Slashdot Mirror
Fake NVIDIA Graphics Cards Show Up In Germany
An anonymous reader writes "Several fake NVIDIA cards — probably GeForce GT 440 — have had their BIOS reflashed to report themselves as GeForce GTX 660. They were sold under the brand "GTX660 4096MB Nvidia Bulk" but only deliver 1/4 of the speed of a real GTX 660. Investigations are ongoing into who did the reflashing, but several hundred of them have already been sold and are now being recalled."
They looked at 'Made in China' sticker and thought it is safe.
yeah it's too bad if nvidia had done this and sold them with the name 660 Bulk, it would have been business as usual.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The cards were all sold by the Distributor "Kosatec". Kosatec itself bought the cards directly from Point of View in the Netherlands (proof was given by invoices and transport packaging). The statement of Point of View is that they have not produced the cards... Could get real interesting :-D
I made a test order of one of these products for evaluating whether they are any good for mining. The 4 GB video RAM on the card and the supposed graphics chip on the card would have made a very good deal.
But it became apparent immediately that this was an outdated Fermi gerneration chip, despite the card being recognized as a GTX 660 by the driver. The card ended up on my scrap heap because it was useless for my purpose (high power consumption and low performance)
At the time I assumed it was some kind of OEM product (relabeling older chips under newer product names is very common in the GPU business). But the investigation of the c't magazine seem to indicate that there is some VBIOS tampering going on and that this is not happening with nVidia's blessing at all.
I'll be following the story closely to see what the outcome of this clusterfuck will be.
--- Eat my sig.
[Disclaimer: These performance results are from gpuboss, which I first heard of today when I searched for gpu comparisons.]
6x better floating point performance (theoretical max GFLOPS)
5.8x better 3DMark score
5x difference in passmark score (4.8x better passmark direct compute score)
4.2x higher Civ5 framerate (* this is a very poor metric)
* Framerate is a VERY stupid comparison. 72.2 fps = 13.85 ms; 17.3 fps = 57.80 ms. Why it's stupid: we're not told how much CPU time was spent on the main thread (yet IO time is fair game). For example, 1.29ms CPU would tell us 4.5x faster, 2.86ms CPU would tell us 5x faster, and 5.06 ms CPU would tell us 6x faster.
Back in the late 90's there was a serious issue with videocard's and their bios being reflashed to something else. Wish I had the magazines with the articles on it still, but it ended up being a rather large investigation. Happened with ati, nvidia, matrox cards quite a bit.
There was also the massive, and I do mean massive counterfeiting of fake Intel and AMD cpus, the most common thing that was done was resilkscreening the cpu. They would turn around and take a cyrix, or lower end amd/intel cpu scrub off the designations, then reapply them, and sell them back on the market. You didn't know that they were fake until you plugged them into the motherboard and surprise that $600 intel cpu was a resilked el-crapo cyrix chip.
In all these cases, the primary source for these were from SE-Asia, mainly Thailand, and Vietnam. It was so bad, that these things were showing up in legitimate supply chains from major distributors like Ingram Micro, Supercom, etc. Even the packaging was legit, serial numbers on the packages were legit, so it was a very well organized scam.
Om, nomnomnom...
Yup, historically, there have always been official card, where the manufacturer try to pass an older chip as a "low-entry" of the newer generation.
(like the GeForce 4MX, which was basically a variant in the GeForce2 familly and thus lacked the programmable shaders of the GeForce 4 Ti familly, but got quite successful due to brand-name recognition)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
out of curiosity: what miner do you use?
in my (limited) experience, Radon-based miner completely out-perfom GeForce at mining.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Are rife especially on ebay
if you want to know about flash RAM devices then check out
http://www.bunniestudios.com/b...
and this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?... it is very informative
who where what when now?
I forgot the name of the site but they have bunch of cards like that listed for sale for what seems like stupid cheap prices. gl4ss piss off amd bitch boy
aliexpress was site that has tons of fake geforce cards like that. just look through them and see this is not an isolated issue.
Unless the firmware flash improved performance...
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
FTFA, as translated by Google:
Compared with a GeForce GTX 660 reference card Fire Strike reaches the "Nvidia GTX660 4096MB Bulk" in 3DMark only 949 instead of 4266 points, so not even a quarter of the power.
First, note 4266/949 is a 4.5x difference.
Second, the picture embedded in the article shows 900MHz GPU clock and 1066MHz memory, where the reference 440 uses 810MHz and 900MHz, respectively.
p.s. The number I quoted earlier at 5.8x 3dmark score from gpuboss was actually the "3DMark vantage texture fill score." The passmark score reported by gpuboss has similar numbers to what's reported by TFA as 3dmark; both seem to agree that the "stock" chips should be 5x difference on that benchmark.
come on, this is 2014? with your own chips and your own firmware and a s**tload of OEMs ready to pull this kind of trick, they should have used signed firmwares. So if somebody tried flashing with a firmware mod, the chip would reject the firmware. signing key never leaves Nvidia premises This stuff is easy, as long as you design your own chips and your own firmware.
"Windows are for cheaters" - Bruce Springsteen
This one Looks Real ATI Radeon Graphics Nvidia Video
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/GTX660Ti-2GB-384bit-2048MB-DDR3-Nvidia-Geforce-PC-Desktop-Video/1506452210.html?s=p
I've read the Heise articles in the original German, and the GPUs were not faked; the cards were an older generation graphics card (~10% of the graphics throughput of the claimed item) with the video BIOS hacked to zero out the card manufacturer ID and the GPU type twiddled to fool the driver into thinking it was the newer card. According to the articles, NVidia is tracing the GPUs through the supply chain by their internal serial numbers.
I would speculate that someone bought up a truckload of obsolete cards, reflashed the BIOS images, and relabeled them with plausible product ID labels. Could have been the Chinese manufacturer, could have been someone elsewhere in the pipeline.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
ATI's just declared war.
I forgot the name of the site but they have bunch of cards like that listed for sale for what seems like stupid cheap prices.
gl4ss piss off amd bitch boy
Were published on Amazon at least a few weeks ago.
3rd shift stuff from the Chinese manufacturer may of done this as well.
... not even re-silkscreening, just outright selling P2-450Mhz but when you got it, it had a large passive heatsink, turns out it's a P2-300Mhz ....
The Pentium 75 Mhz was the real rebranding/remarking king due to its often successful "overclocking". The story goes something like this. There is a single production line for the Pentiums of speeds ranging form 75 to 120 Mhz. Intel tests the chips at 75, 90 and 120 Mhz to determine the speed an individual chip is capable of running at. Note that these tests are far beyond what over clockers can do, often involving specialized hardware probes and such. Normally chips are tested until they fail and branded for the highest speed that they properly executed at. However when orders for Pentium 75 exceeded inventories the testing was abbreviates, chips were only tested at 75 and branded and sold as such if the test was successful. These chips were never tested at 90 or 120 Mhz and many of these chips would have successfully passed testing and been branded at these higher speeds had they been tested at these speeds. The Pentium 75 became legendary for overclocking, and remarking by third parties.
I have heard of a practice where companies produce items with virtually the same product number as a performance model with just a slight, misleading name modification, and then sell them on black friday at severely discounted rates to make people believe they are getting great deals, when in actuality they are getting a terrible product for the break neck prices. This would confirm your comment, that if they find Nvidia is the one behind this, it is just business as usual. They didn't sell out if their overstock so why not just ship it abroad to offload the dead merchandise.
This is NOT nvidia's doing, it would be straight up illegal.