Scammers tricking PC gamers with fake RTX 4090 graphics cards is nothing new, but what? is What's new is that we've seen a couple of these in January 2024, when incidents are normally a more scattered affair, and the latest one occurred in the US.
Tom's Hardware reported that a hardware repair expert on YouTube, North West Repair (NWR), posted a video showing a fake RTX 4090 in all its scam glory.
The buyer bought it on Amazon (we were told the RTX 4090 was on an Amazon Returns pallet sale, so it was a GPU previously returned by another buyer) only to find out it had a dead graphics card. So they sent Lovelace's flagship to NWR for repairs.
However, when NWR set out to repair the board, it was discovered that it was not an RTX 4090 at all. In fact, under the hood, this graphics card had an RTX 4080 board and an RTX 4080 chip, one that “looked fried,” plus there were other obvious flaws (more bad components and missing memory cooling pads).
In short, this wasn't a real graphics card at all, just a collection of broken pieces or a 'FrankenGPU' that wasn't even based on an RTX 4090, but had the chip from a 4080 as mentioned.
Analysis: Gutted (both card and buyer)
What happened here? Well, the scammer was smart enough to make it look, on the surface, like this was a credible fault in an RTX 4090, i.e. they used a melted power connector. So anyone who didn't delve into the guts of the graphics card wouldn't know what had happened.
Apparently, the scammer took all the important parts of the Lovelace graphics card they bought, including the RTX 4090 chip, and replaced them with this mess of broken stuff, before returning the FrankenGPU to Amazon and getting their money back.
As mentioned, this is the second RTX 4090 scam we've seen in a month, and while it's not a trend as such yet, it is a worrying development. Especially considering this occurred in the US, rather than Asia (where the previous fake came from), so for US buyers this is somewhat alarming.
In fact, NWR warns that this is something US consumers may be seeing more and more, and that the incident is “100% real and now in the US market.” To be fair, we've seen these scams in the US before, but the point is, be very careful with second-hand graphics cards or RTX 4090 returns. Especially now that the price of the flagship has gone up so much: it is still above $2,000 on the US market (on Newegg at the time of writing).
That obviously makes it a ripe target for scams, and PC gamers might certainly do well to wait for the RTX 4080 Super, which arrives next week (although it's already appeared on sale), to see it as a much more affordable alternative. high-end games (with an MSRP of $999 in the US, and in line with that elsewhere).
The concern with that new release, however, is that stock will run out quickly, because even if some performance rumors turn out to be true (claiming that the Super version will be a modest step up), it will still be a great value. compared to the base RTX 4080 with that big 20% price drop, and it could well be a product that makes the cut on our list of the best graphics cards.
