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."

Comments

I bought one of these for Litecoin mining

[flowerp]

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But it became apparent immediately that this was an outdated Fermi gerneration chip, despite the card being recognized as a GTX 660 by the driver.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.

Re:I bought one of these for Litecoin mining

[r1348]

It's just some hacked electronics, not so uncommon. I bought a 32Gb mSDHC card a few months ago on Amazon, and I received a "32Gb mSDXC" card, complete with fake Samsung packaging, that on a better inspection turned out to be an old 2Gb mSD card with hacked firmware to show up as 32Gb to the host system. Of course any file transfer beyond the 2Gb limit was failing miserably.
No biggie, I contacted Amazon and received a full refund, and the dealer was soon after banned from Amazon, apparently I wasn't the only one being scammed.