Hey, want a great deal on a graphics card? Stop.
In your quest to save money on an admittedly expensive component,
you might end up buying a fake. But hold on, fake graphics cards, how is that a thing?
I mean, you can't exactly cook up an RTX 4080 in grandma's basement from tinfoil and copper wire, right?
Right. What's actually happening is that shady merchants
are making Frankencards with GPUs and video memory
re-soldered onto different circuit boards. Okay, but if the GPUs in VRAM are legit,
why is this a problem? Well, for starters, the parts are often harvested
from cards that had some kind of problem, from customers that returned faulty units
to cards that failed quality control testing at the factory.
Now, this doesn't mean that the GPUs in VRAM modules on these fake cards are broken or don't work,
but it does mean you have no assurances as to what kind of shape they're in,
and they might not deliver the type of performance or longevity you're expecting.
There are also no guarantees that the parts have the same soldering quality you'd get
when buying a card from a legitimate source or that they'll work together as well.
Remember, specific GPU models tend to be tightly integrated
with the VRAM that they come with, so if the parts are reassembled differently,
you're introducing a pretty major point of failure, but perhaps the bigger problem with fake cards
isn't that these sketchy sellers are just piecing them together and hoping for the best,
it's that many of them are actively lying to you. I feel like I'm being gaslit.
Many of these fake graphics cards are sold as new,
but not only is this untrue because they're being made with old harvested parts,
but the GPU in VRAM might have already suffered physical damage.
It's not uncommon for these parts to be heat damaged due to either improper soldering
or use in cryptocurrency mining at some point. Sometimes you can tell because they'll be slightly yellowed.
Really unscrupulous sellers have even been known to repaint VRAM modules to make them look like new
when in reality, they're anything but. If you're suspicious about a card you've bought recently,
you might even be able to scrape that pain off to confirm you've been swindled.
Even worse, there are plenty of stories about low-end GPUs
being passed off as something much more powerful. Scammers will flash a custom BIOS onto the card,
which makes it appear to the operating system as whatever model the scammers want you to think it is.
So when you go to play a game or even update a modern driver,
you'll get performance far below what you're expecting or even crashes.
Although certain programs like GPU-Z can sometimes determine if your card has a hacked BIOS,
that doesn't mean that scammers have completely given up on selling these imposter cards.
And there's really no way to know what they're sending until it arrives at your house.
But where are people getting these fake cards from anyway? Some come from sites like AliExpress and Wish,
where the precautions against counterfeit merchandise just aren't as strong.
While others can even come from sites like Amazon Marketplace,
which are a bit more reputable, but still rely on third-party sellers to be honest.
Do yourself a favor and buy cards from sellers you trust and manufactured from well-known add-in board partners
you've actually heard of before. After all, what's the point of cheaping out
if you're just gonna get a complete piece of junk? Actually, you might as well just save even more money
and not bought it all. Hey, that was a Techquickie.
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