GPU scammers have taken their forgery skills to a whole new level, using laser engraving to put new model numbers onto old GPUs, and memory, for that matter. A terrifyingly good example has just turned up at graphics card fixer Northwest Repair, with an old Ampere GPU re-engraved with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 model number. As Northwest Repair says in the video below, “scams have gotten so good that even the trained eye cannot detect them.”
The fake chip turned up in an Asus ROG Strix Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card, which had been sent to Northwest Repair to be fixed. It all looks good on a first check – all the VRAM chips look as though they’re still in place, and haven’t been removed to sell on the now-lucrative memory black market. Likewise, while the card doesn’t fire up, the GPU itself looks legitimate at first glance. It’s a big old chip, with the Nvidia lettering at the top and the correct “AD102-300-A1” model number engraved on it.
But take a closer look under a microscope, and all is not as it seems. The first red flags were a missing solder pad around a memory chip, as well as some surprisingly dark-coloured compound, which Northwest Repair says looks like Epoxy. But then he spots that the memory chips look as though they’ve had the tops shaved off, and then been re-engraved, to make them look like GDDR6X chips.
He then pulls up an Ampere GA102-300-A1 chip, as used in the RTX 3090, to compare it with the supposed 4090 chip, and you can see that they’re exactly the same. It’s just that one has had its top shaved off, and then been repolished and re-engraved with the false model name. Even then, though, you have to really look to see the difference between a GA102 and AD102 chip – they have a similar size, and it’s only really the little dots around the edge that are different. It’s not as if the average graphics card buyer can easily check this, especially as you’d have to remove the whole cooling assembly and then clean up the chip.
In terms of attention to detail, it’s astounding, with Northwest Repair claiming “this is the best scam I have ever seen.” In the comments in for the video, he also shares some thoughts about the origins of this fake card. “This type [of] scam could not come from a stranger or even a professional repair shop,” he says. “Given the quality of work, this could only be done at the factory. How it gets to the US and who is distributing these is the question.”
In short, if you’re buying an expensive second-hand graphics card, it’s best to do it from a reputable retailer or a seller you know personally. There are some scarily good scams out there now.
