2024-01-22 12:02:00
The victim of this recent incident unfortunately received a counterfeit RTX 4090 from Amazon. Unfortunately, the buyer discovered “shipping damage” upon receiving the item and sent it to North West Repair (NWR), who shared the story on their YouTube channel.
An initial visual inspection of the card revealed a large crack in the PCB. Additionally, there appears to be a melted power connector – something we’ve seen before on RTX 4090 graphics cards.
But that’s nothing compared to what a deeper inspection reveals. The first sign that something was wrong was that one of the screws had a fake tamper-proof warranty sticker on it, and all the screws were a little over-tightened – two mightn’t be unscrewed and had to be soaked in alcohol.
After removing the back cover and heatsink, the first thing NWR noticed was that the thermal spacer only covered half of the memory chips. The GPU itself appears to be completely burned out, as are some other components on the PCB.
Things only get worse from here, while the serial number on the card’s sticker claims it’s an RTX 4090 with 24GB VRAM, the AD103-300-A1 code shows it’s an RTX 4080. NWR claimed in the video that this was an RTX 4090 laptop GPU, but the company confirmed in the YouTube comments section that this was its own mistake. The final conclusion was that the card was “unrepairable” because there was nothing left to fix.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of someone ordering a graphics card from Amazon only to receive something else. In December 2022, Amazon sent an RTX 3060 Ti graphics card to a Canadian buyer, which turned out to be a fake card filled with a putty-like substance. The company said no refunds will be issued until the “correct” merchandise is returned to its warehouse.
However, there is something worth noting regarding this recent incident. This customer bought the card from a discounted deal on an Amazon return. We often see situations where some criminals will keep the cards that are still usable and return fake cards that look similar to the original product in order to get their money back. These fakes are then sold to other customers who don’t know they are buying fakes.
Earlier this month, reports surfaced that a gamer spent $1,600 on a second-hand RTX 4090 in China, only to discover that it had no GPU and was missing a VRAM chip.
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