 Discount sites like Deal Extreme, AliExpress, and eBay can be a great way to get awesome deals on used or off-brand tech products. And if you're like me, and you're kind of a gigantic cheapskate, the prospect of saving money can be pretty enticing. But, today's video is a cautionary one. A buyer beware tale of making sure that you think critically about a great deal before pulling the trigger. Because even spending $1 is a waste of money if you don't get anything useful in return. For example, this USB to Ethernet adapter that is advertised as being 10 gigabit ready for just over $4 a piece is very eye-catching. But as we're going to see, a lot of the time things like this are just too good to be true. Unlike our sponsor Thermaltake and their A500 case, which features a modern, minimalistic design, brushed aluminum panels, and dual hinge swing tempered glass doors. Check it out today at the link below. So you might understandably find yourself thinking, wow, a 10 gigabit Ethernet adapter for $4 US dollars? Well, gee, that sounds like a way better deal than this 10 gig adapter from Akitio that costs a whopping $200. I mean, why is this thing even so expensive? Well, now that they're both here, these products don't even seem to be in the same universe as one another. The Akitio uses a high speed Thunderbolt 3 interface. It's got a large, well ventilated aluminum chassis. It's got a nice premium feel to it, including a removable cable and we actually haven't tested this yet. But theoretically, if we plug it into a device like, oh, say a laptop. That was a five, four gig file. Okay, so 10 gig working on a laptop. And that's nice. It's bus powered too. It doesn't need any external power adapter. Now, let's turn our attention to our deal extreme adapter. This one is made of cheap plastic with flimsy connectors and a cable that I think could probably best be described as flaccid. It's driverless. That's pretty nice. But what in the world could that be? 100 megabit per second. Let's take that same four gig file and have a real bad time. This doesn't even make sense. Why is it going at 20 megabytes a second? Oh, my Wi-Fi is still. Okay. And you're done, bud. Oh, boy. Yeah, that's what we were expecting. Literally slower than Wi-Fi. So at this point, it's fairly clear that this product has been misrepresented by the website that's selling it. But the problem is that by the time you've got it in your hands to test it, unless you're going to pay 25 bucks to ship back a four dollar item, it's a bit too late to find out that your steal of a deal was just a steal of your money. So how do you differentiate between a scam like this and the real thing before you pull the trigger? You know what? I'm going to use this 10 gig adapter for my web browsing for the rest of this video. Because it's sexy. Now, because there are cases where you can find extraordinary value from up and coming manufacturers or on liquidation deals, we're not saying that you should just dismiss outright anything that seems to be a bargain. We're just saying that your spidey sense should be tingling and you need to make sure that you're doing extra research. So the first thing that we're going to check is whether there is blatantly conflicting information on the product page. Check out, for example, this blender that's advertised as three horsepower and 2200 watts for a cool 90 dollars. The problem here is that the most you can consistently pull from a 120 volt circuit is about 1500 watts before you risk tripping a breaker. And the description of the item actually does correct this misleading title. So then in the case of our adapter here, we can actually see that the title and the detailed specs below are at the very least consistent, both claiming to be 10 gigabit per second. But then getting into our next tip, if we look closely at the product photos, we can actually see that this adapter is clearly labeled fast Ethernet, which, yes, young kids out there, is the actual official name for 100 megabit Ethernet. That is only 1% of the advertised speed. And this is far from the only example of blatant mislabeling on sites like this one. It's a very common practice used to lure in unsuspecting customers. There are the scan SD cards that we recently did a video on, fake brand name fashion goods, cables that are supposedly certified for Apple devices, and of course misleading batteries. Some of the batteries we found even used quotation marks in the title around the capacity and then show the real capacity in the description below, although I'm pretty sure that real capacity is probably a load of bunk as well. It's almost like clickbait titles, except in this case, you're paying for it, and it's definitely false advertising. Back to our Ethernet example, though. We've already got enough evidence to turn us off of this thing, but there is still more for us to learn here. Inflicting specifications can be a surefire way to identify BS. So then we've got that claimed 10 gigabit per second transmission speed. Well, that's pretty cool, but what's also included here in the description is that it's USB 2.0 Type-C. Now, most people understandably might see a USB Type-C connection and go, oh, well, that's really modern and fast, but as a tech nerd, I know right off the bat that Type-C is a physical standard that can carry all kinds of different signals, and the USB 2.0 protocol isn't specced for anywhere near 10 gigabit per second speed. Actually, it tops out at around 5% of that. Now, if you're not so technically inclined, you might not know or even have the desire to know what the differences are between all the USB versions, and that's where our next tip comes in. If you don't know what a specific term means, that doesn't mean it's not important, so Google it. And this can be applicable to any marketing terms or buzzwords, because those might not mean anything at all, even if, you know, less bondage on your new phone sounds really enticing. Back to this specific title again, though. If you search up USB 2.0, the first thing that's going to come up is the Wikipedia page for USB, and it shows that USB 2.0's maximum signaling rate is 480 megabit per second. Oops, oops, oops. The final nail in the coffin here is actually the model number, which we can see in the photo. Remarketing of existing products is very common on these types of marketplaces. See, Soulja Console. So with a quick Google search, we find that this part number actually corresponds to a Realtek Ethernet controller that's designed to run at 10 megabit or 100 megabit speeds. Now that I think of it, we should probably crack this open and find out if it's even a proper Realtek controller. Not yet, though. We'll get to that after our last tip. You might have noticed that one thing that we didn't mention is user reviews, and we'd love to say that that's a good way to avoid scams, and negative reviews should be heated for the most part. It's just that they're not the silver bullet that you might hope. Fake positive reviews have become a huge problem, even on reputable online stores like Amazon. As for these ones, well, simply put, they've been pretty misleading from our experience. This particular item actually doesn't even have any reviews yet, but Deal Extreme shows items with no reviews as having five filled-in stars, and that only changes if a review is submitted. All right, anyway, we've had our fun now. I think it's time for us to crack this nut open. Jake, what was the plan here? Cut stuff, I guess? So this is cool. As expected, we've got only four conductors here, which tells us that, yes, of course, this is not going to transmit at anything more than USB 2 speeds. You would need nine conductors for USB 3, and... 24, I think it is? I think it's 24. Yeah, for Thunderbolt 3. Yeah, this is clearly, very clearly not anything other than USB 2. Yes, it is a real tech controller. Well, at least it's printed as that. So one question you might ask yourself is, if you've only got four conductors here, why do you need this 24-pin connector on the other end? I mean, it just comes down to convenience. USB Type-C is reversible, it's durable, and, of course, modern devices are switching over to using it. It's just that we're clearly only using a couple of pins for the actual data interface on it. So everything else is just blank. It's just not connected to anything. By contrast, let's open up our 10 gigabit adapter here, and this is one... Whoa....beefy, beefy friggin' thing. Although I gotta say, the design of this chassis is not really that amazing, because there's no, like, heat conduction interface between the... Yeah, it could probably be smaller, but I bet you it's very strong. I'm sure it is. You could probably play hockey with it and then come back and use it as your adapter. Just Canadian things. So there it is. If you want 10 gigabit connectivity, you've gotta have a 10 gigabit ready chipset. And, of course, you've gotta have an interface at the other end that is actually capable of taking that 10 gig and transmitting it to something. And you've gotta have a way to dissipate all the heat and whatnot, apparently. Wow, this chip is so... gives off so much heat, they've actually got a thermal pad on the back. The IHS here is almost as wide as this entire board. What's under there? Not bad. A D-ROM, probably? Or the Thunderbolt chipset. Oh, you're probably right. Seems fine. Oh, man. Oh, God. So st... What the hell kind of thermal pad is this? Excellent. Where's your pointer thing? I don't know. It's in your pocket. I just wanna see. Oh, my God. Oh, man. Is that like an actual, like, just bare silicon, too? You're just, like, jabbing a knife into it? I don't think so. No, no, I think it's on a package. Oh, God, the noises. Ah, stop. Just chill, just chill. It's all good. Well... I can't read it anyway, though. I'm gonna have to replace those thermal pads, too. Yeah. Do you mind, Jake? Don't think I have much choice. Bad noise. Yeah. Oh, God, I hate it. It's so bad. Sorry, I'm sorry. It's like the tech nerd equivalent of nails on a chalkboard scratching a microcontroller with a knife. And I can't read it. The markings are, like... What, like, scratched off with a knife? No. Oh. They're just really faint and not, like, obvious anyway. Somehow all, like, scratched. All right, well, here you go. Damn it. Well, thanks for the condom. So conclusion time, then. We know that $4 versus $200 is a huge gap, and this is a pretty obvious example of seems too good to be true. But the point of making this video was to go through some of the steps that you can take for something that isn't quite as obvious to determine the fake stuff from the real stuff, and we hope that even if this might not have been useful for you, maybe you can share this video with someone that you know who has been hoodwinked before. Massdrop and Sennheiser have teamed up to bring us the PC37X gaming headset. It features angled drivers and an open back design for a nice, natural sound and better stereo imaging, and those drivers actually come from the same family as the HD598s and HD600 series headphones. They come with a noise-canceling microphone, and they're available on Massdrop at the link below for just $119.99 for a limited time. Go check them out. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Like, to be very clear, as long as you know what you're getting, four bucks is like... four bucks is four bucks if you need a 100-megabit adapter. While you're down there, you can check out our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum. It's totally worth a join.