Chinese blogger exposes three fake RTX 4090 — inside were RTX 3090 and 3080
Chinese YouTuber Repairing Video Cards Receives Four Allegedly Defective RTX 4090, to try to restore them. However, upon disassembling it turned out that Three out of four video cards turned out to be fakes, remade from old ones RTX 3090 and RTX 3080. All of them were visually designed under RTX 4090, but they turned out to be non-working and had to be disposed of.
The customer purchased these cards at overseas platform for 10 yuan (~000 US dollars) per piece. According to the blogger, you can tell a fake by several signs. Firstly, on a real one RTX 4090 The QR code is located in the very bottom left corner of the substrate., while the RTX 30 series has it shifted a little higher.
Second, the the capacitor in the upper right corner of the substrate protrudes slightly in the 30th series, but is absent from RTX 4090.
The exposed fakes also contained false marking of the AD102 core and poorly replaced components. In one case, the substrate was not green like the original, but had a strange shade and the wrong size, which is why the cooling frame did not fit tightly. Only one of the four cards turned out to be real RTX 4090 with damaged memory, which was restored by replacing the GDDR6X chips and several capacitors.
