WTF?! It’s not just the RTX 5090 that’s experiencing high demand. Gamers are still snapping up Nvidia’s previous-gen RTX 4090, which explains the continued appearance of fake versions of the card. One trick is to use a die from an RTX 3090 series in the Lovelace flagship.
A user on Chinese video-sharing platform Bilibili (via Tom’s Hardware) shared a video of what appears to be an unboxing of a Palit RTX 4090 graphics card.
At first glance, the card looks brand new. But disassembling it reveals the unfortunate truth: it’s sporting a GA102 GPU used in the RTX 3090 Ti, RTX 3090, and RTX 3080 Ti series, instead of the AD102 found in the RTX 4090. The swap is made possible as the GPUs are pin-compatible and nearly identical in size.
One of the most obvious warnings that there would be something wrong with this card was the price. The buyer paid 3,800 yuan, or around $530, which is nowhere near what you’d pay for an RTX 4090, especially in this current market.
As fakes go, this one is very convincing. The video creator said there were no visible signs of damage or any modifications on the exterior of the card.
Even the GPU itself had been filed down to remove any existing markings and expertly engraved with the same labeling as an RTX 4090 die.
An element that revealed the tampering was that one of the capacitors adjacent to the GPU was not in the right position compared to an actual AD102 die. Also, Uniko’s Hardware notes that the MLCCs surrounding the die use the same layout as the RTX 3090, rather than the layout used by the RTX 4090. There was also a lack of labelling on the memory chips.
another fake 4090 that used a 3090 die
lapped the die then remark it as 4090 ad102
the mlcc surrounding the die are the layout that 3090 uses, or just check the location of the dots at cornershttps://t.co/W2KPJ3ZHUK https://t.co/omimu79x78 pic.twitter.com/VR8Cl6d0C6– UNIKO’s Hardware 🌏 (@unikoshardware) March 25, 2025
It’s very unlikely that anyone other than an expert, enthusiast, or someone who knew what they were looking for would have noticed these alterations. Usually, the best way to identify something amiss in these fake cards, other than the performance, is by installing Nvidia’s drivers. However, the fake RTX 4090 in this instance didn’t even work.
We’ve seen plenty of instances of these fake Frankenstein cards in the past. A very similar example appeared last year when a tech repair channel showed what appeared to be an unboxed but brand new Asus TUF GeForce RTX 4090, but like this case, it also featured a GA102 die.
There have also been cases of scammers selling RTX 4090 cards without the GPUs or memory chips, and in January 2024, Amazon sold a fake RTX 4090 with an RTX 4080 GPU and fried components.
