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MyDrivers publishes an article stating that NVIDIA starts cooperating with counterfeit graphics card manufacturers in China, namely a number of large national sales companies, to eliminate stocks of counterfeit graphics cards.
Online retail platforms, including JD.com and Douyin, are in the midst of removing a number of dubious fake listings. NVIDIA is looking to distance itself from the pool of counterfeit hardware and brands responsible for flooding domestic and international markets with so-called counterfeit graphics cards. The company is believed to be puzzled by the dark origins of this influx of patented designs.
The market was saturated with fake hardware during the Ethereum mining boom – little-known artisanal companies such as 51RSIC, Corn, Bingying и JieShuoMllse, pushed rebranded cheap OEM cards to local marketplaces. Counterfeit graphic cards have also crept outside the sector and import listings have begun to appear on international platforms including Ebay, AliExpress, Amazon и Newegg.
NVIDIA is also fighting to stop the sale of refurbished cards – they were most likely used in heavy mining work. A flood of such cards has hit the market after a slump in cryptocurrency mining efforts, and many expert communities warn against buying used cards due to the high risk of component failure.
GeForce RTX for laptops easily adapt to desktop cards. For example, 51RSIC released a card called the GeForce RTX 3070 TiM 8GB, which appears to be a fictitious model name and its specs indicate it is based on a mobile variant.
NVIDIA has required that graphics cards based on older GPU architectures, in particular generations Turing и Pascal, have been removed from sale sites. The latest GeForce RTX 40 series has not escaped the treatment of cheap clones. 51RSIC offer card RTX 4090 Spirit – this is supposed to be an updated version MANLI GeForce RTX 4090 Gallardo with non-standard cooling.
NVIDIA has put together a simple guide for a potential buyer to avoid buying a fake.
At first it is recommended to consider only the last series GeForce RTX 40 due to the debut of the Ada Lovelace architecture after the crash of the cryptocurrency, so GPUs from this range are not strongly associated with mining.
Secondly, buy a card only from an official partner – vivid examples for the Chinese market are ASUS, Colorful, Gainson, GALAX, Gigabyte, Injoy, MSI, Zotac, Renaissance, ASL, Maxsun и Yeston – proper guarantee through these companies is provided.
And one last piece of advice for people who don’t have a big budget to buy from the RTX 40 line: NVIDIA recommends only purchasing higher-end models based on the past Ampere architecture.
This positive NVIDIA trend of focusing on eliminating counterfeit products from online stores will work, but this effort is only targeted at one regional market. The Chinese hardware sector is huge and difficult to regulate, but the proliferation of counterfeit and badly restored cards has spread all over the world, and this is not a new problem, the company must solve it in order to fully satisfy its customers.
