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But it became apparent immediately that this was an outdated Fermi gerneration chip, despite the card being recognized as a GTX 660 by the driver.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