Video Card Shopping… on Wish.com

on the desk in front of me are five fake graphics

card

s and a bottle of water on ttstore.com that's not to say you can't actually play these things, just that we strongly suspect that games won't work the way they're supposed to They must, 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. well to be true the mod mike lineup has something for everyone the mic usb mod is a usb powered attachable mic the mic uni mod is a revamp of the original 3.5mm mic and the wireless modmic is pretty wireless check them out now In the links in the

video

description, when we went

shopping

, we wanted to focus on the most popular graphics cards on Wish, which are currently the gtx 1060 and 1050 ti. prices around 60 US dollars which made us wonder if there was really any difference between the two I mean after these all come from a sketchy seller in China so if they feel comfortable faking a listing I mean Why not fake it more?

Why not call this? an rtx 2080 ti maybe because that would even sound too good to be true anyway fast forward three weeks and here we are to start we threw out every single one of these cards this was the fifth btw it wasn't the water bottle on our test bench to check if it would turn on and the answer is yes we have our hdmi cable running across the floor here to the tv and lo and behold the graphics card is working so Colin is shooting update hardware info which is a useful tool for to find out what exactly is inside any PC or even PC component, and this immediately revealed a fake, both the graphics card and graphics chipset actually reporting completely different values.

Don't wait a second. here's the one above, the one above says it's correct, uh, this one also says it's false. you'll remember is what we thought we were buying but actually both are fake at first in parentheses so the weird thing is the gpu codename is the only thing here that is actually accurate and doesn't have a fake thing in it so which we found our five cards ended up reporting themselves as gf-116 instead of the chip we'd expect to find in an actual 1050 ti, the gp107, so with the pertinent information pulled from the software the next step is to remove the coolers from these things and take a look at both the GPU and RAM chips that are on board these things.

Let's just say the 1060 even managed to get us to have like an ier looking PCB bus, but if you compare them the only difference is that it has chips on it, well why, that's a bit weird. i'm 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 well the 1060 interestingly it has proper nvidia laser etching the die but it doesn't have an actual model number it just has a serial number yeah so this is just production info so I'm guessing what batch or wafer they came from and anything to track it during the manufacturing process but there's no actual die number on it you know what's really weird is they actually go and put a lot of effort into making sure the card holds together well and things like you see it's got these little plastic spacers in here to make sure that even though this cooler is obviously cheap and you could now accidentally rock and chip the die or whatever, they are making sure it stays stabilized so your counterfeit card doesn't get damaged.

I'm really curious if these were taken from some you know b bin uh bin buggy fixed and then resold or like where is where these come from seems to be an old GPU that was collected as we saw with those x79 motherboards that are made with sets of repurposed server chips looks like they just got these chips and actually went and designed and built pcb for them like it looks like new i mean there are little differences 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 break it apart a bit more yeah this is samsung oh this one has alpina chips yeah elpida that's the one i hadn't heard of oh ok yeah no they are their thing they are not normally used on graphics cards from my experience on the last little though well this one actually has the correct connector which is funny all these other boards have a four pin connector and some of them were stuck in there like the plugs didn't fit in Absolutely, yeah, wow, I didn't even notice it. look at this so its like its rammed in there which is funny in theory this pcb is designed for pwm fan control and speed monitoring but instead its just a simple 12 wire volts and ground which is just rammed into the corresponding pins so this fan only works on one speed probably yes it's loud now that's funny this one which is actually on a gf-116 looking pcb with no power jack six pin or whatever it even has the part number markings on it so this is a verified gf 116 200 kaa1 then hardware info is trustworthy

wish

.com product listing is definitely not trustworthy now this is interesting.

Colin pointed out that while these three, and indeed the one mounted on the dyno right now, all use the same PCB, there is a different one. nce between the two that are marked 1050 ti here and the one marked 1060. Oh, also funny that they all even use identical serial number stickers, yeah, so these show up even though they come from different touts to come from the exact same From the same factory, the 1050 ti has only four of a total of 12 potential memory chips that could be mounted on the PCB, while the 1060 has all 12 mounted. Why would they bother to go out of their way to differentiate their fraudulent cards? i know but i guess all we can do is keep exploring yeah so i mean is there a difference if you buy a 1060 you will get something that will theoretically work i mean better or more memory chips yeah ok , but this is very strange because the 1050 ti's claim to have four gigs of ddr5 and the 1060's claim to have five gigs, yeah is there a way to evenly fit 12 modules into five gigs? to keep the illusion ok perfor mance stock performance performance according to one challenge we faced is that while we were able to determine the frequency of some of the memory chips, it wasn't always easy to determine the actual capacity from these part numbers , which are not necessarily publicly listed.

Let's start with the one on the bench then before we start I want to talk about expectations so all of these cards are falsely reporting as 10 series in the bios they all run gf-116 chips as best we can tell which is a chip which last time I think it was used was March 2011. almost a decade um so my expectations for performance are very low but based on how well thought out these rip cards seem to be I hope they actually work , so we're going to start with one of the 1050 ti's on this bigger pcb okay here we go crunch yeah play play a bit play a bit crunch here ok options system settings graphics 1080x768 , that seems reasonable for now hi for now its stuck at 69 nice oh yeah thats soon we are going to hit the lake sometime in the near future date crunch oh yeah ltx we should Do some kind of crisis anniversary, huh or nah, it's not like I don't i knew crunch day, like a celebration in ltx that would be fun where are my mech suits oh oh ok so like you in it's running it's running yes it's running crisis can you run crisis ok 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 the blue screen ok but the card works we could try another yeah ok ok have? funny thing i think we looked up the tdp rating of this chip and it was 100 watts and theoretically the slot can only do 75 watts 100 and the change that introduces another potential problem but hey let's see if it works what's going on here's the tv that's the thing with oled is you can yeah you can't tell the difference between the tv being off on a black screen wow we just crashed i think we got it right so why don't we move on to the 1060 ? wow what and this is the 1060 oh is it because the resolution is high wow look at those textures struggling to load in you got a solid 3 fps in there what are we set to oh my god even the menu look at this no we're just set to 1280x1024 this it's super hard and this is the one we pay the most yes you can do it on I can watch my death forever now that the block we thought might be a fluke turns out not all of our cards consistently stuttered much more than we would expect or outright blocked on games even though they were more stable on desktop and you might think that's ok they probably crashed in games because of the old slow processor that's onboard but it's actually because the fake BIOS that's loaded on these boards makes them the system thinks your graphics card has more vram than could actually be soldered on. so once the physical cal vram fills up it will just crash hard so let's take a look at how much ram we're running here.

Googling we were able to determine that each of the 1050 tis has a gigabyte of vram so this this and this despite the fact that this one has twice as many chips and then as for the 1060 that was a bit more interesting so you have two different models of ram chips five of each type and then some fast Googling we were able to find the speed rated for them which seems to be different but we couldn't find a definitive source for capacity , so we're not sure exactly how much he has, but this card clearly has colin on it.

Could you play a little crunch? for us deeper issues that make it not matter exactly how much vram you have so this experience sucks not only are these cards slower than advertised they aren't even usable which led us down another rabbit hole as well What it turns out is possible to reflash the BIOS chips on these cards to make them report the problem correctly is that the software you'd normally use for that envy flash has crashed somehow, so the only way to fix any of they is to connect directly to 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 to the chip but unfortunately after hours of tinkering we couldn't even read one of the BIOS ships let alone try. show 'em you win some you lose some I guess we really tried here guys even going as far as trying the clearly inadvisable method of reading the bios chip while it's on and that's where things melted down a bit now.

A bit more lucky than us, so you can check out his

video

that 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 tell here: why are these cards still selling when they're clearly not just fake, but broken, aren't they on nvidia's radar? ? purchased at the time we got them they had stores trashed and we realized this during our original wish pc build and some of them would be gone as soon as a week after purchase what that means is vendors they're pumping these cards out to as many people as possible, customers are reporting them obviously, then they tore down the store, walked away with their money, and started making another store and, well, a new listing.

One thing that continues to baffle me though is why these vendors would even bother to ship a graphics card if all the customer is going to get is a paperweight shaped like a graphics card, it begs the question why not just ship a potato directly . The first few customers start a game they are not familiar with the performance of this card, they see something like this, they go well, well I mean it's a game and it is, and maybe they spend some time troubleshooting before they end up reporting. its holding up 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 bucks this for record guys is a 750 ti we found a handful of them on eBay for around 70-75 Canadian dollars and it's not great but at least it works so guys you should remember the ageless wisdom that if it seems too muchgood to be true, it probably is and the lesser known wisdom. until wish.com takes responsibility for scams running on their site you probably shouldn't shop there if you enjoyed this video by the way please subscribe we're going to have a really cool one on the next dock so it's going to want making sure you don't miss out and you'll want to make sure you don't miss this transition to our sponsor surfing the internet can be risky business, so why not protect yourself and browse anonymously with a hidden IP? use online think you are an anonymous person in a different location pia offers several levels of encryption and loads of features like their internet kill switch that will automatically cut your connection if you get disconnected from your vpn unintentionally they have unlimited bandwidth and Reliable service with 3000+ servers in 32 countries and you can try it risk-free with their 7-day money-back guarantee.

They have apps for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS and you can connect up to five devices at once on each account. Check it out. in lmg.gigi pia linus dos we're going to have that link below again thanks for watching guys if you're looking for another video to watch maybe check out the video where me and anthony do it I successfully got one of those headless mining cards playing games by redirecting graphics power through the integrated output which is really nice so what do you want to do with all this now that we can't give it to people with a good conscience yea?

I don't want to keep it, yeah, honestly, they're basically making e-waste there, like it's worthless, like I don't even use it on a mining rig. No oh you can't yes this is one I needed yes 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 fridges what would we use the fridges for , you never know when. you may need a rando aluminum cooler for something it's a good heat sink in which case i'll untie all these screws sorry colin im going to lunch enjoy i'll just produce coolers for you forever.