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Hey, want a great deal on a graphics card? Stop.

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In your quest to save money on an admittedly expensive component,

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you might end up buying a fake. But hold on, fake graphics cards, how is that a thing?

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I mean, you can't exactly cook up an RTX 4080 in grandma's basement from tinfoil and copper wire, right?

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Right. What's actually happening is that shady merchants

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are making Frankencards with GPUs and video memory

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re-soldered onto different circuit boards. Okay, but if the GPUs in VRAM are legit,

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why is this a problem? Well, for starters, the parts are often harvested

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from cards that had some kind of problem, from customers that returned faulty units

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to cards that failed quality control testing at the factory.

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Now, this doesn't mean that the GPUs in VRAM modules on these fake cards are broken or don't work,

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but it does mean you have no assurances as to what kind of shape they're in,

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and they might not deliver the type of performance or longevity you're expecting.

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There are also no guarantees that the parts have the same soldering quality you'd get

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when buying a card from a legitimate source or that they'll work together as well.

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Remember, specific GPU models tend to be tightly integrated

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with the VRAM that they come with, so if the parts are reassembled differently,

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you're introducing a pretty major point of failure, but perhaps the bigger problem with fake cards

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isn't that these sketchy sellers are just piecing them together and hoping for the best,

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it's that many of them are actively lying to you. I feel like I'm being gaslit.

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Many of these fake graphics cards are sold as new,

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but not only is this untrue because they're being made with old harvested parts,

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but the GPU in VRAM might have already suffered physical damage.

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It's not uncommon for these parts to be heat damaged due to either improper soldering

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or use in cryptocurrency mining at some point. Sometimes you can tell because they'll be slightly yellowed.

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Really unscrupulous sellers have even been known to repaint VRAM modules to make them look like new

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when in reality, they're anything but. If you're suspicious about a card you've bought recently,

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you might even be able to scrape that pain off to confirm you've been swindled.

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Even worse, there are plenty of stories about low-end GPUs

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being passed off as something much more powerful. Scammers will flash a custom BIOS onto the card,

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which makes it appear to the operating system as whatever model the scammers want you to think it is.

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So when you go to play a game or even update a modern driver,

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you'll get performance far below what you're expecting or even crashes.

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Although certain programs like GPU-Z can sometimes determine if your card has a hacked BIOS,

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that doesn't mean that scammers have completely given up on selling these imposter cards.

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And there's really no way to know what they're sending until it arrives at your house.

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But where are people getting these fake cards from anyway? Some come from sites like AliExpress and Wish,

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where the precautions against counterfeit merchandise just aren't as strong.

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While others can even come from sites like Amazon Marketplace,

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which are a bit more reputable, but still rely on third-party sellers to be honest.

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Do yourself a favor and buy cards from sellers you trust and manufactured from well-known add-in board partners

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you've actually heard of before. After all, what's the point of cheaping out

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if you're just gonna get a complete piece of junk? Actually, you might as well just save even more money

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and not bought it all. Hey, that was a Techquickie.

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Thanks for watching the whole video. Like the video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it.

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