NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 GPUs are being reused in a variety of ways, with some navigation templates being reused for desktops and others duping people online.
NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 GPUs are being used across a wide range of custom graphics cards, leading to exotic counterfeits and products appearing on the market.
Third party changes made in GPUs are a common tactic adopted by modders or sometimes scammers in the markets to either try something new or take advantage of the average consumer by selling them fake products. We recently reported on scammers advertising GeForce RTX 4090s at low prices, and not surprisingly, the GPUs were empty on the inside. Likewise, a new type of ‘scam’ was discovered by experts from North West Repair, where a GPU purchased from Amazon turned out to be a fake one, which also had a fried PCB and a completely different chip.
North West Repair received an ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4090 from a consumer, who revealed that the graphics card had a minor fault, at least what he was told. When experts dissected the GPU, they discovered that the GPU on the board was a replacement unit, marked AD103-300-A1, which is used in the GeForce RTX 4080.
Image credits: NWR
Image credits: NWR
Image credits: NWR
Not only that, but the seller appears to have done some testing on the GPU itself, which is why it was assembled “oddly”, with melted power connectors and a cracked PCB as well. What came as a “simple fix” to repair North West turned out to be something entirely different, even an unusual case, especially considering it was purchased from the US market.
Not all GPU modding incidents are bad faith, but in another case, a Chinese company reportedly designed desktop cards, which featured reused NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 mobile GPUs, along with a completely unofficial, and universally interesting, design. Same time. Although there is no reason to integrate mobile GPUs into desktop computers, one possibility is that doing so has no limitations, and is much easier for an expert to do, since mobile chips have lower TDPs and lower thermal requirements as well. ,So the GPU design part becomes easier as well.
In this case, Chinese sellers on Goofish are selling NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090M and GeForce RTX 4080M mobile GPUs into strangely designed white and purple GPUs. In terms of performance, you’d expect a significant drop compared to its desktop counterparts, since the GeForce RTX 4090M features 16GB of memory, a significant drop from 24GB. However, the Chinese listings put the ‘modified’ GPUs on par with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Ti, so the comparison becomes fairly fair.
- Desktop RTX 4090 – AD102 GPU / 16384 cores / 24GB GDDR6X memory / 384-bit / 450W
- Desktop RTX 4080 – AD103 GPU / 9728 cores / 16GB GDDR6X / 256-bit / 320W
- RTX 4090 laptop – AD103 GPU / 9728 cores / 16GB GDDR6 / 256-bit / 120W
- RTX 4080 laptop – AD104 GPU / 7424 cores / 12GB GDDR6 / 192-bit / 110W
In terms of price, the GeForce RTX 4090M desktop GPU will go for 13,800 yuan or about 1,900 US dollars, but this is most likely a fake listing. However, the GeForce RTX 4080M desktop retails for around 4,000 yuan or $555 USD which makes it an interesting proposition. Regardless of the price, we would not advise our customers to choose any of these variants, since they do not come with any warranties and are very likely to cause you problems in the long run.
To be safe from any kind of scams in the PC industry, we advise users to choose official sources for their PC components from trusted and reputable retailers in the markets.
News sources: Tom’s Devices, Videocardz