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But it became apparent immediately that this was an outdated Fermi gerneration chip, despite the card being recognized as a GTX 660 by the driver.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