Fake NVIDIA Graphics Cards Show Up In Germany 76
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."
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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.
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Re: Don't buy American. (Score:1)
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interesting case.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:interesting case.... (Score:4, Interesting)
There's also the delivery company that could have switched them. I know for a fact not all delivery companies are to be trusted equally.
Or, if either Kosatec or POV uses a company to handle their warehousing, a third company.
Re:interesting case.... (Score:4, Informative)
This doesn't mean that it isn't one of the intermediaries; but if it is they are working with considerably more sophistication than the 'fell off the truck' level of supply chain skimming.
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For the packaging, make a deal with whoever cleans up at an assembly line for desktops. Plenty of PC vendors wind up with pallets of packaging to dispose of.
Not faked GPUs... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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whose fucking bright idea was it to install the BIOS on a fucking EEPROM??
What happened to hardcoding it?
Jusssayin'
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Every BIOS in consumer hardware has been on EEPROM (or flash) for more than a decade, easily.
Mask ROM is not worth the effort, except in very specific cases.
3rd shift stuff from the Chinese manufacturer (Score:2)
3rd shift stuff from the Chinese manufacturer may of done this as well.
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It will get intestesting if it traces back to manufacturing. Lets hypothise a second that the production plant has problem reaching their production goals. It would be quite a nasty twist if they simply took the products of another production line which was working under its nominal rate and rebranded the products.
If (and its a big IF) the deception occured at that level, it will raise an important question on the quality and authenticity of any other products comming out of those work and countries. So in
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If (and its a big IF) the deception occured at that level, it will raise an important question on the quality and authenticity of any other products comming out of those work and countries.
It says nothing about the country. Sketchy businessmen exists everywhere.
The only thing that says something about the state of the country is if law enforcement doesn't work and the people responsible gets away with it. That would tell us that the country is more interested in protecting its own citizens than business from other countries.
Apart from the pirate bay case I can't really name any situation in a western country where law enforcement prioritized foreign businesses over local citizens.
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Wrong generation label (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
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(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)
I bought a GF4MX and was happy. It was successful not because it fooled people, but because of what it actually offered: Performance in between GF2 and GF4, at a GF2 price. If your games didn't have shader support, which was typical back then, you got acceptable performance at rock-bottom price.
I bought one of these for Litecoin mining (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I bought one of these for Litecoin mining (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Meanwhile, not everybody found out in time, not everybody bothered complaining, and the fraudster pocketed a lot of money. After being banned from Amazon he started a new company under a different name and does it again.
The only way to prevent this is someone pressing criminal charges and someone going to jail.
Fake SDcards (Score:2)
Are rife especially on ebay
if you want to know about flash RAM devices then check out
http://www.bunniestudios.com/b... [bunniestudios.com]
and this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] it is very informative
Re:I bought one of these for Litecoin mining (Score:5, Funny)
Better: If you scam on Amazon, you should be forced to work in Amazon mechanicalturk.
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Or in china, where all of these 2mb/32mb cards come from!
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Might be, but that's really up to Amazon to do. I won't sue someone for a 20€ scam, it's just not worth the money and time.
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shit, that's the most awesome scam ever, how did they even think they'd get away with that??
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I guess they were hoping on people laziness or lack of technical knowledge...
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Did you have to prove it by mailing it back to them for them to try it and reproduce this issue?
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I did have to mail it back without charge, while I added a detailed description of the problem, I don't know if they actually tested it or not, but a few days later I've got my money back.
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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.
These guys are obviously very good at what they do, but not very ambitious; they should direct their talents towards coming up with a fake 2GB card that stores 32GB of data.
AMD vs. Nvidia mining (Score:2)
out of curiosity: what miner do you use?
in my (limited) experience, Radon-based miner completely out-perfom GeForce at mining.
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Nvidia for FP usage - ATI for integer, seriously !
it's horses for courses
if you want bitcoin mining now you have to use ASIC but previously the integer cores in the AMD units where the dog's dangleies
Re:I bought one of these for Litecoin mining (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed, this is nothing new. It takes all of 10 seconds to find fake video cards being sold on eBay.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/OEM-GT... [ebay.com]
The sellers will simultaneously lie and tell the truth to skirt the rules and not get banned. Not that eBay actually cares about counterfeit goods.
Right now it's rebadging Fermi (400/500 series) generation parts as modern Kepler (600/700 series) parts. However it's an old scam, and if you go back a few years you can find G7x (7xxx series) cards that were being rebadged and sold as GT2xx cards [anandtech.com].
The method of the scam hasn't changed: flash a hacked vBIOS to change the device ID so that it shows up as the desired card. And as long as sellers aren't prosecuted it will keep happening. There's just not much risk in this kind of fraud on the individual level. Though the scam in TFA is large enough that it's certainly going to attract more attention than the perps would like.
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From the eBay page:
It's a nvidia chipset if you think it's a fake one so please don't bid thank you
Is this really definitive proof that it's a fake?
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The RAM and the board connectors are proof. A real GTX 780 has 3GB of GDDR5, and no board ships with VGA. VGA is only found on low-end (or old) cards, so it's a dead giveaway.
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Haha. Oh dear.
Surely this sort of thing hurts eBay's image - aren't they motivated to stamp on this stuff?
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Also, the stickers have the old logo on them, which was replaced years ago.
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DVI+HDMI connectors are a good indicator of a modern board, VGA? Who the fuck uses DSub15 any more??
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"I made a test order of one of these products for evaluating whether they are any good for mining."
Anyone should know nVIDIA cards suck for mining. AMD cards are far faster at hashrates with scrypt.
Actually more like 5-6x difference in performance (Score:2, Informative)
[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 ti
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Unless the firmware flash improved performance...
Ahh...so this strikes again huh? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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You were unlucky. I ran a P2-300 at 450 for years with no bother. It was a sweet spot of Intel producing much better chips than they needed, so you could easily overclock them without any special tricks. I had no trouble with MMX or anything else, stable as a rock.
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The celerons were the same way, it was an excellent generation of cpu's that were rock solid for ocing. You could take an off the shelf 200, 266 or 300, and simply bump up the FSB muliplier, while adjusting the side bus divider and "magic" would happen. Getting 400/500/600+Mhz out of them on air cooling only wasn't only possible, it was super easy. Huge business with mobo manufactures, intel wasn't too happy though.
The Pentium 75 Mhz ... (Score:2)
... 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
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PIII "E"* series processors always annoyed the fuck out of me, every time I came across one I was like "Oh, here we fucking go again!" because that "E" guaranteed trouble.
*"E" being early Coppermine stamps, not the Core series Pentiums.
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I ran into this with RAID controller cards, way back in the day. The part numbers on the chips had apparently been scraped or burned off. The systems identified them as ATI, but the cards were such crap that the mounting plate was misattached and you couldn't make it fit in the system without filing and carefully remounting the card. The boss tried to say "oh, just bend it and force it, that'll put extra force to keep it in place". The customer was *ballistic*, and should have been ballistic, at the complet
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How did this get upvoted? There was never any swapping of AMD for Intel, just taking of lower speed parts and marking them for higher speeds.
Quite wrong, see back in oh '96ish both intel and amd used the same boards, so did cyrix. The way it used to be was, Intel was topshelf, AMD was middle shelf, cyrix was low. They all fit on the same board, had the same pin count, and all the rest. The 'guts' of the cpu's were effectively the same as well, this all changed a few years later when intel and amd finally went their own ways in terms of cpu design and manufacturing. You then saw the first generations of split mobo designs, some of the more in
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oh give me back the super socket 7, those boards were amazing. I was doing obscene things with K6/II processors, things that would turn your hair white. At 575MHz.
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So.. Nvidia don't use signed firmware? (Score:1)
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Conspiracy! (Score:2)
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Prove it. :P