Repair technician finds three of four RTX 4090s were fakes packing RTX 3000-series GPUs

Why it matters: The surprisingly common practice of replacing a high-end graphics card's GPU with a different one from a cheaper card, borking it in the process, isn't going away. A Chinese repair technician uploaded a video to YouTube showing that of the four faulty RTX 4090 cards he recently received, three of them packed RTX 3090 or RTX 3080 dies.

The YouTuber explains in the video that the customer in this case paid 10,000 yuan ($1,392) for each graphics card, which were purchased from an overseas seller.

Taking the cards apart exposed the reason why three of them weren't working: they were fake RTX 4090s.

Spotting that the cards weren't packing a real AD102 isn't easy for those who don't know what to look for. For example, most people wouldn't know that the QR code on this GPU is located ...