TECH NEWS – In China, two GPUs intended for other devices are being recycled; although you can see examples of this on AliExpress with cheaper, older graphics cards, it’s at least understandable there because the product isn’t crazy expensive…

Other scams are also on the rise, as scammers have even tried to sell Nvidia’s current top-of-the-line GeForce RTX 4090 card with nothing inside! Now another tricky method has been reported by North West Repair. The lead story is a card sold on Amazon that quickly turned out to be fake: it has a damaged PCB, and the chip itself is not what it should be…

But it looks like what you’d expect from an Asus ROG Strix RTX 4090. It has minor defects… theoretically. But when you take the card apart, the deception is revealed: it has a different GPU. It has the AD103-300-A1 that they usually put on the RTX 4080! The card itself was also assembled in a strange way: melted power connectors, broken PCB… so a quick repair job revealed something completely different, which is very sad when sold on a US site.

But back to desktop graphics, we also see an example of a Chinese company putting their laptop RTX 4000 chips on a desktop “board” with a unique design, and since they are laptop GPUs, the power consumption is low and they don’t produce as much heat, so the design is a simpler task. On Goofish, RTX 4090M and RTX 4080M laptop GPUs get weird looking white and purple graphics cards. How much performance loss? About the same as the RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti, which is understandable:

• Desktop RTX 4090: AD102 GPU, 16384 CUDA cores, 24GB GDDR6X memory, 384-bit, 450W
• Laptop RTX 4090 – AD103 GPU, 9728 CUDA cores, 16GB GDDR6 memory, 256-bit, 120W
• Desktop RTX 4080 – AD103 GPU, 9728 CUDA cores, 16 GB GDDR6X memory, 256-bit, 320W
• Laptop RTX 4080 – AD104 GPU, 7424 CUDA cores, 12 GB GDDR6 memory, 192-bit, 110W

The RTX 4090M video card costs around 13,800 yuan, or about $1900, but that’s a bit exaggerated when you look at the RTX 4080M (4,000 yuan, about $555). Let’s not fall for fake ads and fake products.

Source: WCCFTech