on the desk in front of me are five fake graphics cards also a water bottle at
ttstore.com that's not to say that you couldn't actually play games on these
things but rather that we strongly suspect that the games won't run the way
that they're supposed to so let's take a
look at both why and how sellers on
wish.com get away with selling fake
merchandise like graphics cards and also
what you can expect to receive in the mail if you do go for one of their too
good to be true deals mod mike's lineup has something
for everyone the mod mic usb is a usb powered attachable microphone the mod
mic uni is a revamp of the original three and a half millimeter mic and the
modmic wireless is well wireless check them all out now at the links in the
video description
when we went shopping shopping we wanted to focus on the most
popular graphics cards on wish which currently are the gtx 1060 and 1050 ti
both of them are often sold under the same listing and both of them have
similar amazing prices of about 60 us
dollars which made us wonder if there was actually any difference between the
two i mean after all these are coming from some sketchy seller in china so if
they're comfortable falsifying a listing i mean why not falsify it more why not
call this an rtx 2080 ti maybe because
that would seem even like too much too good to be true anyway fast forward
three weeks and here we are to start off we threw each
one of these cards this was the fifth one by the way it wasn't the water bottle onto our test bench to verify if
it would fire up at all and the answer is actually yes we've got our
HDMI cable running through the floor here over to the tv and lo and behold
the graphics card is working so colin is
firing up hardware info which is a useful tool for finding out what exactly
is inside any pc or even pc component
and this one immediately revealed some fakery fake
both the graphics card and the graphics chipset
actually report completely different values wait no hold
on a second where's the top one the top one says it's right
uh this one also says fake i think it's just scrolled over uh
yeah ah there it is okay so check this out guys both the graphics card and
graphics chipset fields report back as
GeForce 1050 ti which if you'll recall
is what we thought we were buying but they've actually both got fake
at the beginning of it in brackets
so the weird thing is that the GPU code
name is the only thing in here that's actually accurate and doesn't have a
fake thing on it so we found that all
five of our cards ended up self-reporting as
gf-116 instead of the chip that we would expect to find in a real 1050 ti the
gp107 so with the pertinent info pulled from software the next step is to remove
the coolers from these things and take a look at both the GPU dies themselves and
the RAM chips that are on board these things
you know what the kind of weirdest thing is actually you know what i take it back i
was going to say like the 1060 even managed us to have like a a busier
looking pcb but if you compare them the only
difference is that it has chips on it
well why oh that is
that is kind of bizarre ooh i'm also kind of excited to use these guys have
you used these yet not too wipes they're like ready to go
yeah yeah yeah come on it's ready to go it's already already wet
i'm ready to go i'm already wet you did the 1060. uh well the
the 1060. so curiously it does have proper NVIDIA
laser etching on the die but it doesn't
have an actual model number on it it just has a serial number yeah so this is
all just production info so i guess what uh what batch or wafer these all came
out of and anything to track it during the manufacturing process but there's no
actual like die number on it you know what's
really bizarre is that they actually go and put
like work into making sure that the card stays together well and stuff like you
see it's got these little plastic spacers here to make sure that even
though this cooler is obviously you know cheap and could you know accidentally
rock and chip the die or whatever else they're making sure that it stays
stabilized so that their falsified card doesn't get damaged i'm
very curious if these were like taken from some you know b bin uh defective
bin fixed and then resold or like like where is where are these coming from it
seems to be an old GPU that was harvested kind of
like we saw with those x79 motherboards that are made using repurposed server
chipsets it seems like they just they sourced these chips and they actually
went and designed and built pcbs for them like it seems to be brand new i
mean there are there are minor differences that we can see here like some of the RAM chips are like hynix
some are samsung some are a brand i've never heard of here let's pull apart
some more yeah this one this one's samsung oh this one's got alpina chips
yes elpida that's the one i hadn't heard of oh okay yeah no they're their thing
not typically used in graphics cards
from my experience over the last little while well this one actually has the
right connector which is funny all of these other boards have a four pin
connector and some of them were just jammed in there like the the plugs don't
fit at all yeah wow i didn't even notice that check this out so it's just like
rammed on there that's hilarious theoretically this pcb is designed for
pwm fan control and speed monitoring but
instead it's just a simple 12 volt and ground wire that are just rammed onto
the corresponding pins so this fan just runs at one speed probably yep
it's loud now that's curious this one that's actually on a gf-116 looking pcb
with no six pin power connector or anything even
actually does have the part number markings on it so this is a gf 116 200
kaa1 verified then hardware info trustworthy wish.com
product listing definitely not not trustworthy now
this is interesting colin pointed out
that while these three and actually the
one that's mounted to the test bench right now all use the same pcb
there is one difference between the two that are marked as 1050 ti
right here and the one that's marked as 1060. oh also curious is they're all
using even identical serial number stickers yes so these appear even though
they came from different resellers to come from exactly the same factory the
1050 ti ones have only four
of a total of 12 potential memory chips that could be mounted to the pcb
while the 1060 has all 12 of them
mounted why they would bother going to this length to differentiate their scam
cards i don't know but um
i guess all we can do is keep exploring yeah so i mean like there is a
difference if you buy a 1060 you're going to get something that theoretically will do i mean better or
more memory chips on it yep okay but
this is so weird because the 1050 ti's are claiming they have four gigs of ddr5
and the 1060 claims to have five gigs yeah is there any way for 12 modules to
go evenly into five gigs not that i'm aware of
like why even why even pretend to maintain the
illusion okay performance stock performance performance all right
one challenge we were running into is that while we were able to determine the
frequency of some of the memory chips it was not always easy from these part
numbers which are not necessarily listed publicly to determine the actual
capacity so sure let's start with the one on the
bench then before we start i want to talk expectations so
all these cards are falsely reporting as 10 series in the BIOS they're all
running gf-116 chips as best as we can
tell which is a chip that last time i think it was used was
march of 2011. almost a decade um
so my expectations for performance are
very low but based on how sort of well thought out these scam
cards seem to be i'm expecting them to actually
work so we're going to start with one of the 1050 ti's on this bigger pcb
okay here we go crisis yeah you play play some play some
crisis here okay so options
system settings graphics
1080x768 that seems reasonable for now hi for now okay
it's stuck at 69
nice oh wow yeah that's soon wow we are
coming up on the lake sometime in the near future
date of crisis
oh yeah ltx we should totally do some kind of
crisis anniversary uh or not it's not like i don't know crisis day like
celebration at ltx that'd be fun where are my mech suits
oh oh okay so like you're in it's running it's
running yeah it it it runs crisis it can run
crisis
okay i want to save the game first though uh
so we're at 10 24 by 768. we're going to try 1600 by 900 now
oh and it crashed
at least they didn't blue screen okay but the card the card works we could try
another one yeah okay
um do we have no there's no yeah so that's a curious thing i think we looked
up the rated TDP of this chip and it was 100 watts and theoretically the slot can
only do 75 watts 100 and change that introduces uh yet another potential
problem but hey let's see if it works what's going on here
is the tv that's the thing about OLED is you
can yeah you can't tell the difference between the tv being off on a black screen
wow did we just get hard locked i think we did
all right then why don't we move on to the 1060.
wow what and this is the 1060 oh it's because the resolution's high wow look
at those textures fighting to load in
you got a solid 3 FPS there what are we set at oh my goodness even the menu look
at this no we're only set to 1280x1024
this one's derping super hard
and this is the one we paid more for yeah
you can do it come on
i get to watch my death forever now that crashing we thought might be a
fluke turns out it's not all of our cards consistently stuttered
far more than we would expect or outright locked up in games even though
they were more stable on the desktop and you might think that okay well they
probably locked up in games because of the slow ancient processor that's on
board but it's actually because the fake
BIOS that's loaded onto these boards makes the system think that your
graphics card has more vram than might
actually be soldered to it so once the physical vram fills up
it'll just crash out hard
so uh let's take a look at how much RAM we are
actually running here from some googling we were able to
determine that each of the 1050 tis has one Gigabyte of vram so this one this
one and this one in spite of the fact that this one has twice as many chips and
then as for the 1060 that one was a little bit more
interesting so it's got two different models of RAM chips on it five of each
type and then from some quick googling we were able to find the rated speed of
them which appears to be different but we couldn't find a definitive source for
the capacity so we're not sure exactly how much it has but this card clearly
has colin could you play some crisis for us deeper issues that make it just sort of
not matter exactly how much vram it has
so this experience sucked not only are
these cards slower than advertised they're not even usable which led us
down another rabbit hole so as it turns out it is possible to re-flash the BIOS
chips on these cards to get them to report correctly the problem is that the
software you would normally use for that envy flash has been locked out in some
way so the only way to fix any of them is to connect directly
to the BIOS chip and use a usb reprogrammer like this one to rewrite it
now we ended up spending about 20 bucks for the programmer and the additional
clip that we needed to connect to the chip but unfortunately after hours of
tinkering we were unable to even read one of the BIOS ships let alone try to
flash them you win some you lose some i guess we
really did try here guys even going as far as trying the clearly inadvisable
method of reading the BIOS chip while it's powered and that was where things
got a little bit melty now dewy does tech had a bit more luck than us so you
can check out his video which we've linked below if you really want to see
that process anyway we decided to cut our losses at this
point but there's still a story to be told here namely
why these cards are still being sold when they are clearly not just fake but
but broken are these not on NVIDIA's radar like what's the deal
as far as we can tell there's a very fast turnover of these card listings on
which in fact all five of the ones that we've purchased by the time we got them
had the stores ripped down and we noticed this during our original wish pc
build as well some of them would go away as soon as a week after the purchase
what that means is that vendors are pumping these cards out to as many
people as possible customers are reporting them
obviously then they take down the store
they're off with your money and on to making another store and
well a new listing one thing that continues to baffle me
though is why these sellers even bother to ship a
graphics card at all if all the customer is going to get is a graphics card
shaped paperweight it sort of raises the question why not
just send a potato right the best guess that i have is it's to
slow down the error reporting process so
maybe the first few customers fire up a game they're not familiar with how this
card should perform they see something like this they go okay well hey
i mean it's gaming and it is and maybe they spend some time
sort of troubleshooting before they end up reporting it delaying the process i
can understand the appeal of seeing a 1050 ti at this price point given that
under normal circumstances this is the kind of performance that you
can expect for 60 bucks this for the record guys is a 750 ti we did find a
handful of them on ebay for around the neighborhood of 70 to 75
canadian dollars and it's not great
but at least it works so guys you gotta remember the timeless wisdom of
if it seems too good to be true it probably is and the lesser known bit
of wisdom until wish.com takes responsibility for the scams running on
their site you probably shouldn't shop there if you guys enjoyed this video by
the way get subscribed we're going to have a really cool one upcoming on the
next dock so you're going to want to make sure you don't miss it and you're
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that linked below again thanks for watching guys if you're looking for another video to watch maybe check out
the video where Anthony and i successfully got one of those headless
mining cards playing games by rerouting the graphics power through the onboard
output that's a really good one so so what do you even want to do with all
these now like we can't give them to people in
good conscience yeah i don't want to keep them yeah honestly they're
basically they're manufacturing e-waste over there like
those are these are worthless um
like i wouldn't even use these in a mining rig nope oh you can't
yeah this is one i needed yeah we're going to have to erase them i know this is useless but it's kind of
a shame you want to get rid of this we could hold on to the coolers what would we use the coolers for you
never know when you might need just like a rando aluminum cooler for something
it's a nice heat sink in which case i'll undo all these screws
sorry colin i'm going for lunch
enjoy i'll just produce coolers for you
forever