Info Newegg took action, no longer allowing 3rd-party sellers to peddle Chinese FAKE video cards on their site, and even featuring them in their ads.

[VirtualLarry]

Are you a human?

www.newegg.com

This card was in Newegg's most recent front-page rotating banner ad product selection.

It purports to be a GTX 1050 ti 4GB, for $98. What a deal, right? WRONG!

It has a VGA port. VGA has been deprecated since Maxwell. Pascal DID NOT SUPPORT VGA AT ALL. That's a key way that you know that this card is a FAKE, probably BIOS-modded/hacked, and most likely not even a 4GB card, likely a 2GB GT 730 (Kepler) or 1GB GTX 560 / 460 (Fermi). NOT PASCAL.

Shame on you Newegg, for perpetrating fraud in their ads!

 

[maddogmcgee]

its gone

 

[VirtualLarry]

LOL, maybe someone at Newegg saw this thread.

Good for them, that they took care of that.

 

[aigomorla]

its gone

no i see it for sale still.. and its on sale even.. WOW..

Sale Ends in 6 Days (Mon) -Save: $11.00 (10%)

Are you a human?

www.newegg.com

I took an effort to write a review on it letting people know it might be fake copy and pasting larrys comment.
Lets see if newegg allows it or even bothers to read the review.

 

[Mopetar]

no i see it for sale still.. and its on sale even.. WOW..

Sale Ends in 6 Days (Mon) -Save: $11.00 (10%)

Are you a human?

www.newegg.com

I took an effort to write a review on it letting people know it might be fake copy and pasting larrys comment.
Lets see if newegg allows it or even bothers to read the review.

I don't know if that review is supposed to be live or not, but I'm not able to see it and the product doesn't have any reviews. Perhaps that means your review isn't active pending some kind of approval or that a team at Newegg is looking into this in more detail, but they have another card they're selling (https://www.newegg.com/p/1DW-00AX-00001) that doesn't seem to add up either.

It's being advertised as an ancient 6770 with a 1 GHz clockspeed and 4 GB of memory, neither of which are close to realistic for that card. It's also advertised as having 720 pipelines, which I'm assuming refers to the shader count, but if that's accurate it would make this a 6750. The card would need one hell of an overclock to hit 1 GHz and the only way it has 4 GB of memory is if they really mean Gigabit instead of Gigabyte. It also lists supporting DirectX 10, which really makes me wonder since everything 5000-series and onwards had DirectX 11 support. The shroud is obviously a fake since GPUs didn't look like that when the 6000-series roamed the earth.

 

[VirtualLarry]

That "6770" doesn't show it taking a 6-pin either, and yet it lists 40nm fabrication.

What AMD 40nm cards didn't take PCI-E power connectors? It would have to be a very pedestrian GPU, one of their non-gaming ones, I think.

Edit: Could this be a HD4830? With a different shroud?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Brian from TechYesCity on YT, confims what I said, go to 3:10 in the video.

 

[Mopetar]

That "6770" doesn't show it taking a 6-pin either, and yet it lists 40nm fabrication.

What AMD 40nm cards didn't take PCI-E power connectors? It would have to be a very pedestrian GPU, one of their non-gaming ones, I think.

Edit: Could this be a HD4830? With a different shroud?

I'm honestly not sure what it might be considering how much of it is made up, so I don't see why the 40 nm fabrication would be any more accurate than the completely bogus clock speed or memory capacity. The 4830 was done on 55 nm (only a few mid-range cards that came late to the 4000-series used the 40 nm process) and the lack of a 6-pin power connector really does limit what it might be. If it's an actual 6000 series card it's at most a 6670. A 5570 is another possibility and both of those at least match the types of ports the photos have which can't be lied about.

It does have AMD visible on the bottom of the board, but that could be fake as well, but would suggest it's not a 4000-series card since it makes no sense for a Radeon to bear AMD branding at that point. There are also some pictures of 6000-series cards that show that on actual AMD cards, but again it may just be something added to give the appearance of a genuine product. A lot of the really low-end cards that only ran on power from the PCI bus weren't very tall though, but the pictures make it appear full height.

I'd probably guess it's some kind of OEM card so that they could get a big enough batch to doctor up as something else, unless the picture is just as bogus as the rest of it and you just get some random cobbled together piece of kit. I am kind of curious what it actually is now though.

 

[Motostu]

Just for fun I took a look since those models sounded familiar. I've got both a 4830 and a 6670 laying here. The 4830 has a 6 pin power connector on it; no power connector on the 6670. The video connector layout on the 6670 looks identical to the card on newegg. It's a 1GB ddr3 card. Will add a pic shortly.

 

[EXCellR8]

wtf is an "independent desktop computer?"

sounds like a system that "doesn't need no man tellin' her what to do"

 

[CP5670]

It's like those Rolex knockoffs you can get. Now people are making fake video cards too.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Dawid [YT] takes a look (with teardown) at some fake GPUs allegedly sold by Amazon.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Are you a human?

www.newegg.com

More fakes on Newegg, in their current sale. Someone inform Dawid.

 

[Mopetar]

Are you a human?

www.newegg.com

More fakes on Newegg, in their current sale. Someone inform Dawid.

That fake is particularly funny if you read the product description:

• Graphics chip: GeForce GTX550Ti 1GB
• Display: GTX1050TI 4GB GPU

I'm not sure if they're incompetent or what the hell's going on exactly. It's hard to tell, but I even doubt it's actually a 550 Ti under the hood. I wonder if that's just left over from a previous scam where they tried passing it off as a 550 Ti instead of whatever it actually is.

Also the stickers on the fake shroud look so awful that anyone should be put off buying it for that reason alone.

 

[VirtualLarry]

What I would really like to know is, given the might that NVidia has and the sway that they hold over GPU AIB partners, don't they have any recourse (Trademark or otherwise) against these scammers? They are using the model number of a legitmate Nvidia product (GPU), and "passing off" an inferior one. Doesn't NVidia care one bit about their reputation, among new buyers (the types that might be sucked in by these scam cards)?

Surely, they could alert US Customs. Or do they not ever send "mass quantities" of these cards over here to the USA, just sell them as onesies from China-sellers?

 

[Mopetar]

I'm sure Nvidia cares in the same way that every company wants to protect their brand image from fakes, knock-offs, etc. but at the end of the day China doesn't care one bit and there's only so much Nvidia can do to stop it since shutting down or banning one scammer just leaves the door open for another to take their place. It isn't too dissimilar to to the illicit drug trade in that regard. It's one big game of whack-a-mole and a question of how much time and money you're willing to spend trying to shut something like this down. Your employees cost a lot more to pay than the dingus that's trying to run the scam in the first place. The only real way to stop it is an educated consumer that won't fall for this type of scam, but good luck with that.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm sure Nvidia cares in the same way that every company wants to protect their brand image from fakes, knock-offs, etc.

The only real way to stop it is an educated consumer that won't fall for this type of scam, but good luck with that.

Would it be too much for NVidia to put up a "Beware of fake GPUs" page on their site, complete with pictures, and points to note to detect the fakes, as well as potentially, a list of sellers on ebay, Amazon, and Newegg, that sell/sold fake Nvidia-esque GPUs? A little consumer education might go a long way.

That is, unless NVidia doesn't want to even touch the subject, because they fear that mentioning that there are "fakes" out there, would put off people from buying NVidia GPUs altogether. But that's why they need to stamp out, or at least, clearly identify the fakes.

 

[Mopetar]

Sure they can make such a page, but as soon as they post pictures of what all of the fakes look like, all of the fakes will look like something else. How much money do they want to spend having someone play cat and mouse with the scammers?

Perhaps you're reasoning is why companies don't address such things more openly, but also consider the poor fool who has just been scammed by the newest fake and now blames Nvidia for not having pictures of it on their website. Maybe you think there's no one stupid enough to do something like that, but they already bought a fake GPU.

This is an age old problem. "Caveat emptor" as the Romans would say.