Scammers in China recently made the headlines again, this time for selling NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 cards that are actually RTX 3090 GPUs underneath the hood. These sort of scams are dime a dozen in China, and suffice it to say, they aren’t going to stop anytime soon.
Discovery of the fake RTX 4090 was posted by UNIKO’s Hardware on X, who also appears to have made the discovery after noticing that the capacitor layout around the GPU was not the same as the intended PCB and design for the card. Additionally, the scammer had polished the die and relabelled it with what we can assume to be an industrial laser to make it look legit.
another fake 4090 that used a 3090 die
lapped the die then remark it as 4090 ad102
the mlcc surrounding the die are the layout that 3090 uses, or just check the location of the dots at cornershttps://t.co/W2KPJ3ZHUK https://t.co/omimu79x78 pic.twitter.com/VR8Cl6d0C6— UNIKO's Hardware 🌏 (@unikoshardware) March 25, 2025
Fake RTX 4090 cards aren’t the only GPU scammers are peddling to the unsuspecting masses. In the past, scammers have even tried to sell fake RTX 3090 Ti and 3080 Ti models. Last year, one gamer bought an RTX 4090, only to find out all they had bought was a PCB devoid of the GPU and accompanying memory modules.
And the reason for these hollowed out PCBs is part of a much broader issue, where modders and companies that strip these RTX 4090 cards reuse these chips by doubling the memory on actual cards (custom-made, of course), given that the PCBs are typically double-sided.
Whatever the case, the victims at the end of the day are the ones that end up paying top-dollar and end up with something else.
(Source: Uniko’s Hardware)
