RTX 3090 Founders Edition Cooler Contains Chopped-Up Radeon R9 280 PCB

Facebook marketplace buy turned sour when a buyer had to pay $50 for a product that turned out to be a fake – or at least heavily modified – graphics card. An attempt to buy a used NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 FE for cheap resulted in a big letdown for the consumer. Unverified second-hand sites where you can buy high-end graphics cards are quite dangerous for getting counterfeit, modified hardware.

Buyer discovers modified AMD board inside NVIDIA case after $50 purchase

It's important to inspect high-end graphics card internals if you want to be sure that you won't get scammed. Mere visual inspection may not be enough to detect the physical modifications.

• Fake PCB Model: Gigabyte Radeon R9 280 3GB
• Purchase Price: $50
• Physical Modifications: PCB cut on both sides, display connectors removed, five memory chips missing

The repair lover named Blighted Agent was hoping to get an authentic NVIDIA graphics card in the mail. To his surprise, though, it was a very different hardware lurking under the heavy aluminum cooler. Buried under the NVIDIA case was a heavily modified Gigabyte Radeon R9 280 3GB PCB. The seller put it this way that it's a stripped-down RTX 3090 board, which deceived the buyer into thinking it's something different.

In order to make a fake assembly work, the hardware seller had to do a lot of physical modifications to make it fit into the original NVIDIA cooler. The Gigabyte Radeon R9 280 PCB was physically cut on two sides to fit the dimensions of the RTX 3090 case. Moreover, the seller removed display connectors, and deleted 5 memory chips from the PCB. The physical modifications that were done, like cutting the PCB, and missing memory chips, helped the fake assembly pass as a broken – but authentic – NVIDIA cooler at a glance.

Blighted Agent shared the in-depth teardown to warn the public about this type of scam. The seller did warn that the card is missing components, however, they didn't reveal that it's actually an entirely different AMD board. The missing display connectors and the missing memory chips helped the card pass an initial visual inspection because it looked like a stripped-down card, rather than a blatant fake. It's yet another proof that you can't trust the external looks and cooler integrity of a graphics card if you want to be sure the internal parts are authentic and functional.