WTF?! Once again, another cautionary tale has arrived that proves consumers need to be extra vigilant when buying graphics cards, even if they come from well-known retailers such as Amazon. Not for the first time, a customer who purchased a card from the tech giant was sorely disappointed with what they received.
The victim in this latest incident was unfortunate enough to have received a fake RTX 4090 from Amazon. Sadly for the buyer, it arrived with “shipping damage,” so it was sent to North West Repair (NWR), which shared the story on its YouTube channel.
The initial visual inspection of the card revealed a giant crack in the PCB. There also appears to be a melted power connector – something we’ve seen before in RTX 4090 cards.
While that isn’t the sort of damage you want in a card, it’s nothing compared to what the deep dive revealed. The first sign of something being really amiss was the fake anti-tamper warranty sticker covering one of the screws, all of which were a little overtightened – two refused to come out and had to be soaked in alcohol.
After removing the back cover and the heatsink, the first thing NWR noticed was that the heating pads were only covering half the memory chips. The GPU itself appeared to be completely fried, as were some other components on the PCB.
Things only got worse from there. Although the card’s sticker with the serial number claims it is an RTX 4090 with 24GB of VRAM, the AD103-300-A1 code identifies it as an RTX 4080. NWR says it’s an RTX 4090 laptop GPU in the video, but the company confirmed in the YouTube comments section that this was a mistake on its part.
The final verdict is that the card is a “no fix” as there’s nothing left to fix.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of someone ordering a graphics card from Amazon and receiving something else. In December 2022, Amazon sent a Canada-based buyer an RTX 3060 Ti that turned out to be a fake card stuffed with a putty-like substance. The company said it wouldn’t hand over a refund until the “correct” item had been returned to its warehouse.
There is a caveat with this latest incident, though. The customer bought the card as part of a pallet deal from Amazon returns. We’ve often seen cases where unscrupulous types keep working cards and return fake ones that look similar to the original product to get their money back. These are then sold to other customers unaware they are buying a dud.
Earlier this month, there were reports of a gamer who paid $1,600 for a second-hand RTX 4090 in China, only to find it had no GPU and was missing VRAM chips.
