When it comes to swindling honest people, crooks really are ingenious. Indeed, Nortwestrepair came across a rather atypical case of an RTX 4090 with an RTX 3080 Ti GPU equipped with a 256 MB memory chip… Nonsense indeed, but ingenious nonsense!
RTX 3080 Ti GPUs to imitate RTX 4090s!
In a nutshell, a customer arrived with an “RTX 4090” that looked like new (or almost new), since the card still had its protective plastic. However, the card didn’t seem to be working, otherwise there’d be no point in going to Nortwestrepair, would there?
Anyway, when examining the board, the technician noticed a very strong resistance in the CPU, as if it hadn’t been soldered. After removing it, it turns out to be partially soldered, which isn’t very clean.
Then, after sifting through the memory, it clearly didn’t have the right capacity: 256 MB instead of 2 GB for a genuine RTX 4090.
Finally, once the GPU had been welded back together, it turned out to be a fake. In fact, the crooks simply used a GTX 3080 Ti chip, polished it and then re-engraved it to reveal the markings of an AD102 GPU used on an RTX 4090.
In short, Northwestrepair’s conclusion is simple: don’t buy cards from China!
