping a sticker on someone else's possibly used
product so that rules out manaji 51 risk
and corn SL kology whoever you are
leaving us with yes Sira and milie S ya
1650 underperforms and is priced higher
than some of the 1660 supers so unless you absolutely need a half height single
slot card that's a big fat nope and of the two that remained milc did
underperform a bit but costs far less
while yes performed as expected includes cute stickers but comes at a higher
price these guys have also been around for at least 20 years though which gives
us some confidence that they'll be around to support us if something goes
wrong however all that said with more trans transparency around the
refurbished status of these other cards almost everything we saw today was a
pretty okay value at the prices that they're charging you just have to decide
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