Numerous fake Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics cards sold on Ebay

Fake versions of Nvidia graphics cards are currently being offered on eBay at rather low prices (which should be your first hint), a report by c't uncovers quite a bit. Chinese traders mark old Fermi graphics chips as GeForce GTX 1060.

In a test purchase campaign of the magazine end of July 2018, a total of eight advertised as Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics cards were purchased on eBay. All models were offered by Chinese dealers at unusually low prices in the range of 54 to 80 euros for the graphics cards 3 GB memory model - which normally should be about 200 euros. 

After receiving the goods and the opening of the boxes, the first signs of a forgery already showed up: All rumored GTX 1060 had a VGA video output, which is no longer provided by Nvidia. Also, the SLI connector was positioned wrong. As it turns out these are rebadged GTX 450 cards. Basically, they modified the BIOS to report naming as GTX 1060. While not recognizable at first, that chip's BIOS can be altered and the PC first recognizes the fake GPU as a GTX 1060. Another hint is that the BIOS version is 70.26.33.00 which is outdated and lacks support for DirectX 12 with feature level 12_1 The third hint, the GPU has only 192 shader units; a GTX 1060 has at least 1,152 shader procs. The performance of the cards is disappointing as expected: Only about 1,600 points in 3DMark FireStrike, where that should be 10,000 points. Diagnostic tool GPU-Z (download) since then has been updated and should detect fake graphics cards starting with version number 2.12.0 with a prefix "FAKE" in the name field with a big exclamation mark. of course, if you see an analog VGA connector on the card product photos, that's your biggest hint.

Handy, but we doubt anyone on this website would have fallen for this, right?