Jul 08, 2024 12:35:00

Older generation graphics cards disguised as NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090s are in circulation

NVIDIA's

GeForce RTX 4090 is the top-of-the-line consumer GPU manufactured by NVIDIA at the time of writing, and even the cheapest graphics cards are sold for about 300,000 yen. The YouTube channel 'northwestrepair,' which publishes many videos of repairing PC parts, has reported that counterfeit graphics cards equipped with older generation GPUs are on the market.

Warning about new Nvidia 4090 scam just hit the market - YouTube


The product that northwestrepair was asked to repair was the ASUS ' TUF-RTX4090-24G-GAMING '.

When I check the resistance, the tester shows a fairly high number.

So we investigated further and found that no current flowed even when a voltage of 1.8V was applied.

Even when we applied voltage while taking pictures with a thermal camera, there was no sign of the temperature rising.

So I decided to remove the GPU. Here, northwestrepair had a bad feeling that the metal frame of the removed GPU came off easily.

When we checked the pads on the board that connect to the GPU solder balls, we found several scratches that looked like they had been rubbed against something.

First, repair the scratches on the pad.

Then they soldered the GPU back in. At this stage, northwestrepair noticed something else suspicious.

Looking closely at the soldered VRAM around the GPU, we see that there are some soldered and some unsoldered parts.

In fact, the VRAM installed was a fake, with only the outer shell looking like the real thing.

If you look at the solder balls of the VRAM, you can see that the circuit patterns are completely different between the fake and the real thing.

This raises the possibility that the GPU whose metal frame easily comes off is also a fake. Upon investigation, we found that the position of the ground on the bottom left of the GPU die is different between the real one and the fake one.

The ground position matches that of the RTX 3080Ti. The pins on the AD102 GPU of the RTX 4090 are compatible with the GA102 GPU of the RTX 3080Ti. northwestrepair pointed out that the chip of the RTX 4090 that was requested to be repaired was a fake RTX 3080Ti that had its surface polished to remove the original mark and had a new mark laser engraved on it. Of course, such a process is very dangerous and could damage the GPU. northwestrepair said, 'If it's a scam, how can you tell? You can't tell unless you take it apart and take a closer look. Don't buy an RTX 4090 from a Chinese online store.'