In today’s report of hardware scammers and fake GPUs, we head back to China, where technician Brother Zhang received a broken RTX 4090. The problem, though, is that the level of fakery didn’t just end at the GPU die being an entirely different model, it wasn’t even real.
Brother Zhang shows in his Bilibili video how scammers had stuck a plastic, plastic, on to the RTX 4090 PCB to imitate the GPU’s original GPU die. Like all fakes, Zhang could see the telltale signs of the con; firstly, the card was bought for 1,500 Yuan (~RM916). Despite it already being a generation behind, there’s no way a flagship Ada Lovelace card would ever currently sell for that cheap.
Then there are the markings on the “GPU die”. Besides it being plastic, many of the markings were incorrect. Uniko’s Hardware says that the “30” date code made no sense, as that would indicate that the GPU was made in 2030, which, by our internal calculator, hasn’t arrived yet. Also, the RTX 4090 came out in 2022 and, since the launch of Blackwell, has been discontinued.
The fake GPU die also lacked other details. Specifically, there was no QR code in the bottom-left corner of the card, and the marking at the top-right corner of the substrate is something that you’d only find on the older RTX 30 Series, such as the 3080 and 3090. Again, with reference to the fake date, those cards launched back in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Then there is the slapdash method in which the plastic die was attached: there is no glue or adhesive around the “silicon”, which means that should some unlucky person buy it, it would likely just detach from the PCB, even if a heatsink was installed on top of it.
(Source: Bilibili, Uniko’s Hardware via X, Videocardz)
