None suspected anything, neither the wholesaler nor the retailer: unfortunately, many people purchased a Zotac graphics card called “GTX 660 4096MB Nvidia Bulk”, without realising they were being conned.


The wholesaler Kosatec wasn't paying too much attention, when it acquired a batch of GTX 660 from China. Once these cards got on the german market, a lot of users started complaining and asking questions about the cards.

First of all, the name is quite weird, since it indicates the presence of 4GB of RAM when the GTX 660 models with this amount of memory are not that common. Furthermore, once they tested the cards, they immediately realized something wasn't working right. Under a Zotac branded cooler, even though the BIOS was confirming it to be a GTX 660 with a GF106 GPU, there was actually the Fermi GPU of a GT 440. No need to say this, but an entry level graphics card from 2010 can't be compared to a GTX 660.

At the moment nobody knows where these graphics card came from, since the chinese wholesaler affirms that they bought the cards from Point of View, which is denying everything. Anyway, it would be weird for a company like PoV to sell graphics card to Zotac, something is not right, and Zotac is complaining too. Nvidia is on the case, and they should be able to trace the chips thanks to the serial numbers, to see which companies held these chips and when they sold it. Anyway, the customers have been fully refunded.




Source: Heise
via Le Comptoir du Hardware.