Last month, we reported on how the rapidly increasing cost of copper was potentially going to impact the PC industry, as explained by Thermal Grizzly's Roman 'Der8auer' Hartung. Now he's back again on the subject of copper, but this time highlighting a more alarming and depressing side of the current market: industrial-scale material fraud.Hartung describes the whole situation in painful detail via his YouTube channel, starting with a breakdown of why Thermal Grizzly needs several tons of copper and aluminium. These materials are milled to produce GPU water blocks, such as TG's DeltaMate Astral. Unable to source them at a sensible cost in Europe, Hartung turned to China's vast metal market.In the video, he goes through all the checks he went through to ensure that the products being ordered were fit for purpose, and after being satisfied with all the evidence presented, Thermal Grizzly placed their orders with two separate suppliers, one for just copper, the other for aluminium and copper. Several weeks later, multiple pallets of metal arrived in Germany, upon which the company's usual quality control checks began. Cutting a small 1 mm piece from the corner of a sheet and then checking it via X-ray spectroscopy confirmed that the material was 100% pure copper.But the next test contradicted this, as the sheet failed a conductivity check. Puzzled by this, the team then milled the sheet to inspect the material more deeply and discovered that it sparked during the cutting process, something that copper doesn't do.
