WEBVTT

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on the desk in front of me are five fake graphics cards also a water bottle at

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ttstore.com that's not to say that you couldn't actually play games on these

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things but rather that we strongly suspect that the games won't run the way

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that they're supposed to so let's take a

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look at both why and how sellers on

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wish.com get away with selling fake

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merchandise like graphics cards and also

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what you can expect to receive in the mail if you do go for one of their too

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good to be true deals mod mike's lineup has something

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for everyone the mod mic usb is a usb powered attachable microphone the mod

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mic uni is a revamp of the original three and a half millimeter mic and the

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modmic wireless is well wireless check them all out now at the links in the

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video description

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when we went shopping shopping we wanted to focus on the most

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popular graphics cards on wish which currently are the gtx 1060 and 1050 ti

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both of them are often sold under the same listing and both of them have

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similar amazing prices of about 60 us

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dollars which made us wonder if there was actually any difference between the

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two i mean after all these are coming from some sketchy seller in china so if

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they're comfortable falsifying a listing i mean why not falsify it more why not

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call this an rtx 2080 ti maybe because

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that would seem even like too much too good to be true anyway fast forward

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three weeks and here we are to start off we threw each

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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

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it would fire up at all and the answer is actually yes we've got our

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HDMI cable running through the floor here over to the tv and lo and behold

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the graphics card is working so colin is

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firing up hardware info which is a useful tool for finding out what exactly

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is inside any pc or even pc component

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and this one immediately revealed some fakery fake

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both the graphics card and the graphics chipset

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actually report completely different values wait no hold

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on a second where's the top one the top one says it's right

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uh this one also says fake i think it's just scrolled over uh

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yeah ah there it is okay so check this out guys both the graphics card and

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graphics chipset fields report back as

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GeForce 1050 ti which if you'll recall

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is what we thought we were buying but they've actually both got fake

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at the beginning of it in brackets

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so the weird thing is that the GPU code

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name is the only thing in here that's actually accurate and doesn't have a

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fake thing on it so we found that all

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five of our cards ended up self-reporting as

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gf-116 instead of the chip that we would expect to find in a real 1050 ti the

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gp107 so with the pertinent info pulled from software the next step is to remove

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the coolers from these things and take a look at both the GPU dies themselves and

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the RAM chips that are on board these things

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you know what the kind of weirdest thing is actually you know what i take it back i

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was going to say like the 1060 even managed us to have like a a busier

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looking pcb but if you compare them the only

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difference is that it has chips on it

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well why oh that is

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that is kind of bizarre ooh i'm also kind of excited to use these guys have

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you used these yet not too wipes they're like ready to go

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yeah yeah yeah come on it's ready to go it's already already wet

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i'm ready to go i'm already wet you did the 1060. uh well the

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the 1060. so curiously it does have proper NVIDIA

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laser etching on the die but it doesn't

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have an actual model number on it it just has a serial number yeah so this is

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all just production info so i guess what uh what batch or wafer these all came

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out of and anything to track it during the manufacturing process but there's no

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actual like die number on it you know what's

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really bizarre is that they actually go and put

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like work into making sure that the card stays together well and stuff like you

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see it's got these little plastic spacers here to make sure that even

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though this cooler is obviously you know cheap and could you know accidentally

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rock and chip the die or whatever else they're making sure that it stays

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stabilized so that their falsified card doesn't get damaged i'm

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very curious if these were like taken from some you know b bin uh defective

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bin fixed and then resold or like like where is where are these coming from it

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seems to be an old GPU that was harvested kind of

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like we saw with those x79 motherboards that are made using repurposed server

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chipsets it seems like they just they sourced these chips and they actually

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went and designed and built pcbs for them like it seems to be brand new i

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mean there are there are minor differences that we can see here like some of the RAM chips are like hynix

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some are samsung some are a brand i've never heard of here let's pull apart

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some more yeah this one this one's samsung oh this one's got alpina chips

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yes elpida that's the one i hadn't heard of oh okay yeah no they're their thing

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not typically used in graphics cards

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from my experience over the last little while well this one actually has the

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right connector which is funny all of these other boards have a four pin

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connector and some of them were just jammed in there like the the plugs don't

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fit at all yeah wow i didn't even notice that check this out so it's just like

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rammed on there that's hilarious theoretically this pcb is designed for

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pwm fan control and speed monitoring but

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instead it's just a simple 12 volt and ground wire that are just rammed onto

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the corresponding pins so this fan just runs at one speed probably yep

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it's loud now that's curious this one that's actually on a gf-116 looking pcb

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with no six pin power connector or anything even

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actually does have the part number markings on it so this is a gf 116 200

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kaa1 verified then hardware info trustworthy wish.com

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product listing definitely not not trustworthy now

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this is interesting colin pointed out

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that while these three and actually the

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one that's mounted to the test bench right now all use the same pcb

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there is one difference between the two that are marked as 1050 ti

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right here and the one that's marked as 1060. oh also curious is they're all

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using even identical serial number stickers yes so these appear even though

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they came from different resellers to come from exactly the same factory the

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1050 ti ones have only four

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of a total of 12 potential memory chips that could be mounted to the pcb

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while the 1060 has all 12 of them

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mounted why they would bother going to this length to differentiate their scam

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cards i don't know but um

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i guess all we can do is keep exploring yeah so i mean like there is a

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difference if you buy a 1060 you're going to get something that theoretically will do i mean better or

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more memory chips on it yep okay but

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this is so weird because the 1050 ti's are claiming they have four gigs of ddr5

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and the 1060 claims to have five gigs yeah is there any way for 12 modules to

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go evenly into five gigs not that i'm aware of

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like why even why even pretend to maintain the

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illusion okay performance stock performance performance all right

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one challenge we were running into is that while we were able to determine the

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frequency of some of the memory chips it was not always easy from these part

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numbers which are not necessarily listed publicly to determine the actual

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capacity so sure let's start with the one on the

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bench then before we start i want to talk expectations so

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all these cards are falsely reporting as 10 series in the BIOS they're all

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running gf-116 chips as best as we can

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tell which is a chip that last time i think it was used was

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march of 2011. almost a decade um

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so my expectations for performance are

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very low but based on how sort of well thought out these scam

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cards seem to be i'm expecting them to actually

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work so we're going to start with one of the 1050 ti's on this bigger pcb

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okay here we go crisis yeah you play play some play some

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crisis here okay so options

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system settings graphics

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1080x768 that seems reasonable for now hi for now okay

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it's stuck at 69

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nice oh wow yeah that's soon wow we are

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coming up on the lake sometime in the near future

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date of crisis

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oh yeah ltx we should totally do some kind of

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crisis anniversary uh or not it's not like i don't know crisis day like

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celebration at ltx that'd be fun where are my mech suits

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oh oh okay so like you're in it's running it's

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running yeah it it it runs crisis it can run

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crisis

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okay i want to save the game first though uh

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so we're at 10 24 by 768. we're going to try 1600 by 900 now

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oh and it crashed

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at least they didn't blue screen okay but the card the card works we could try

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another one yeah okay

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um do we have no there's no yeah so that's a curious thing i think we looked

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up the rated TDP of this chip and it was 100 watts and theoretically the slot can

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only do 75 watts 100 and change that introduces uh yet another potential

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problem but hey let's see if it works what's going on here

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is the tv that's the thing about OLED is you

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can yeah you can't tell the difference between the tv being off on a black screen

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wow did we just get hard locked i think we did

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all right then why don't we move on to the 1060.

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wow what and this is the 1060 oh it's because the resolution's high wow look

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at those textures fighting to load in

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you got a solid 3 FPS there what are we set at oh my goodness even the menu look

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at this no we're only set to 1280x1024

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this one's derping super hard

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and this is the one we paid more for yeah

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you can do it come on

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i get to watch my death forever now that crashing we thought might be a

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fluke turns out it's not all of our cards consistently stuttered

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far more than we would expect or outright locked up in games even though

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they were more stable on the desktop and you might think that okay well they

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probably locked up in games because of the slow ancient processor that's on

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board but it's actually because the fake

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BIOS that's loaded onto these boards makes the system think that your

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graphics card has more vram than might

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actually be soldered to it so once the physical vram fills up

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it'll just crash out hard

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so uh let's take a look at how much RAM we are

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actually running here from some googling we were able to

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determine that each of the 1050 tis has one Gigabyte of vram so this one this

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one and this one in spite of the fact that this one has twice as many chips and

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then as for the 1060 that one was a little bit more

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interesting so it's got two different models of RAM chips on it five of each

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type and then from some quick googling we were able to find the rated speed of

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them which appears to be different but we couldn't find a definitive source for

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the capacity so we're not sure exactly how much it has but this card clearly

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has colin could you play some crisis for us deeper issues that make it just sort of

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not matter exactly how much vram it has

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so this experience sucked not only are

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these cards slower than advertised they're not even usable which led us

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down another rabbit hole so as it turns out it is possible to re-flash the BIOS

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chips on these cards to get them to report correctly the problem is that the

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software you would normally use for that envy flash has been locked out in some

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way so the only way to fix any of them is to connect directly

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to the BIOS chip and use a usb reprogrammer like this one to rewrite it

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now we ended up spending about 20 bucks for the programmer and the additional

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clip that we needed to connect to the chip but unfortunately after hours of

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tinkering we were unable to even read one of the BIOS ships let alone try to

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flash them you win some you lose some i guess we

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really did try here guys even going as far as trying the clearly inadvisable

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method of reading the BIOS chip while it's powered and that was where things

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got a little bit melty now dewy does tech had a bit more luck than us so you

00:14:04.240 --> 00:14:08.560
can check out his video which we've linked below if you really want to see

00:14:07.360 --> 00:14:12.880
that process anyway we decided to cut our losses at this

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point but there's still a story to be told here namely

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why these cards are still being sold when they are clearly not just fake but

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but broken are these not on NVIDIA's radar like what's the deal

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as far as we can tell there's a very fast turnover of these card listings on

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which in fact all five of the ones that we've purchased by the time we got them

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had the stores ripped down and we noticed this during our original wish pc

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build as well some of them would go away as soon as a week after the purchase

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what that means is that vendors are pumping these cards out to as many

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people as possible customers are reporting them

00:14:52.480 --> 00:14:57.360
obviously then they take down the store

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they're off with your money and on to making another store and

00:14:59.760 --> 00:15:05.519
well a new listing one thing that continues to baffle me

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though is why these sellers even bother to ship a

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graphics card at all if all the customer is going to get is a graphics card

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shaped paperweight it sort of raises the question why not

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just send a potato right the best guess that i have is it's to

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slow down the error reporting process so

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maybe the first few customers fire up a game they're not familiar with how this

00:15:29.040 --> 00:15:36.480
card should perform they see something like this they go okay well hey

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i mean it's gaming and it is and maybe they spend some time

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sort of troubleshooting before they end up reporting it delaying the process i

00:15:43.760 --> 00:15:50.959
can understand the appeal of seeing a 1050 ti at this price point given that

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under normal circumstances this is the kind of performance that you

00:15:53.120 --> 00:16:00.240
can expect for 60 bucks this for the record guys is a 750 ti we did find a

00:15:58.320 --> 00:16:04.800
handful of them on ebay for around the neighborhood of 70 to 75

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canadian dollars and it's not great

00:16:07.759 --> 00:16:15.040
but at least it works so guys you gotta remember the timeless wisdom of

00:16:12.720 --> 00:16:19.920
if it seems too good to be true it probably is and the lesser known bit

00:16:17.600 --> 00:16:24.480
of wisdom until wish.com takes responsibility for the scams running on

00:16:21.759 --> 00:16:27.519
their site you probably shouldn't shop there if you guys enjoyed this video by

00:16:26.160 --> 00:16:31.600
the way get subscribed we're going to have a really cool one upcoming on the

00:16:29.680 --> 00:16:34.079
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

00:17:27.280 --> 00:17:33.120
the video where Anthony and i successfully got one of those headless

00:17:30.880 --> 00:17:38.000
mining cards playing games by rerouting the graphics power through the onboard

00:17:35.200 --> 00:17:41.360
output that's a really good one so so what do you even want to do with all

00:17:39.039 --> 00:17:44.880
these now like we can't give them to people in

00:17:43.120 --> 00:17:49.120
good conscience yeah i don't want to keep them yeah honestly they're

00:17:47.200 --> 00:17:53.840
basically they're manufacturing e-waste over there like

00:17:50.480 --> 00:17:55.120
those are these are worthless um

00:17:53.840 --> 00:17:59.760
like i wouldn't even use these in a mining rig nope oh you can't

00:17:58.320 --> 00:18:03.840
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

00:18:02.799 --> 00:18:08.720
a shame you want to get rid of this we could hold on to the coolers what would we use the coolers for you

00:18:07.200 --> 00:18:12.480
never know when you might need just like a rando aluminum cooler for something

00:18:10.799 --> 00:18:17.600
it's a nice heat sink in which case i'll undo all these screws

00:18:15.039 --> 00:18:21.360
sorry colin i'm going for lunch

00:18:20.000 --> 00:18:26.320
enjoy i'll just produce coolers for you

00:18:23.600 --> 00:18:26.320
forever