How To Check If Your Graphics Card Is A Fake

It feels like these days everyone is out to scam you, even social media giants want some of the action. But what about the hardware inside your PC? You might think it’s hard to fake a CPU or graphics card, but it is possible and it does happen.

It’s not like they’re made of cardboard or anything. The GPUs are genuine, they’re just older chips that have been relabelled. While it’s unlikely your card is dodgy if you bought it somewhere reputable, it doesn’t hurt to have peace of mind, especially if you don’t think your shiny new GPU is performing as it should.

The latest version of TechPowerUp’s GPU-Z, a tool designed to show in-depth information about video cards, now comes with a fake detection feature. All you need to do is download and run it.

GPU-Z will inspect the card’s BIOS to make sure it hasn’t been tampered with — in this case, to make the card report itself as a model more powerful (and expensive) than it is. If the card is a fake, you’ll see “[FAKE]” before the model name, as well as a yellow warning icon.

Here is the full changelog for GPU-Z, including the older GPUs that are being relabelled:

v.2.12.0 (October 12th, 2018)

  • Added detection for fake graphics cards using old relabeled NVIDIA GPUs (G84, G86, G92, G94, G96, GT215, GT216, GT218, GF108, GF106, GF114, GF116, GF119, GK106)
  • Added BIOS saving capability for NVIDIA Turing
  • Added monitoring for multiple fans on Turing
  • Added fan speed % monitoring on Turing
  • Added HDMI and DisplayPort info to Advanced -> NVIDIA
  • Power draw on NVIDIA cards is now reported in both TDP % and Watt
  • Fixed system hang caused by Valve anti-cheat
  • Fixed memory bandwidth on Turing with GDDR6
  • Fixed tooltip for system memory usage sensor
  • Fixed broken Radeon RX 400 GPU usage monitoring on newer drivers

GPU-Z [TechPowerUp, via gHacks]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.