Video Card Shopping… on Wish.com

On the desk in front of me are five fake graphics

card

s and a bottle of water from ttstore.com. That's not to say you can't play with these things, but we strongly suspect the games won't work properly. They are supposed to, so let's take a look at why and how sellers on Wish.com get away with selling fake products like graphics

card

s and also what you can expect to receive in the mail if you buy one of them too. It's good to be true, mod mike's offerings have something for everyone. The Mic USB Mod is a USB powered attachable microphone.

The mod mic uni is a renewal of the original three and a half millimeter microphone and the modmic wireless is wireless. Check them all out now. In the links in the

video

description, when we went

shopping

, we wanted to focus on Wish's most popular graphics cards, which are currently the GTX 1060 and 1050 Ti. Both are often sold in the same listing and both have similar amazing features. prices around 60 US dollars, which made us wonder if there was really any difference between the two, I mean, after all, these come from some shady seller in China, so if they feel comfortable faking a listing, I mean , why not fake it more? call this rtx 2080 ti maybe because it would seem too good to be true anyway, fast forward three weeks and here we are to start, we threw each of these cards, by the way this was the fifth.

Put the water bottle on our test stand to check if it would turn on and the answer is yes we have our HDMI cable running through the floor to the TV and lo and behold the graphics card is working so colin. is turning on hardware information, which is a useful tool to find out what exactly is inside any PC or even PC component and this immediately revealed a fake, both the graphics card and the graphics chipset actually report completely different values. Wait, don't wait a second. Where is the one above? The one above says it is correct.

This one also says false. I think it just shifted. Oh yeah, there it is, so check this out. Both the graphics card and graphics chipset fields are reported as geforce 1050 ti, which is. As you may remember, it's what we thought we were buying, but actually they're both fake at the beginning in parentheses, so the strange thing is that the GPU code name is the only thing here that's really accurate and there's nothing fake about it. , so we discovered that our five cards ended up reporting as gf-116 rather than the chip we would expect to find on a real 1050 ti, the gp107, so with the pertinent information extracted from the software the next step is to remove the coolers from these things and take a look at the GPU dies and RAM chips that are on board these things.

You know what the weirdest kind of thing is. Actually, you know what I take back. I was going to do. Let's say the 1060 even managed to give us a busier looking PCB, but if you compare them the only difference is that it has chips, well why, oh, that's a little strange. Ooh, I'm excited to use them too. Guys, have you used these wipes too much yet? They're ready to go, yeah, yeah, yeah, come on, it's ready to go, it's already wet, I'm ready to go, I'm already wet, you made the 1060. uh, well, the 1060. Interestingly, it has a laser engraving of nvidia suitable on the die, but it doesn't have an actual model number, it just has a serial number.

Yes, this is all just production information, so I assume batch or wafer is all. came out and anything to track it during the manufacturing process, but there's no actual die number on it, you know, what's really strange is that they actually go and work hard to make sure the card stays together well and stuff. as you see. I have these little plastic spacers here to make sure that even though this cooler is obviously cheap and you might know that it accidentally moves and chips your die or whatever, they are making sure that it stays stabilized so your counterfeit card doesn't fall out. . damaged, I'm really curious if these were taken from some, you know, b bin uh, defective container repaired and then resold or where they came from.

It appears to be an old gpu that was harvested like we saw with those x79 motherboards that are made with repurposed server chipsets, it seems like they just sourced these chips and actually designed and built PCBs for them as if they looked new, I mean, there are minor differences that we can see here. like some of the ram chips are like hynix some are samsung some are a brand I've never heard of here let's separate a little more yes this one is samsung oh this one has alpina chips yes elpida that's the one I hadn't heard of oh okay yeah no they're their thing, they're not normally used on graphics cards, from my experience lately, well this one actually has the right connector, which is funny, all these other boards have a four pin connector and some of them were just stuck in there like the plugs didn't fit at all, yeah, wow, I didn't even notice that, look at this, so it's kind of tamped in there, that's funny, in theory, this PCB is designed for pwm fan control and speed monitoring but instead it is just a simple 12 volt and ground wire that is simply inserted into the corresponding pins so this fan only runs at one speed probably yes , it's loud, that's funny, this one is actually on a PCB that looks like gf-116 without a six pin power connector or anything like that.

It even actually has the part number markings so this is a verified gf 116 200 kaa1 and then the hardware information is reliable. The

wish

.com product list is definitely not unreliable, now this is interesting. Colin pointed out that while these three and actually the one mounted on the dyno right now all use the same PCB, there is a difference between the two that are marked 1050 ti here and the one that is marked 1060. Ah , also curious that they are all using stickers with identical serial numbers, yes, so these appear even though they come from different resellers and come from the exact same factory, the 1050 ti have only four of a total of 12 memory chips potentials that could be mounted on the PCB, while the 1060 has all 12 mounted, why would they bother?

Going to this length to differentiate their scam cards, I don't know, but I guess all we can do is keep exploring, yeah, so I mean there's a difference, if you buy a 1060, you'll get something that theoretically will work. I mean better or more memory chips, yes ok but this is very strange because the 1050 ti claims to have four gigs of ddr5 and the 1060 claims to have five gigs. Yes, is there a way for 12 modules to be evenly distributed over five gigs? Not that I'm aware of why even pretend to maintain the illusion. Well, performance, stock, performance, performance, well, one challenge that we were running into is that while we were able to determine the frequency of some of the memory chips, that wasn't always the case.

It's easy to determine actual capacity from these part numbers that aren't necessarily publicly listed so let's start with the one on the bench and then before we get started I want to talk about expectations so all of these cards report falsely as series 10 in the BIOS. We are all running gf-116 chips as best we can tell, which is a chip that I believe was last used in March 2011. Almost a decade, so my performance expectations are very low, but based on what well thought out. these scam cards seem to be, I hope they actually work, so let's start with one of the 1050 ti on this bigger PCB, okay here we go, crisis, yeah, you play, you play, you play, crisis here, okay, so, options system. graphics settings 1080x768 which seems reasonable for now hi for now ok its stuck at 69 nice oh wow yeah that's soon wow let's get close to the lake sometime in the near future crisis date oh yeah ltx we should do some kind of crisis anniversary uh or not, it's not like I don't know crisis day, like a celebration in ltx, that would be fun, where are my mech suits? oh oh okay so like you're in it's running it's running yeah run crisis can run crisis.

Well, I want to save the game first, so we're at 10 24 by 768. Let's try 1600 by 900 now, oh, and it crashed, at least they didn't have a blue screen, okay, but the card works. I could try another one, yeah, okay, don't we have any? There isn't, yes, so it's something curious. I think we looked up the nominal tdp of this chip and it was 100 watts and theoretically the slot can only produce 75 watts 100 and the change that introduces uh. Yet another potential problem, but hey, let's see if it works. What's happening here is the television. The thing about OLED is that you can, yes, you can't tell the difference between the TV being off and a black screen.

Wow, did we just get blocked? I think we did well, so why don't we move on to 1060? Wow, what and this is the 1060, oh, it's because the resolution is high. Look at those textures struggling to load, you've got a solid 3 fps, what are we? set to oh my god even the menu look at this no we are only set to 1280x1024 this one is super hard and this is the one we paid the most for yes you can do it come on I can see my death forever now it fails We thought That could be a coincidence.

It turns out that not all of our cards constantly stutter much more than we would expect or completely crash in games even though they were more stable on desktop and you would think okay, they probably crashed in games. due to the slow old processor that is on board, but it is actually because the fake BIOS that is loaded on these boards makes the system think that your graphics card has more VRAM than it could actually be soldered on, so a Once the physical VRAM fills up, it just crashes hard, so let's take a look at how much RAM we're actually running here.

By googling we were able to determine that each of the 1050 tis has a gigabyte of vram, so this one, this one and this one, despite the fact. that this one has twice as many chips and then as for the 1060, that one was a little more interesting so it has two different models of RAM chips, five of each type and then quickly googling we were able to find the classified one . speed of them, which seems to be different, but we couldn't find a definitive source for the capacity, so we're not sure how much it has exactly, but this card clearly has colin.

Could you play a crisis for us? Deeper problems that make it just It doesn't matter exactly how much VRAM it has, so this experience sucked, not only are these cards slower than advertised, but they aren't even usable, which led us down another rabbit hole rabbit, so it turns out that it is possible to reflash the BIOS chips. on these cards to report correctly, the problem is that the software you would normally use for that envy flash has been blocked somehow, so the only way to fix any of them is to plug directly into the BIOS chip and use a USB reprogrammer like this to rewrite it now we ended up spending about 20 bucks on the programmer and the extra clip we needed to connect it to the chip but unfortunately after hours of tinkering we couldn't even read one of the BIOS let alone try to display them you win something, you lose something, I guess we really tried here guys, even going so far as to try the clearly inadvisable method of reading the BIOS chip while it's powered on and that's where things melted a little, now the technology is wet .

He was a little luckier than us, so you can watch his

video

which we have linked below if you really want to see that process. Anyway, we decided to cut our losses at this point, but there is still a story to tell here, namely, why are these cards still selling when they are clearly not only fake but broken, aren't they on nvidia's radar? What is the problem? As far as we know there is a very rapid turnover of these card listings where in fact the five that we bought at the time we got them the stores were taken down and we noticed this during the build of our desire computer Also, some of them would disappear as soon as a week after purchase, what that means is that the suppliers are pumping these out.

Cards sent to as many people as possible. Customers are reporting them, obviously, then they close the store, walk away with their money, and go create another store and, well, a new listing. One thing that continues to baffle me is why these sellers even bother sending a graphics card if all the customer is going to receive is a graphics card shaped paperweight, it begs the question.of why not just send a potato properly. The best guess I have is that it will slow down the bug reporting process. So maybe the first few customers start a game that they're not familiar with how this card works, they see something like this and they go well, hey, I mean it's a game and it is, and maybe they spend some time to solve problems before finishing.

Reporting that you delayed the process, I can understand the appeal of seeing a 1050 ti at this price given that under normal circumstances this is the kind of performance you can expect for $60, for the record guys it's a 750 ti we found. a handful of them on eBay for about 70-75 Canadian dollars and it's not great, but at least it works, so guys, you have to remember the eternal wisdom that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is and the less known. of wisdom until Wish.com takes responsibility for the scams running on their site, you probably shouldn't shop there if you enjoyed this video, by the way, please subscribe, we have a really cool one coming up in the next dock, so "You'll want to make sure Don't miss out and you'll want to make sure you don't miss this transition to our sponsor.

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Yes, I don't want to keep them. Yes, honestly. They're basically manufacturing e-waste there, like this is worthless, like I wouldn't even use it on a mining rig, no, oh you can't, yeah, this is one I needed, yeah, we're going to have. to delete them, I know this is useless, but it's a shame you want to get rid of this. We could keep the refrigerators. What would we use refrigerators for? You never know when you might need, like, a rando aluminum cooler, for something. It's a good heatsink, in which case I'll unscrew all these screws. Sorry, Colin, I'm going to lunch.

Enjoy, I will only produce refrigerators for you forever.