By now, you’ve already read about the horror stories of how NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs are being stripped, literally, for parts and leftovers in China. In keeping with the theme of Frankenstein GPUs, an unfortunate customer in the US became the victim of a scam after they bought a fake RTX 4090 via Amazon.
And by fake, we mean a really, really bad fake. As presented by the fairly popular hardware repair shop, northwestrepair, the card was sent in by the customer for what they assumed would be a quick repair job. One of the punchlines here is that they had paid US$2,000 (~RM9,430) for the card.
As northwestrepair procedurally tears down the card, they’re greeted with a hodge-podge of components, horrendously put together on to the PCB. On the subject of PCB, they also found that the PCIe retention finger had a crack at the apex. Adding on to that, the card also had a melted power connector.
But the biggest tell-tale of the fake RTX 4090 was the GPU core itself. A quick search online of the codename listed on the die, AD103-300-A1, was that of an RTX 4080 die. For the record, an RTX 4090 bears the codename AD102-300-A1, which is an entirely different beast in and of itself.
The laundry list of red flags is plentiful but northwestrepair says that it shared its “repair” video of the fake RTX 4090 as a warning that is as old as time to consumers: not everything that you purchase online is authentic or the real deal. More alarming is the fact that these cards are in circulation within the US marketplace. As for the poor customer, this card was deemed a “no fix” by the outfit.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware)
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