The RTX 4090 is the latest scam to hit the IT world. A buyer based in Hong Kong – we assume, given the currencies quoted – bought an RTX 4090… Which, on inspection, contained no GPUs at all!
RTX 4090, risk of cards being sold without GPUs!
If you’re the sort of person who imports their products, be careful with anything from China. One buyer has just been swindled out of something like $1660 by buying a 4090… However, after installing it in his PC, it turned out that the card didn’t work, apart from the aRGB lighting on it. Apparently, the fans were at a standstill, despite semi-passive modes, which are activated on start-up, and here they were inanimate.
Finally, after dismantling for inspection, it turned out that the card had no GPU soldered to the PCB. Similarly, a number of memory chips were missing. Clearly a big scam, given that the advert appeared to present a functional product.
Worst of all, after contacting the local authorities, no one seemed to want to lift a finger… This is a huge blow for Mr Hong, who has been swindled out of HK$13,000.
Now, it’s reasonable to suspect where these cards came from: directly from China. As you know, if you’ve been following us, for a while factories were set up to disassemble and reassemble RTX 4090s into cards designed for AI. In layman’s terms, their speciality was to unsolder the GPU and memory chips and put them back on a standardised PCB so that a blower heatsink could be fitted. In this way, the cards are simpler to integrate massively into servers.
All that’s left to do is dispose of the waste: PCB and fan… Clearly, they’ve figured out how to do it.
