Video Card Shopping… on Wish.com

on the desk in front of me are five fake graphics cards also a water bottle LT t store that's not to say that you couldn't actually play games on these things but rather that we strongly suspect that the games won't run the way that they are supposed to so let's take a look at both why and how sellers on wish calm get away with selling fake merchandise like graphics cards and also what you can expect to receive in the mail if you do go for one of their too-good-to-be-true deals mod Mike's line up has something for everyone the mod Mike USB is a USB power detachable microphone the mod Mike uni is a revamp of the original three-and-a-half millimeter mic and the mod mic wireless is wireless check them all out now at the links in the video description [Music] when we went shopping we wanted to focus on the most popular graphics cards on which which currently are the GTX 1060 and 1050 Ti both of them are often sold under the same listing and both of them have similar amazing prices of about 60 US dollars which made us wonder if there was actually any difference between the two I mean after all these are coming from some sketchy seller in China so if they're comfortable falsifying a listing I mean why not falsify it more why not call this an Archie X 2080 I may because that would seem even like too much too good to be true anyway fast forward three weeks and here we are to start off we through each one of these cards this was the fifth one by the way it wasn't the water bottle onto our test bench to verify if it would fire up at all and the answer is actually yes we've got our HDMI cable running through the floor here over to the TV and lo and behold the graphics card is working so colin is firing up hardware info which is a useful tool for finding out what exactly is inside any PC or even PC component and this one immediately revealed some fakery fake both the graphics card and the graphics chipset actually report completely different values wait no hold on a second where's the top one the top one says it's right this one also says fake I think it's just scrolled over yeah ah there it is okay so check this out guys both the graphics card and graphics chipset fields report back as GeForce 1050 Ti which if you'll recall is what we thought we were buying but they've actually both got fake at the beginning of it in brackets so the weird thing is that the GPU code name is the only thing in here that's actually accurate and doesn't have a fake thing on it so we found that all five of our cards ended up self reporting as gf 1/16 instead of the chip that we would expect to find in a real 1050 TI the GP 107 so with the pertinent info pulled from software the next step is to remove the coolers from these things and take a look at both the GPU dies themselves and the RAM chips that are onboard these things you know what the kind of weirdest thing is actually you know what I take it back I was gonna say like the 1060 even managed us to have like a busier looking PCB you know but if you compare them the only difference is on it well why oh that is that is kind of bizarre who I'm also kind of excited to use these guys who use this easy set not to of wipes they're like ready to go yeah yeah yeah come on it's pretty to go it's already already wet I'm ready to go I'm already wet you did the 1060 well said the 1060 m so curiously it does have proper Nvidia laser etching on the die but it doesn't have an actual model number on it it just has a serial number yeah so this is all just production info so I guess what what batch or wafer these all came out of and anything to track it during the manufacturing process but there's no actual like dye number on it you know what's really bizarre is that they actually go and put like work into making sure that the card stays together well and stuff like you see it's got these little plastic spacers here to make sure that even though this cooler is obviously you know cheap and could you know accidentally Rock and chip the die or whatever else they're making sure that it stays stabilized so that they're falsified card doesn't get damaged I'm very curious if these were like taken from some you know be bin or defective been fixed and then resold or like where is where are these coming from it seems to be an old GPU that was harvested kind of like we saw with those x79 motherboards that are made using repurposed server chipsets it seems like they just think they saw first these chips and they actually went and designed and built PCBs for them like it seems to be brand new I mean there are there are minor differences that we can see here like some of the tram chips are like Hynek some are Samsung some are a brand I'd never heard of here let's pull apart some more yeah this won't this one Samsung oh this one's got Elpida chips yes Oh Peter that's the one I hadn't heard of okay yeah no they're their thing not typically used in graphics cards from my experience over the last little while well this one actually has the right connector which is funny all of these other boards have a four pin connector and some of them were just jammed in there like the plugs don't you at all yeah Wow I didn't even notice that check this out so it's just like rammed on there that's hilarious theoretically this PCB is designed for PWM fan control and speed monitoring but instead it's just a simple 12 volt and ground wire that are just rammed onto the corresponding pins so this fan just runs it one speed probably yep it's what now that's curious this one that's actually on a GF 116 look in PCB with no six pin power connector or anything even actually does have the part number markings on it so this is a GF 116 200 ka a one verified then hardware info trustworthy wished comm product listing definitely not trustworthy now this is interesting Colin pointed out that while these three and actually the one that's mounted to the test bench right now all use the same PCB there is one difference between the two that are marked as 1050 Ti right here and the one that's marked as 10 6000 also curious is they're all using even identical serial number stickers yes so these appear even though they came from different resellers to come from exactly the same Factory the 1050 Ti ones have only four of a total of 12 potential memory chips that could be mounted to the PCB while the 1060 has all 12 of the mountain why they would bother going to this length to differentiate there scam cards I don't know but I guess all we can do is keep exploring yes so I mean like there is a difference if you buy 1060 you're gonna get something that theoretically will do I mean better memories on it yeah okay but this is so weird because the 10:50 tea eyes are claiming they have four gigs of DDR 5 in the 1060 claimed to have five gigs yeah is there any way for 12 modules to go evenly into five gigs not that I'm aware like why even why even pretend to maintain the illusion okay performance to talk performance before let's do one challenge we were running into is that while we were able to determine the frequency of some of the memory chips it was not always easy from these part numbers which are not necessarily listed publicly to determine the actual capacity so sure let's start with the one on the bench then before we start I want to talk expectations so all these cards are falsely reporting is ten series in the BIOS they're all running gf1 sixteen chips as best as we can tell which is a chip that last time I think it was used was March of 2011 yeah almost a decade so my expectations for performance are very low but based on how sort of well-thought-out these scam cards seem to be I'm expecting them to actually work so we're gonna start with one of the 10:50 TI's on this bigger PCB okay here we go you're crazy like this yeah you put your place someplace of crisis here okay so options system settings giraffe --ax 1080 by 768 that seemed reasonable for now high for now okay it's stuck at 69% Hey nice oh wow yeah that's soon Wow we are coming up on the lake sometime in the near future date of crisis oh yeah we should totally do some kind of crisis anniversary or not it's not like I don't know crisis day like celebration at LTX I'd be fun where are my mech suits Oh okay so like you're in its running it's running yeah it runs crisis can run crisis okay I want to save the game first though so we're at 1024 by 768 we're gonna try 1600 by 900 now and it crashed lose it in bluescreen okay but the card the card works we could try another one yeah okay do we have no there's no yeah that's a curious thing I think we looked at the rated TDP of this chip and it was 100 watts and theoretically the slot can only do 75 Watts hundred change that introduces yet another potential problem but hey let's see if it works what's going on there it's the TV that's the thing about OLED as you can yeah you can't tell the difference between the TV being off and a black screen wow did we just get hard locked I think we did all right then why don't we move on to the 1060 Wow what and this is the 1060 oh it's because of resolution so I Wow look at those textures fighting to load in you got a solid 3 FPS there what are we set oh my goodness even the menu look at this no Roman to 1280 by 1024 this one's derp and super hard and this is the one we paid more for yeah you can do it come on and sometimes I get to watch my death forever now that crashing we thought might be a fluke turns out it's not all of our cards consistently stuttered far more than we would expect or outright locked up in games even though they were more stable on the desktop and you might think that okay well they probably locked up in games because of the slow ancient processor that's onboard but it's actually because the fake BIOS that's loaded onto these boards makes the system think that your graphics card has more vram than might actually be soldered to it so once the physical vram fills up it'll just crash out hard so let's take a look at how much RAM we are actually running here from some googling we were able to determine that each of the ten 50t is has one gigabyte of VRAM so this one this one and this one in spite of the fact that this one has twice as many chips and then as for the 1060 that one was a little bit more interesting so it's got two different models of RAM chips on it five of each type and then from some quick googling we were able to find the rated speed of them which appears to be different but we couldn't find a definitive source for the capacity so we're not sure exactly how much it has but this card clearly has Colin could you play some crisis for us deeper issues that make it just sort of not better exactly how much we around it has so this experience sucked not only are these cards slower than advertised they're not even usable which led us down another rabbit hole so as it turns out it is possible to reflash the BIOS chips on these cards to get them to report correctly the problem is that the software you would normally use for that envy flash has been locked out in some way so the only way to fix any of them is to connect directly to the BIOS chip and use a USB reprogram er like this one to rewrite it now we end up spending about 20 bucks for the programmer and the additional clip that we needed to connect to the chip but unfortunately after hours of tinkering we were unable to even read one of the BIOS chips let alone try to flash them you win some you lose some I guess we really did try here guys even going as far as trying to clearly inadvisable method of reading the BIOS chip while it's powered and that was where things got a little bit melty now DeWitt does tech had a bit more luck than us so you can check out his video which we've linked below if you really want to see that process anyway we decided to cut our losses at this point but there's still a story to be told here namely why these cards are still being sold when they are clearly not just fake but but broken are these not on Nvidia's radar like what's the deal as far as we can tell there's a very fast turnover of these card listings on which in fact all five of the ones that we've purchased by the time we got them had the stores ripped down and we noticed this during our original wish PC build as well some of them would go away as soon as a week after the purchase what that means is that vendors are pumping these cards out to as many people as possible customers are reporting them obviously then they take down the store they're off with your money and on to making another store and well a new listing one thing that continues to baffle me though is why these sellers even bother to ship a graphics card at all if all the customer is going to get is a graphics card shaped paperweight it sort of raises a question why not just send a potato right the best guess that I have is it's to slow down the error reporting process so maybe the first few customers fire up a game they're not familiar with how this card should perform they see something like this they go okay well hey I mean it's gaming and it is and maybe they spend some time sort of troubleshooting before they end up reporting it delaying the process I can understand the appeal of seeing a 1050 Ti at this price point given that under normal circumstances this is the kind of performance that you can expect first 60 bucks this for the record guys is a 750ti we did find a handful of them on eBay for around the neighborhood of seventy to seventy-five Canadian dollars and it's not great but at least it works so guys you got to remember the timeless wisdom of if it seems too good to be true it probably is and the lesser-known bit of wisdom until wish calm takes responsibility for the scams running on their site you probably shouldn't shop there if you guys enjoyed this video by the way get subscribed we're gonna have a really cool one upcoming on the next dock so I want to make sure you don't miss it and you're gonna want to make sure you don't miss this segue to our sponsor browsing the Internet can be risky business so why don't you protect yourself and browse anonymously with a hidden IP private Internet access is an affordable way to do just that they make the websites and services that you use online think that you are some anonymous person in some different location piao various levels of encryption and a ton of features like their internet kill switch that will automatically cut your connection if you get disconnected from your VPN involuntarily they've got unlimited bandwidth and reliable service with over 3000 servers in 32 countries and you can try it risk-free with their 7 day money-back guarantee they've got apps for Windows Mac Android and iOS and you can connect up to five devices at once on each account check it out at LM d GG / p IA linus - we're gonna have that linked below again thanks for watching guys if you're looking for another video to watch maybe check out the video where Anthony and I successfully got one of those headless mining cards playing games by rerouting the graphics power through the onboard output that's a really good one so what do you even want to do with all these now like we can't give them to people in good conscience yeah I don't want to keep them yeah honestly they're basically they're manufacturing you waste over there like don't user these are worthless like I wouldn't even use these in a mining rig nope oh you can't yeah this is yeah we're gonna have to you waste them I know this is useless but I want to get rid of all because hold on to the coolers what would we use the coolers for you never know when you might need just like a Rando aluminum cooler for something that's a nice heatsink in which case I'll undo all these screws sorry I'm going for lunch enjoy I'll just produce coolers for you forever

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 3,485,954

Rating: 4.9390936 out of 5

Keywords: wish, wish.com, alibaba, banggood, gearbest, fake, counterfeit, bios, gaming, gpu, geforce, false, usb, flash, crysis, benchmark, fps, nvidia, 1050ti, 1060, 750, 750ti, old, recycled, ewaste, cooler, ram, hynix, samsung, elpida, chips

Id: ZbZ32mqmsrg

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/digitalplanet_]

Wish is a dumpster fire lol

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/ExistingMix6]

well, very typical kinda stuff in China, we basically these stuff all the time. But they actually barely existed in our online platform now due to Ali's policy.

Still, we have our talent, however some people didn't use them in right way most of the time