Is a Fake GTX 970 from ebay usable?

so a couple weeks ago I bought this on eBay a GTX 970 for just 72 dollars and let's brand-new of course my belief is that that's not what's gonna be it's gonna be some sort of fake now it's arrived we're going to take a look already there is a sign that it's not going to be very impressive you notice that they've listed on here that the u.s. value is only $20 a lot less than I paid for it now this is potentially an interesting thing to look at because it allow us to answer a simple basic question when buying fake Goods do you get more when you pay more because not that long ago I purchased this $55 GTX 780 so $20 less did I'm did I in fact get less for my money is the $70 video card going to be better or is it in fact going to be exactly the same I don't know so here it is you can see it doesn't look like they used fancier packaging now in case you don't happen to know this the GTX 970 the GTX 780 benchmark more or less the same so there it is truth in advertising presumably so this more expensive card is coming in a less fancy box Wow they don't even bother to label the driver CD it's just a standard CDR this seems to be a really down market okay so it does not look identical on the inside it came in anti-static container which is kind of nice the heatsink is a little different looking let's compare the two side-by-side but what about the card itself that's the only part that's really going to be informative here so interestingly enough you can see that there's a different number of PCI pins that's definitely suggestive let's look at the back though and it does look like it's a different card for sure be interesting to see how well it performs it's this one's got a little bit more chips on it so maybe it really does have the two gigabytes of RAM that it advertises this one claims that four gigabytes but it just turned out to only have one gigabyte let's see from this view and you can see this looks pretty different too so clearly not identical so the question is did this card the more expensive one is it going to actually perform better than the cheaper card or just price not matter when you're buying counterfeit goods so I put the card in my computer and happily the fan does not make an atrocious amount of noise and I ran my favorite comparative benchmarking tool it's quick and dirty it's called user bench and the card showed up as it checks mine summon you can see that here but it's performance relative to the rest of the GTX 970 s is a really horrible so this is the average for gtx 970 and this is where it benchmarked way way way way way outside of the neural distribution so as suspected completely fake now i was a little tricky to figure out from these numbers what the closest equivalent GPU would be just for comparison here's the other fake card that I got which is slower than this card but well not by a huge amount my best guesstimate is that roughly speaking it's equivalent to a GTX 650 and just for amusement sake I have that over here compared against a GTX 460 which is what was in my computer before all this shenanigans started and you can see the GTX is actually a faster card on average than this so-called GTX 970 so let's see what gpu-z has to say about things so here's what gpu-z as I say on this side we've got some random user on the Internet and who has presumably a real GTX 970 and over here we have the GTX 970 quote/unquote that I bought bought and you can see that the numbers are all not all that similar I'll just point out a few highlights the bus width is strange and the band width is about 1/3 and the number of shaders is maybe 10% interestingly the pixel fill rate seems to actually be higher not really sure what that means and whether or not that's actually calculated so clearly some sort of bizarro card maybe it is a GTX 650 who knows so user benchmark is nice because it's quick and it gives you a distribution of other people's cards but doesn't look anything like a game it's nowhere near as complex so I ran this oldie but a goodie heaven benchmark from gosh what half a decade ago certainly not the most fancy benchmark but it's enough to give the card a little bit of workout you can see that everything seems to displaying okay and we'll get a benchmark results and a little bit here I wouldn't say the performance is very good certainly it's no 970 but it does appear to at least be usable I have to keep in mind that's only using half a gigabyte of video memory in order to run this benchmark so with the game that fully stresses all supposed gigabytes we may see a different result we'll have to find out but at least for modest gaming it seems like this card would do ok so the benchmark completed and here's the result this so-called GTX 970 and we can compare it against a much older video card which I own and test it in the same computer a GTX 460 which is shown on the left as you can see this fake card is not even as fast as a GTX 460 which was a perfectly good card back in the day but I mean come on that's an old old card so looks like you know at best we're getting maybe 25% maybe 20% of the performance of a real GTX 970 now we're gonna test of this card really has 2 gigabytes of RAM and to do that I'm gonna do something you probably didn't know you could do which is run multiple copies of the heaven benchmark each copy takes up about 500 megabytes a video memory so we can just keep on piling on copies and see one and if the card chokes now this may take a little while but it might be fun to watch with the fake 780 we got massive video glitches when we exceeded 1 gigabyte and we're just about one gigabyte now so we're about to find out if this really has at least two gigabyte now what we're asking this to do is fairly intensive and kind of mean but a correctly functioning video card would have no problem running multiple copies of this benchmark it would run out of memory at some point but it wouldn't crash or glitch out so we've already exceeded 1 gigabyte easily and I don't see any problems yet so that suggests that it really does have 2 gigabytes or at least a gig and a half it would seem that they've gotten more clever since the first fake card that I purchased now they're really putting the amount of memory that they're advertising in them which means that the card isn't massively unstable so it might be really slow which people might or might not notice but it won't crash which people would definitely notice clearly surpassed the one and a half gigabytes and suggests this card really does have two gigabytes of RAM so if you're gonna buy one of these fake cards and you're hoping to be able to use it I would recommend getting one with two gigabytes because it's probably more likely to be a true characterization of the amount of memory in the card just to compare my other video this screen would be full of snow and the video card driver would be crashing intermittently at this stage alright we can try to launch one more there shouldn't be enough memory for another copy but the driver should be smart enough to see that too much video RAM is being requested and just blocked the loading of the fifth benchmark here so we're now up to almost 1.9 you get bytes now maybe what'll happen here is the driver will be smart enough to start swapping unused textures in and out of memory I'd be kind of cool if it's true because it does sort of look like we've got all five running although at really miserable frame rates so that's actually pretty intelligent to the driver to do that it means that you won't crash it means the program won't quit and just gets really really slow so this point we have 1970 odd megabytes of textures in the video memory and everything seems to look just fine I mean slow as the Dickens but working okay so the video card really does have two gigabytes of memory so that's nice that means that for $70 I got a card that performs at roughly 20% of a real gtx 970 and usable video card so for low-end gaming could actually be just fine now it's interesting compared that it's not even as good as a GTX 460 which you can probably buy for what $30 $40 used now so I definitely overpaid for this video card there's no question about that there's a certain amount honor to buying fake goods on eBay and then reporting them ooh eBay ticket those scammers in trouble because what they're hoping for here is that someone who doesn't know any better buys this card and doesn't discover that its performance is horrible until well after the return period is over so to conclude my cliffhanger from the beginning of this video did paying 22 more dollars for a fake video card give me a better performance yes it did this 70 dollar video card performed about 20% better than this 55 dollar video card and the $75 video card didn't crash and have graphical glitches all over the place so more money did give me something better that's not to say it was either of them were good deals though

Channel: xeostube

Views: 12,751

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Id: g0Lo1hcdSHs

Length: 11min 17sec (677 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 08 2018