discount sites like deal extreme aliexpress and ebay can be a great way
to get awesome deals on used or off-brand tech products and if you're
like me and you're kind of a gigantic cheapskate the prospect of saving money
can be pretty enticing but
today's video is a cautionary one a
buyer beware tale of making sure that you think critically about a great deal
before pulling the trigger because even spending one dollar is a waste of money
if you don't get anything useful in return for example this usb 2 Ethernet
adapter that is advertised as being 10
gigabit ready for just over four dollars
a piece is very eye-catching but as we are going to see a lot of the time
things like this are just too good to be
true unlike our sponsor thermaltake and their
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so you might understandably find yourself thinking wow a 10 gigabit
Ethernet adapter for four us dollars well gee
that sounds like a way better deal than this 10 gig adapter from akitio that
costs a whopping 200. i mean why is this
thing even so expensive well
now that they're both here these products don't even seem to be in the
same universe as one another the akitio
uses a high speed Thunderbolt 3 interface it's got a large
well-ventilated aluminum chassis it's got a nice premium feel to it including
a removable cable and
we actually haven't tested this yet but theoretically if we plug it into a
device like oh say a laptop
that was a five four gig file
okay so 10 gig working on a laptop and that's
nice it's bus powered too it doesn't need any external power adapter
now let's turn our attention to our
deal extreme adapter this one is made of cheap plastic
with flimsy connectors and a cable that i think could probably
best be described as flaccid
it's driverless that's pretty nice but
what in the world could that be 100 megabit per second
let's take that same four gig file and have a real bad time this doesn't
even make sense why is it going at 20 megabytes a second oh my Wi-Fi still
okay and you're done bud oh boy yeah that's
what we were expecting literally
slower than wi-fi so
at this point it's fairly clear that this product has been misrepresented
by the website that's selling it but the problem is that by the time you've got
it in your hands to test it unless you're going to pay you know 25
bucks to ship back a four dollar item it's a bit too late to find out that
your steal of a deal was just a steal of
your money so how do you differentiate between a scam
like this and the real thing before you pull the trigger you know
what i'm going to use this 10 gig adapter for my web browsing for the rest of this
video because it's sexy now because
there are cases where you can find extraordinary value from up-and-coming
manufacturers or on liquidation deals we're not saying that you should just
dismiss outright anything that seems to be a bargain we're just saying that your
spidey sense should be tingling and you need to make sure that you're doing
extra research so the first thing that we're gonna
check is whether there is blatantly conflicting information on the product
page check out for example this blender that's advertised as three horsepower
and 2200 watts for a cool ninety
the problem here is that the most you can consistently pull from a 120 volt
circuit is about 1500 watts before you
risk tripping a breaker and the description of the item actually does
correct this misleading title so then in the case of our adapter here we can
actually see that the title and the detailed specs below are at the very
least consistent both claiming to be 10 gigabit per second but then getting into
our next tip if we look closely at the product photos
we can actually see that this adapter is
clearly labeled fast Ethernet which yes young kids out
there is the actual official name for
100 megabit Ethernet that is only one
percent of the advertised speed and this
is far from the only example of blatant mislabeling on sites like this one it's
a very common practice used to lure in
unsuspecting customers there are the scam sd cards that we recently did a
video on fake brand name fashion goods cables that are supposedly certified for
apple devices and of course misleading batteries some of the batteries we found
even used quotation marks in the title around the capacity and then show the
real capacity in the description below although i'm pretty sure that real
capacity is probably a load of bunk as well
it's almost like click bait titles except in this case you're paying for it
and it's definitely false advertising
back to our Ethernet example though we've already got enough evidence to
turn us off of this thing but there is still more for us to learn here
conflicting specifications can be a surefire way to identify bs
so then we've got that claimed 10 gigabit per second transmission speed
well that's pretty cool but what's also included here in the description is that
it's usb 2.0 type c
now most people understandably might see a usb type-c connection and go oh well
that's really modern and fast but as a tech nerd i know right off the
bat that type c is a physical standard
that can carry all kinds of different signals and the usb 2.0 protocol isn't
spec for anywhere near 10 gigabit per second speed actually it tops out around
5 of that now if you're not so technically
inclined you might not know or even have the
desire to know what the differences are between all the usb versions
and that's where our next tip comes in if you don't know what a specific term
means that doesn't mean it's not important so google it and this can be
applicable to any marketing terms or buzzwords because those might not mean
anything at all even if you know less bondage on your new phone sounds really
enticing back to this specific title again though if you search up usb 2.0
the first thing that's going to come up is the wikipedia page for usb and it
shows that usb 2.0's maximum signaling rate is 480 megabits per second oops
oops the final nail in the coffin here is actually the model number which we
can see in the photo remarketing of existing products is
very common on these types of marketplaces see soldier console so with
a quick google search we find that this part number actually corresponds to a
realtek Ethernet controller that's designed to run at 10 megabit or 100
megabit speeds now that i think of it we should probably crack this open and find
out if it's even a proper real tech controller not yet though we'll get to
that after our last tip you might have noticed that one thing that we didn't
mention is user reviews and we'd love to say
that that's a good way to avoid scams and negative reviews
should be heated for the most part it's just that they're not the silver bullet
that you might hope fake positive reviews have become a huge problem even
on reputable online stores like amazon as for these ones well simply put
they've been well pretty misleading from our experience this particular item
actually doesn't even have any reviews yet but deal extreme
shows items with no reviews as having
five filled in stars and that only changes if our review is submitted all
right anyway we've had our fun now i think it's time for us to crack this
nut open uh Jake what was the plan here uh
cut stuff i guess so this is cool as expected
we've got only four conductors here which tells us that
yes of course this is not going to transmit anything more than usb 2 speeds
you would need nine conductors for usb 3 and 20 actually yeah how many frames 24
yeah for Thunderbolt 3. so yeah yeah this is clearly
very clearly not anything other than usb2
yes it is a real tech controller well at least it's printed as that
so one question you might ask yourself is if you've only got four conductors
here why do you need this 24 pin connector on the other end i mean it
just comes down to convenience usb type c is reversible it's durable and of
course modern devices are switching over to using it it's just that we're clearly
only using a couple of pins for the actual data
interface on it so everything else is just blank it's just not connected to
anything by contrast let's open up our 10 gigabit
adapter here and this is one whoa
beefy beefy friggin thing although i gotta say
the design of this chassis is not really that amazing because there's no
like heat conduction
yeah between smaller but yeah i bet you it's
very strong yeah i'm sure it is you could probably play hockey with it and
then come back and use it as your adapter
just canadian things so there it is
if you want 10 gigabit connectivity you've got to have a 10 gigabit ready
chipset and of course you've got to have an
interface at the other end that is actually capable of taking that 10 gig
and transmitting it to something and you've got to have a way to
dissipate all the heat and whatnot apparently wow this chip is so gives off
so much heat they've actually got a thermal pad on the back the ihs here is
almost as wide as this entire board what's under there not bad d-round
probably or the Thunderbolt chipset oh you're probably right
seems fine oh man oh god
what the hell kind of thermal pad is this excellent where's your pointer
thing i don't know it's in your pocket i just want to see
oh my god
this is physically oh man is that like an actual like just bare silicon too
that you're just like i don't think so no no i think it's on the package oh god
the noises ah stop
just chill just chill it's all good
well i can't read it anyway i'll have to replace those thermal panels
yeah do you mind Jake i don't think i have much choice
bad noise yeah oh god i hate it it's so bad sorry i'm sorry
it's like the tech nerd equivalent of nails on a chalkboard
scratching a microcontroller with a knife
and i can't read it the markings are like what like scratched off with a knife
no they're just really faint and not like
obvious anyway somehow all like scratched
all right well here you go
well thanks for the condom so conclusion time then we know that
four dollars versus two hundred dollars is a huge gap and this is a pretty
obvious example of seems too good to be true but the point of making this video
was to go through some of the steps that you can take for something that isn't
quite as obvious to determine the fake stuff from the real stuff and we hope
that even if this might not have been useful for you maybe you can share this
video with someone that you know who has been hoodwinked before
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disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
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four boxes four bucks you need a 100 megabit adapter uh while you're down
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