It is extremely difficult for an ordinary user to distinguish between counterfeit NVIDIA graphics cards with broken laser engraving on the chips. The repairman told us about the external signs.
A Chinese YouTuber received four faulty RTX 4090 graphics cards for repair. He found that three of them were fakes created by a modification of the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 that imitated the look of the 4090. They were beyond repair because they could not work. The buyer of the video cards paid $1394 (10,000 yuan) for each video card and purchased all of them from an overseas supplier. The X UNIKO’s Hardware account called the «cards the new» scam level.
the next level of the 4090 scam.
according to 张哥,
this time the surrounding mlcc position is correct, the qr code position is also correct.
however the color of the PCB substrate is too fake, and the metal frame on the substrate is not fully attached.bilibili 修电脑的张哥… pic.twitter.com/tnQMBs8zOe
— UNIKO’s Hardware 🌏 (@unikoshardware) June 14, 2025
Several external signs helped to identify fake chips. The QR code on the processor of a genuine RTX 4090 is located in the very bottom-left corner of the substrate. On the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080, the QR code is located in the same area, but slightly above the lower-left corner. Usually, these codes are not moved during modification, which makes it easy to see a counterfeit. Moreover, RTX 30 graphics cards have a capacitor in the upper-right corner of the substrate that protrudes slightly upwards — it is not present on RTX 4090 chips.
The crystals had a modified laser engraving to disguise them as RTX 4090. The first video card had a QR code in the wrong area and fake video memory. The second had a fake and damaged crystal labeled AD102, also with an incorrect QR code. The third had a processor with an abnormal green and thinner substrate in poor condition.
Only one of the RTX 4090s was genuine, with damage that required repair. Some GDDR6X chips and capacitors on the board were faulty. After replacing the two faulty memory modules and capacitors with new ones, the «graphics card came to life and worked stably.
Fortunately, there are currently virtually no reports of counterfeit RTX 5090s on sale. But given the high-demand and high cost of the new video card, they are likely to appear. Meanwhile, we should beware of fake RTX 4090, as well as popular AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processors that repeatedly forged, as well as Ryzen 7 7800X3D before.
Source: Tom`s Hardware
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