A Chinese hardware repair YouTuber received four allegedly faulty RTX 4090 graphics cards that needed repairing. The YouTuber discovered that three of the four cards were fake graphics cards modded from RTX 3090s and RTX 3080s to look like the real deal. The three fake cards had to be scrapped since they were apparently incapable of running. The customer of the four GPUs apparently paid $1,394 (10,000 yuan) for each GPU and purchased all four from an overseas vendor or supplier.
The Chinese repair YouTuber shared key insights to detect fake RTX 4090s. For starters, the QR code on every legitimate RTX 4090 is located on the very bottom left corner of the GPU substrate. On legitimate RTX 3090s and RTX 3080s, the QR code is located in the same area but slightly above the bottom left corner of the substrate. Most modders will allegedly not move the QR code of a GPU die they are trying to make look like another one, making this an easy way to verify whether an RTX 4090 is real.
