NVIDIA is working with popular e-commerce platforms to eliminate counterfeit GeForce GPUs
A subject of cheap Chinese GPU brands that many have never heard of before is reoccurring more often than one might think. Those companies appear out of nowhere, often with unique designs. However, the story is a lot deeper than one might think.
We have always wondered why NVIDIA is doing absolutely nothing to prevent such companies from selling unlicensed and often counterfeit GeForce GPUs. Turns out the whole operation is more complex. Companies like JieShuo, Bingying, 51RSIC, Corn, Mllse and others are not official partners of NVIDIA. On the contrary, these companies should not be selling GeForce GPUs at all.
Gamers can easily find such GPUs on Chinese etail sites, and unfortunately also on popular international platforms like AliExpress, Wish, Amazon, Newegg or eBay. If any of those products are listed as ‘shipping from China’ one might immediately assume it will be very hard to issue an after-sale claim.
Some of those cards are purchased from known brands at bulk and lower price and then simply repacked with new stickers. A good example is the MANLI RTX 4090 GPU with a built-in spirit level. The company informed us that what we originally covered as ’51RISC’ GPU is actually their design and the 51RISC simply stole their photos.
Another example are mobile GPUs sold as desktop cards. Those are indeed very unique designs and may even be considered an alternative to more expensive desktop GPUs, but as we have always said, those cards should not really exist. NVIDIA has never allowed any company to sell such mobile GPUs to consumers as desktop cards. In the end, NVIDIA will never provide any support for such hybrid designs, so just because they work now, they might just as well lose driver support later. To make matters worse, some companies are even shipping these cards with drivers infested with malware.
NVIDIA RTX 30 Laptop GPUs as desktop cards
Finally, we have post-mining GPUs. There are many companies now specializing in cleaning and reselling graphics cards that we used for cryptomining. Some of those cards are easy to spot, others not so much. The problem is so vast that there are now even companies that paint memory modules to hide the yellow tint, a problem often occurring with post-mining GPUs.
NVIDIA has now engaged with popular Chinese e-commerce platforms to eliminate this problem. Merchants are now no longer allowed to sell old, second-hand RTX 20, GTX 16 or GTX 10 GPUs. At least four popular Chinese platforms have agreed to implement such measures.
NVIDIA will work with these platforms to establish better relations with official partners (like ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte and so on) and prioritize newer GPU series like RTX 30 or RTX 40, which are less likely to be affected by these issues. However, one just cannot understand why this is happening years after the first reports. This is not a new problem at all.
Source: MyDrivers via Tom’s Hardware
