Cheap AliExpress Graphics Cards - SCAM???

go home max late as hell Plus no way they're finally here I thought Anthony was just throwing money away buying graphics cards on Aliexpress let's go check these things out after I tell you about today's sponsor be quiet dark rock for and pro for near silent air coolers feature wave contoured cooling fins and easy top mounted installation learn more through the links below ok so apparently what we think we ordered is an Elsa BT X 1080 and a max Sun GTX 10 65 gig and this is what we've got so why don't we start with the one that has no box so we've got Elsa on here that's actually like molded so you know presumably there's some kind of volume to this production and then it's got a sticker on the fan that says de Broglie or de Broglie is but it doesn't sound very good the board feels pretty heavy it's got a lot of memory chips back here so this seems somewhat credible but there's no no recognizable part number anywhere on it it's got what looks like a serial and then a warranty void by a tear or a damage and that's about it I gotta say though this shroud is sketching me out a little bit I haven't seen many 1080s that are that sort of cheaply constructed alright so we know already that this one doesn't have five gigs of memory because Nvidia doesn't make a gtx 1060 with five gigs of memory this is a funny thing for me so max sun is using a really cheap heatsink design on this thing holy crow I haven't seen something like this on a card above the like hundred dollar price point in my memory so you see even though it has all of these aluminum fins this is just a what is it like a caste design I'm gonna check with Alex would this be cast aluminum and you see how that the fins don't go all the way through actually no this was extruded extruded okay so his theory is that it's actually extruded and that makes a ton of sense because then they just have this profile and they'd have the aluminum just kind of pushed through it and then they could just slice off heat sinks like this and then it's very little work to create these little slices for air to pass through and then these little spots where they can throw in a couple of heat pipes this is a very inefficient way of cooling versus having fins that actually pass all the way through so you've got a lot more airflow there's nothing really else about it that sets off warning bells other than the plastic backplate which will obviously not only serve no purpose for cooling because even metal ones don't do that but actually could make it worse holy crap this might actually have five gigs of RAM what is a 160 bit bus am I mistaken is there a 5 gig like like you know what let's just all right so we've got benchmarks run for our reference founders Edition GT X 1080 already which means we can go ahead pull that puppy off the bench here and throw on the ELSA de broglie how much less did we actually pay I thought the idea was we were supposed to find things that were like cheap okay so 720 us for the 1080 okay they've got some kind of tape over the SLI fingers why would they do that and not like a like a temporary looking tape like this doesn't look like it's intended to be taken off these little heatsink fins on the back don't actually appear to be like attached to this aluminium plate in any meaningful way so I doubt sincerely that they're really doing anything for cooling it does show up as a GT X 1080 benchmarks almost done and honestly everything here is pretty good so far we haven't like power throttled or anything like that so 65 51 average FPS of 49 how does that compare to our founders edition Anthony our founders edition did 65 76 okay so this one is bang-on that's actually pretty cool because compared to the overpriced mining cards that were available at the time even though we did pay a lot of money for this thing and getting a warranty for it would probably be a pretty sketchy ordeal we at least did save a significant amount of money spoil it for me was there anything I was supposed to notice that was bad about this one that shroud is for a gtx 980ti not a 1080 did they reuse the PCB as well the PCB is for an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Founders edition but then they're just using a 980 TI shroud on it yeah okay our model numbers on the back that coincide with an apple mac pro geforce 7300 GT so it's not like it's not a little sketchy but by and large we got what we paid for I consider that one a success all right this one oops I am not quite as hopeful about these fans are exactly as cheap as the heatsink all the way and hold on maybe they're not at no they're not as bad as I thought it'd help out okay you stop that this is like an AMD card or something I said okay no no don't don't tell me don't tell me well I'm not sure if I'm expecting it but we should see performance similar to a GTX 1060 frame rates look like about what I would expect from a 1060 let's see what it is it's actually showing up as 10 65 gig with memory running it 4 gigahertz so that would be 8 effective so at 35 32 that's above 300 points less than we got with our founders edition 1060 but every piece of data we can find seems to confirm that this is in fact a five gig card so those of you who have heard us rant on what was it the 1070 TI video and at various points on the lan show will be aware of how we feel around here about manufacturers saying this is a 1060 it's got six gigs of ram and this is a 10 63 gig but i hope by the way it's actually also cut down in some ways we don't like it but apparently they're screwing around with this even more in other regions okay so after some digging what it looks like happened here is Nvidia actually released a China specific 5 gig version of the 1060 with the only difference same number of CUDA cores with the only difference being the bus width and the amount of memory so it performs as we saw fairly similarly to a regular 1060 but what with the whole global DRAM shortage and all that it comes in at a lower price and it is intended for internet cafes so this card ended up accidentally on purpose on a marketplace but it was actually for OAM sales only to these kinds of land cafes that are much more popular over there than they are over here so once again we actually got an OK value and the product itself was legit so buying GPUs on Aliexpress good idea bad idea we're still not quite sure but it's it's not obviously a complete scam so that's actually better than I was expecting to be perfectly honest with you Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes in design business technology and more and Premium Membership gives you unlimited access to high-quality classes on must know topics so you can improve your skills unlock new opportunities and the work that you love our own editor Taryn here and a few other lzg team members are learning about motion graphics working through the core series motion graphics with Curtis Scott motion graphics nobody can pronounce code schizont Skillshare is really affordable with an annual subscription that works out to less than $10 a month and the first 500 people who use our link in the video description will get their first two months of Skillshare for free so check it out now so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured from a source that we definitely trust at the link in the video description also down there through merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join well that was fun now we've got a couple of graphics cards that we bought that we don't need so we'll probably have like an eBay or Craigslist link under the video at the end here if anyone actually wants 7 5 gig 1060 or 1080 presumably you'll get no warranty coverage whatsoever so you know the thing about mystery meat is it tastes best with a grain of salt

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 7,564,401

Rating: 4.8227224 out of 5

Keywords: gpu, graphics, card, aliexpress, sketchy, mystery, mystery meat, buyer beware, china, chinese products, Counterfeit?, Scam?, Investigation, performance, benchmarks

Id: PUIxyLRnzDc

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Thu May 24 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/rokr1292]

ELSA GPU? Bet it runs ice cold. one might even say, Frozen.

[u/thibaultmol]

WOW! WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT!? xd