GTX 1060 3GB for 72 USD ? Where's the catch?

Hardware GPU
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“New” unbranded latest gen video cards from China at far below market price. What could possibly go wrong?

eg. 72USD including shipping for a GTX 1060 3GB

What are these cards? Where’s the catch?

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There’s lots of fake cards on ebay. They’ll send you an old card with a reflashed BIOS that makes it look like a 1060. Note how the advertised wattage of both the 1060 and 1050 doesn’t even match that of real cards.

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Wow that is so nasty.

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The worse catch of this deal is that you wont get a 1060 XD. Could still be a good deal if you dont even have a GPU

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Those usually end up being some 1gb vram older series with a hacked bios. Theres videos of people on youtube flashing them back to stock but not without some difficulty. They wont work in stock form since the vram reported is less than actual so games will often crash or be really buggy. I think @catsay has experience with this.

EDIT
Check this out

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The catch is… Its probably not a 1060. Probably a 600 series chip.

7

Uggh this again (still).

Usually these are trash GTS450/550 or other poor (low quality binned / reject dies) put onto generic custom PCB’s fitted with the cheapest parts and ram, then sold.
The BIOS on them is often horrifically modified and operating in a sort of life support mode to just keep the parts alive.

Who ever is doing this though is running a big operation, likely hundereds of skilled technical workers are involved with this somewhere and they have a lot of documentation about how these GPU’s work and are put together. The PCB’s also seem ‘custom made’ in a sort of way, like there is a factory churning these out based on old designs.

Regarding modding these cards, There’s of course also no overclocking potential on these parts possible (they’re already underclocked) and its just generally a pain to deal with.

Oh and they could potentially spread hardware embedded malware via the VBIOS code if they might choose to.

Its a mess all in all. Reflashing these is possible but its not worth it other than as an experimental exercise. These cards are utter crap and should be dealt with appropriately.

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