Check out the scam: technician finds RTX 4090 that actually uses the RTX 3080 Ti GPU

O canal no Youtube NorthWest Repairfrom a renowned hardware repair store, showed yet another of the many scams that can happen when buying a video card in certain places. Simply an RTX 4090, the best option today NVIDIA for the gamer segment, but which actually uses the GPU of a previous generation model, the RTX 3080 Ti.

Buying a “pig in a poke”

Apparently, everything is correct, an ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 4090 unit, complete with protective film and everything. However, when disassembling the VGA, the reality. The GPU was not the AD102, a chip found in the RTX 4090, but rather the GA 102, the graphics chip of the RTX 3080 Ti. The scammers did not choose this chip by chance. Given the pinout compatibility, it was possible to use the old GPU. The scam was so ingenious that the matrix was polished and a new label, with the identification of the AD102 chip, was laser engraved. A detail that makes the scam go unnoticed just taking into account a visual inspection.

NortWest Repair also noted that at least one of the memory modules was not 2GB, but rather 256MB, and they weren’t even GDDR6X.

Covering the tracks

With memory modules, tricks to prevent visual inspection from revealing anything unusual are more common, especially on used boards damaged by mining. In order to hide the effect of the highlight on the chips, some scammers even paint themas revealed by Paulo Gomes, a Brazilian video card repair technician.

In another video, the repair shop mentions the risks of buying a graphics card through Facebook’s marketplace. In this case, he shows an MSI RTX 4090 that was simply missing the GPU and memory modules. A situation that has also been reported by some users on the Chinese Chiphell forum.

China is the biggest exporter of scams like these and many others, even Desktop graphics cards being sold with gaming notebook GPUs have already been found on Chinese websites.