Fake 1050 ti...?

[afees98]

Hello, Just want to know what other people think of this.... I got this so called 1050 ti on Geek (Powered by Wish) for $60...

I believe it fake as it doesnt even work....

http://prntscr.com/i04pn5

http://prntscr.com/i04pr9

http://prntscr.com/i04pu7

And the box that it came in... http://prntscr.com/i04pzr

 

[stephen.simonsen]

Just thought I'd give a definitive answer. It's not "Fake" or "counterfeit" per se, just not what they claimed it was. I'll post an update if I get it going and see it is reported as in GPU-Z.

 

[4745454b]

That's fake. It's a fake/counterfeit 1050. Can the OP confirm this is the same card?

 

[stephen.simonsen]

I disagree, "fake" would be a card that in appearance would look exactly like the real thing. Counterfeit would fall along the same lines, looks like the real thing, acts like the real thing, but is not. Like a fake or counterfeit Rolex watch, looks like the real thing but you have to dig deeper to spot the fake from the real thing. This is nothing more than a generic graphics card that someone has taken steps to pass off as the real thing. Not necessarily what I would call "fake" per se. More along the lines of sticking a Mercedes badge on a Chevy. It's not a "fake Mercedes", it's a Chevy someone is trying to pass off as a Mercedes. There's a difference. It's a legitimate graphics card albeit a legitimate GTX 550ti NOT a GTX 1050 ti. Just labeling it fake orcounterfeit would be like calling the Chevy in the analogy a fake or counterfeit car.

edit- If this is not the OP's card, then it's an amazing coincidence and the person I got it from bought the same card with the same box and it's also non-working.
2nd edit - might not be from the OP, the fan sticker doesn't look like it was removed. Not sure though. Same exact card though.

 

[USAFRet]

I disagree, "fake" would be a card that in appearance would look exactly like the real thing. Counterfeit would fall along the same lines, looks like the real thing, acts like the real thing, but is not. Like a fake or counterfeit Rolex watch, looks like the real thing but you have to dig deeper to spot the fake from the real thing. This is nothing more than a generic graphics card that someone has taken steps to pass off as the real thing. Not necessarily what I would call "fake" per se. More along the lines of sticking a Mercedes badge on a Chevy. It's not a "fake Mercedes", it's a Chevy someone is trying to pass off as a Mercedes. There's a difference. It's a legitimate graphics card albeit a legitimate GTX 550ti NOT a GTX 1050 ti. Just labeling it fake orcounterfeit would be like calling the Chevy in the analogy a fake or counterfeit car.

False advertising.

 

[Karadjgne]

Not only false advertising. Internet fraud, copyright infringement (I've never seen nvidia stickers off-center like that on a fan, ontop of other manufacturers stickers), violation of eBay EULA and seller would be lucky not to catch petty theft as well.

 

[stephen.simonsen]

Yep. My guess is they got their hands on old factory overrun stock and are passing it off as newer cards. I replaced the mosfet and the card is up and running. So far during post it shows 1050ti branding and GPU-Z is showing a GP107 which clearly it's not.

The question is did they modify the bios to show a 1050ti? Or did they actually load it with 1050ti bios (which my first thought would be that it shouldn't work at all)......bears investigating.

edit - I'd love to hear from some programmers. I'm a hardware guy so not 100% on if they loaded 1050ti bios it would actually work or just brick it.

 

[Rogue Leader]

You didn't buy the card from the OP. eBay is overrun with these things. Occasionally they take them down only for new ones to pop up.

The BIOS is modified to show the statistics of a 1050ti, but no you can't load an actual 1050ti BIOS to such a card and have it actually function.

As for the card being "fake" its sold as a "1050ti" and its not. Its a functional card yes, but its not an actual 1050ti. Not only that, the chips on it may not even be real Nvidia chips, as the branding doesn't match exactly, China often clones processors and I am sure, especially a card that is so old, they easily cloned this one. Anyway there is no single 1050ti, and in theory you could get a reference board from Nvidia and make your own 1050ti if you were a manufacturer and create your own cooling solution, so there is no real definition of a "1050ti" except that its a card running such a GPU processor. So yes, this is a fake card.

 

[The Paladin]

the thing is, in the past there were rumors of card you could take and re-bios to the later version card and got the benefits of it,
I mostly heard of these things being done with AMD cards (i.e. Take a rx570 and using a modded bios, transform it to a RX580), though not hard to find on google... and 90% of the references made are from crypto mining folks trying to extract every little inch of power the card can produce.

if you take the heatsink/plastic assembly, look at the main board, is there a imprinted reference on it ?
if so you could go to this web site and get the original Bios and reflash it back to what it supposed to be..
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/
and follow this procedure to reflash it...
http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-2288384/upgrade-gpu-bios.html

once I change this 970 for a 1070, I will try it for giggles, mostly because when you look at the Bios characteristic below its make you wonder why I could not run a 980 Bios on my 970 Card since oc it already runs at the speed of a 980.. but I am speculating more than not.

 

[Rogue Leader]

Flashing the BIOS from a card that uses essentially the same GPU chip but cut down is possible because, as mentioned, its the same chip. Completely different chips? Not going to work at all, and you're gonna brick your card.

 

[stephen.simonsen]

So, after digging deeper, I'm unsure of which chip it is. Either it's a GF116 GTX 550ti or a GF106 GTS 450. I was thinking the former because it has GDDR5 and I thought the GTS 450's only had GDDR3 but I guess at the end of the run of the 400 series they started using GDDR5 in some of them. So essentially it's either a $30-$40 dollar card or a $50 dollar card being passed off as a newer card. Moral of the story to everyone out there is make sure when you buy, you buy with protection, make use of ebay's buyer protection if something like that happens to you and report the sellers to ebay/amazon etc. (although they'll probably pop up again). What I can't figure for the life of me is why they would go through all that trouble, modding the bios, printing fake labels etc. to essentially sell it for $10-$20 more than it's worth. With the 1050 ti going as high as it is you think they would have tried scamming for more money. Boneheaded criminals? As Mal would say it don't make no goram sense. But anyways, this was fun, worth the $25 I paid for it and I'll strip the parts (mem ic's etc) for future repairs/reworks.

 

[cryoburner]

Perhaps running a few performance benchmarks could better indicate what card it is. You should be able to get a rough idea of what other cards the results line up with.

 

[stephen.simonsen]

I might do that later. In the middle of reballing a Fury x.

 

[Karadjgne]

Just gotta say, I'm impressed (that's not easy). Anybody else would have flipped out, (usually the post is readable once the mods get done 'de-cussing' it) and gone all kinds of spastic crazy. You went the exact opposite, took it as a learning experience and rose to the challenge of figuring out just what you did get, and will be using what's plausible.

Kudos.

 

[Anthony Mondz]

It is indeed a fake my good sir

 

[Rogue Leader]

So, after digging deeper, I'm unsure of which chip it is. Either it's a GF116 GTX 550ti or a GF106 GTS 450. I was thinking the former because it has GDDR5 and I thought the GTS 450's only had GDDR3 but I guess at the end of the run of the 400 series they started using GDDR5 in some of them. So essentially it's either a $30-$40 dollar card or a $50 dollar card being passed off as a newer card. Moral of the story to everyone out there is make sure when you buy, you buy with protection, make use of ebay's buyer protection if something like that happens to you and report the sellers to ebay/amazon etc. (although they'll probably pop up again). What I can't figure for the life of me is why they would go through all that trouble, modding the bios, printing fake labels etc. to essentially sell it for $10-$20 more than it's worth. With the 1050 ti going as high as it is you think they would have tried scamming for more money. Boneheaded criminals? As Mal would say it don't make no goram sense. But anyways, this was fun, worth the $25 I paid for it and I'll strip the parts (mem ic's etc) for future repairs/reworks.

I think you are even over estimating the value of the base card. As I mentioned before its likely that the Chip isn't even an actual Nvidia GPU but a cloned one, which is "worth" pennies. a $50 550ti is made by MSI and has an actual Nvidia GPU in it. This thing between the cloned processor and maybe even cloned memory chips cost them very little to make.

 

[cryoburner]

I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have "cloned" the actual GPU silicon, as that would be a hugely expensive undertaking, with minimal gains considering these are older, lower-end graphics cards. It seems unlikely that the chip was made in anything but an official factory (though I suppose it's possible they could have been made on unofficial runs after Nvidia ended production). And even on an "official" 550 Ti from a company like MSI, the processor would be worth very little at this point, since the card design is around 7 years old and no one is manufacturing them anymore.

And since graphics card manufacturers can typically choose what brand of memory chips and other components they want on a card, no "cloning" would be needed for that, as they should be free to use whatever cheap off-brand memory they want anyway, so long as it's compatible. It's possible that the board design or cooler could have been copied from another manufacturer, but again, reference designs are made available for that purpose.

These are more likely just GPUs that were built for the Chinese market, which have since become hard to sell due to them being a few generations old at this point, and not fast enough to meet the needs of most people in the market for a dedicated card. Rather than sit on old stock in a warehouse, someone likely decided to re-badge them as current-gen cards so they could extract some profit out of them.

Or maybe there was a stockpile of cards that were set aside as defective, that they decided to "refurbish" by simply tacking on some new branding without testing them or anything. : P

 

[Rogue Leader]

I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have "cloned" the actual GPU silicon, as that would be a hugely expensive undertaking, with minimal gains considering these are older, lower-end graphics cards. It seems unlikely that the chip was made in anything but an official factory (though I suppose it's possible they could have been made on unofficial runs after Nvidia ended production). And even on an "official" 550 Ti from a company like MSI, the processor would be worth very little at this point, since the card design is around 7 years old and no one is manufacturing them anymore.

And since graphics card manufacturers can typically choose what brand of memory chips and other components they want on a card, no "cloning" would be needed for that, as they should be free to use whatever cheap off-brand memory they want anyway, so long as it's compatible. It's possible that the board design or cooler could have been copied from another manufacturer, but again, reference designs are made available for that purpose.

These are more likely just GPUs that were built for the Chinese market, which have since become hard to sell due to them being a few generations old at this point, and not fast enough to meet the needs of most people in the market for a dedicated card. Rather than sit on old stock in a warehouse, someone likely decided to re-badge them as current-gen cards so they could extract some profit out of them.

Or maybe there was a stockpile of cards that were set aside as defective, that they decided to "refurbish" by simply tacking on some new branding without testing them or anything. : P

Cloning the GPU silicon is not as huge expensive undertaking as you might think. China is known for doing things like this, they clone everything. The company I used to work for made the machines that make LEDs, DRAM and CPUs. Chinese companies literally bought our machines, reverse engineered them, and made their own versions they sold for half the price (and also half the quality). The other option is after 550ti production ended they got their hands on the silicon recipe to manufacture their own. Plug that recipe into a machine like my former company used to make, get yourself the right thickness wafer and bam you are making your own processors.

No they didn't clone memory, they just used whatever cheap DRAM they already manufacture. China is a different world, you can get knock offs of literally everything there.

The identical cards have a seemingly endless supply, they aren't just leftovers, they are manufacturing this garbage as they know suckers keep falling for it.. Vamery was the big ebay brand before, but they all have the same cooler, one knock off design they all just use, print their own labels done.

 

[Georg Rauh]

Almost bought one of these ....phew..

But in all seriousness, can't believe you didn't do a few benchies just out of curiosity.