 On the desk in front of me are five fake graphics cards. Also a water bottle at ttstore.com. That's not to say that you couldn't actually play games on these things, but rather that we strongly suspect that the games won't run the way that they're supposed to. So let's take a look at both why and how sellers on wish.com get away with selling fake merchandise like graphics cards and also what you can expect to receive in the mail if you do go for one of their too good to be true deals. ModMic's lineup has something for everyone. The ModMic USB is a USB powered detachable microphone, the ModMic Uni is a revamp of the original 3.5mm mic, and the ModMic Wireless is...well, wireless. Check them all out now at the links in the video description. When we went shopping, we wanted to focus on the most popular graphics cards on wish, which currently are the GTX 1060 and 1050 Ti. Both of them are often sold under the same listing, and both of them have similar amazing prices of about 60 US dollars, which made us wonder if there was actually any difference between the two. I mean, after all, these are coming from some sketchy seller in China, so if they're comfortable falsifying a listing, I mean, why not falsify it more? Why not call this an RTX 2080 Ti? Maybe because that would seem even like too much too good to be true. Anyway, fast forward three weeks and here we are. To start off, we threw each one of these cards, this was the fifth one by the way, it wasn't the water bottle, onto our test bench to verify if it would fire up at all, and the answer is actually yes, we've got our HDMI cable running through the floor here over to the TV, and lo and behold, the graphics card is working. So Colin is firing up Hardware Info, which is a useful tool for finding out what exactly is inside any PC or even PC component. And this one immediately revealed some fakery. Fake. Both the graphics card and the graphics chipset actually report completely different values. Wait, no, hold on a second, where's the top one? The top one says it's right. This one also says fake, I think it's just scrolled over. Ah, there it is. Okay, so check this out guys, both the graphics card and graphics chipset fields report back as fake. So this is GeForce 1050 Ti, which if you'll recall is what we thought we were buying, but they've actually both got fake at the beginning of it in brackets. So the weird thing is that the GPU code name is the only thing in here that's actually accurate and doesn't have a fake thing on it. So we found that all five of our cards ended up self-reporting as GF116, the chip that we would expect to find in a real 1050 Ti, the GP107. So with the pertinent info pulled from software, the next step is to remove the coolers from these things and take a look at both the GPU dies themselves and the RAM chips that are on board these things. You know what the kind of weirdest thing is? Actually, you know what, I take it back. I was gonna say like the 1060 even managed us to have like a busier looking PCB. But if you compare them, the only difference is that it has more RAM chips on it. Oh, it's got more RAM chips? Well, why? Oh, that is kind of bizarre. Oh, I'm also kind of excited to use these guys. Have you used these yet? Not too of wipes? They're like ready to go? No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on. It's ready to go. It's already wet. I'm ready to go. I'm already wet. You did the 1060? Uh, well, the 1060. Yeah. So curiously, it does have proper NVIDIA laser etching on the die, but it doesn't have an actual model number on it. It just has a serial number. Yeah, so this is all just production info. So I guess what batch or wafer these all came out of and anything to track it during the manufacturing process. But there's no actual like die number on it. You know what's really bizarre is that they actually go and put like work into making sure that the card stays together well and stuff. Like you see, it's got these little plastic spacers here to make sure that even though this cooler is obviously, you know, cheap and could, you know, accidentally rock and chip the die or whatever else, they're making sure that it stays stabilized so that their falsified card doesn't get damaged. I'm very curious if these were like taken from some, you know, B-Bin or defective bin fixed and then resold or like, like where is, where are these coming from? It seems to be an old GPU that was harvested kind of like we saw with those X79 motherboards that are made using repurposed server chipsets. It seems like they just, they sourced these chips and they actually went and designed and built PCBs for them. Like it seems to be brand new. I mean, there are minor differences that we can see here. Like some of the RAM chips are like Hynix, some are Samsung, some are a brand I'd never heard of. Here, let's pull apart some more. Yeah, this one, this one's Samsung. Oh, this one's got Alpida chips. Yes, Alpida, that's the one I hadn't heard of. Oh, okay. Yeah, no, they're a thing. Not typically used in graphics cards from my experience over the last little while. Well, this one actually has the right connector, which is funny. All of these other boards have a four-pin connector and some of them were just jammed in there. Like the plugs don't fit at all. Yeah. Wow, I didn't even notice that. Check this out. So it's just like rammed on there. That's hilarious. Theoretically, this PCB is designed for PWM fan control and speed monitoring, but instead it's just a simple 12-volt and ground wire that are just rammed onto the corresponding pins. So this fan just runs at one speed probably. Yep, it's a lot. Now that's curious. This one that's actually on a GF116-looking PCB with no six-pin power connector or anything even actually does have the part number markings on it. So this is a GF116-200KAA1. Verified then. Hardware info, trustworthy. Wish.com product listing. Definitely not. Not trustworthy. Now, this is interesting. Colin pointed out that while these three, and actually the one that's mounted to the test bench right now, all use the same PCB, there is one difference between the two that are marked as 1050Ti right here and the one that's marked as 1060. Oh, also curious is they're all using even identical serial number stickers. Yes. So these appear, even though they came from different resellers, to come from exactly the same factory. The 1050Ti ones have only four of a total of 12 potential memory chips that could be mounted to the PCB, while the 1060 has all 12 of them mounted. Why they would bother going to this length to differentiate their scam cards, I don't know, but I guess all we can do is keep exploring. Yeah, so I mean, like there is a difference. If you buy a 1060, you're going to get something that theoretically will do better. It has more memory chips on it. Yeah. Okay. But this is so weird because the 1050Ti's are claiming they have four gigs of DDR5 and the 1060 claims to have five gigs. Is there any way for 12 modules to go evenly into five gigs? Not that I'm aware of. Like, why even pretend to maintain the illusion? Okay, performance, stock performance? Performance. All right, let's do it. One challenge we were running into is that while we were able to determine the frequency of some of the memory chips, it was not always easy from these part numbers, which are not necessarily listed publicly to determine the actual capacity. So, sure, let's start with the one on the bench then. Before we start, I want to talk expectations. So, all these cards are falsely reporting as 10 series in the BIOS. They're all running GF116 chips as best as we can tell, which is a chip that last time I think it was used was March of 2011. Yeah, almost a decade. So, my expectations for performance are very low, but based on how sort of well thought out these scam cards seem to be, I am expecting them to actually work. So, we're going to start with one of the 1050Ti's on this bigger PCB. Okay, here we go. We're in crisis. Yeah, you play crisis. Play some crisis here. Okay, so options, system settings, graphics, 1080 by 768. That seems reasonable for now. High? Yeah, for now. Okay. It's stuck at 69%. Nice. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's soon. Wow, we are coming up on the like, sometime in the near future, date of crisis. Oh, yeah. This is the name of our LTX. We should totally do some kind of crisis anniversary. Or not. It's not like, I don't know, crisis day, like celebration at LTX. That'd be fun. Where are my mech suits? Okay, so like you're in. It's running. It's running. Yeah, it runs crisis. It can run crisis. Okay, I want to save the game first though. So we're at 1024 by 768. We're going to try 1600 by 900 now. And it crashed. At least it didn't blue screen. Okay, but the card works. We could try another one. Yeah. Okay. Do we have, no, there's no. Yeah, so that's a curious thing. I think we looked up the rated TDP of this chip and it was 100 watts. And theoretically, the slot can only do 75 watts. 100 and change. That introduces yet another potential problem. But hey, let's see if it works. What's going on here? It's the TV. That's the thing about OLED is you can't, yeah, you can't tell the difference between the TV being off and a black screen. Wow, did we just get hard locked? I think we did. Well, right then, why don't we move on to the 1060. Wow, what the heck? And this is the 1060. Oh, it's because the resolution is so high. Wow, look at those textures fighting to load in. You got a solid three FPS there. What are we set at? Oh my goodness, even the menu. Look at this. No, we're only set to 1280 by 1024. This one's derping super hard. And this is the one we paid more for. Yeah. You can do it. Come on. And I'm dead. Wow, I get to watch my death forever. Now that crashing we thought might be a fluke turns out it's not. All of our cards consistently stuttered far more than we would expect or outright locked up in games, even though they were more stable on the desktop. And you might think that, okay, well, they probably locked up in games because of the slow ancient processor that's on board. But it's actually because the fake BIOS that's loaded onto these boards makes the system think that your graphics card has more VRAM than might actually be soldered to it. So once the physical VRAM fills up, it'll just crash out hard. So let's take a look at how much RAM we are actually running here. From some Googling, we were able to determine that each of the 1050 TIs has one gigabyte of VRAM. So this one, this one, and this one in spite of the fact that this one has twice as many chips. And then as for the 1060, that one was a little bit more interesting. So it's got two different models of RAM chips on it, five of each type. And then from some quick Googling, we were able to find the rated speed of them, which appears to be different, but we couldn't find a definitive source for the capacity. So we're not sure exactly how much it has, but this card clearly has, Colin, could you play some Crisis for us? Deeper issues that make it just sort of not matter exactly how much VRAM it has. So this experience sucked. Not only are these cards slower than advertised, they're not even usable, which let us down another rabbit hole. So as it turns out, it is possible to reflash the BIOS chips on these cards to get them to report correctly. The problem is that the software you would normally use for that, EnvyFlash, has been locked out in some way. So the only way to fix any of them is to connect directly to the BIOS chip and use a USB reprogrammer like this one to rewrite it. Now we ended up spending about 20 bucks for the programmer and the additional clip that we needed to connect to the chip, but unfortunately, after hours of tinkering, we were unable to even read one of the BIOS chips, let alone try to flash them. You win some, you lose some, I guess. We really did try here, guys, even going as far as trying the clearly inadvisable method of reading the BIOS chip while it's powered, and that was where things got a little bit melty. Now, Dawid DoesTech had a bit more luck than us, so you can check out his video, which we've linked below if you really want to see that process. Anyway, we decided to cut our losses at this point, but there's still a story to be told here, namely why these cards are still being sold when they are clearly, not just fake, but broken. Are these not on Nvidia's radar? Like, what's the deal? As far as we can tell, there's a very fast turnover of these card listings on Wish. In fact, all five of the ones that we've purchased by the time we got them had the stores ripped down, and we noticed this during our original Wish PC build as well. Some of them would go away as soon as a week after the purchase. What that means is that vendors are pumping these cards out to as many people as possible. Customers are reporting them, obviously. Then they take down the store, they're off with your money, and on to making another store and, well, a new listing. One thing that continues to baffle me, though, is why these sellers even bother to ship a graphics card at all. If all the customer is going to get is a graphics card-shaped paperweight, it sort of raises the question, why not just send a potato, right? The best guess that I have is it's to slow down the error reporting process. So maybe the first few customers fire up a game, they're not familiar with how this card should perform, they see something like this, they go, okay, well, hey, I mean, it's gaming, and it is, and maybe they spend some time sort of troubleshooting before they end up reporting it, delaying the process. I can understand the appeal of seeing a 1050 Ti at this price point, given that under normal circumstances, this is the kind of performance that you can expect for 60 bucks. This, for the record, guys, is a 750 Ti. We did find a handful of them on eBay for around the neighborhood of 70 to 75 Canadian dollars. And it's not great, but at least it works. So, guys, you got to remember the timeless wisdom of, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is, and the lesser known bit of wisdom, until wish.com takes responsibility for the scams running on their site, you probably shouldn't shop there. If you guys enjoyed this video, by the way, get subscribed. We're going to have a really cool one upcoming on the next dock, so you're going to want to make sure you don't miss it, and you're going to want to make sure you don't miss this segue to our sponsor. Browsing the internet can be risky business, so why don't you protect yourself and browse anonymously with a hidden IP? Private internet access is an affordable way to do just that. They make the websites and services that you use online think that you are some anonymous person in some different location. 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Honestly, they're basically they're manufacturing e-waste over there. Like these are worthless. Like I wouldn't even use these in a mining rig. Nope. Oh, you can't. Yeah, this is one I need. Yeah, we're going to have to e-waste them. I know this is useless, but I want to get rid of all these. We can hold on to the coolers. What would we use the coolers for? You never know when you might need just like a rando aluminum cooler for something. It's a nice heat sink. In which case I'll undo all these screws. Sorry, Colin. I'm going for lunch. Enjoy. I'll just produce coolers for you forever.