A GTX 1070 8GB for less than $100 and it's probably real!

Just now, I was browsing eBay looking for the best GPUs for almost any budget (for my next article) when I came across something that quite frankly shocked me, an MSI GTX 1070 8GB for less than $100 shipped! Anyone that's a PC gamer has (hopefully) heard of the many fake GPUs that you can find floating around on sites like eBay and Wish. The good thing is that unless you're very gullible, you can pretty much spot a fake one from a mile away. These fake GPUs are especially prominent when searching for budget Nvidia cards such as the GTX 1050 TI. They pretty much all come from China and almost look identical to each other. While the GPUs themselves are real GPUs, scammers take very old GPUs from like 10-15 years ago, slap on a crappy heatsink with fans and flash a BIOS to the cards to make them appear like the card that they claim to be. Some gullible (and some not so gullible) gamers have found that when running benchmarks with these cards that they perform terribly and oftentimes the buyers even have trouble with finding the correct drivers for them since they've been flashed with a false BIOS.

It's very easy to go by the old saying of "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is", but I decided to do some further research on this specific posting to see if this is just another scam or if it's a dream deal on an amazing GPU. The first thing I did was to look at the sellers profile and I could see that his/her profile was setup in April of this year and they have never sold anything or have any other active postings as far as I can tell. The seller is from China as well and the listing states no returns so most people would instantly become suspicious of this posting and probably rightfully so. The next thing that I did was to read the description for the item which goes as follows:

"MSI AERO GeForce GTX 1070 8GB TURBO Graphics Card
This Graphics Card is in good condition and has been handled with care.
However there is a small broken fan fin (shown in photos) this does not effect the working of the Graphics Card.
All of our graphics cards are tested through graphical benchmarks, this board successfully ran all benchmarks.

Everything that is included, is in the photos "

Typically scam sellers won't tell you that there's anything wrong with the GPU even if it's something small, but this one does, albeit, it's not a big deal and won't affect the function of the card. The next thing that I decided to do was to look up this specific card on Amazon and sure enough there was an exact model of this currently listing on Amazon for $522.99 plus shipping. The next thing that I did was to compare all the photos that the eBay seller provided and to compare it to images of the real one. I went through one by one and very carefully inspected every inch of the card front, back, side, and outputs. I concluded that the images that the seller listed seems to indicate that this is the correct card. One thing that many scammers will do is use either really crappy images with a very limited number of them (usually only one) or they will simply pull stock photos from the internet and upload them to their listing, but in this case that wasn't done. After checking every minute inch of these pictures, they started to seem like the real deal based on all the research that I did, but I wanted to do one final test. I wanted to perform a reverse image search on one of the images, specifically, the image that showed the user guide and CD. If the image was found elsewhere online it would almost 100% prove that it was fake. While almost all of the images seemed to be taken by an actual person and not just stock photos, this one was without a doubt taken by a real person as most people selling GPUs don't typically include photos of these items even if they're included in the purchase. The results honestly shocked me...

This image appeared nowhere else online at all! Out of billions of images, there wasn't any that matched this photo meaning that the seller must have taken this photo and I'd be willing to bet that they also took all the other photos as well. Normally if someone was to tell me that they was to find a GPU like this at this price, I'd tell them to stay as far away from it as possible because they're almost certain to get scammed. This is one of those once in a rare blue moon kind of cases that I would be willing to bet money that this card is 100% real!!! Even as I write this I'm speechless. The only downside to this is that shipping could take over a month, but this card is a steal even with that being factored in. You may be asking yourself at this point, "If you think it's so real then why don't you buy it?" which would be a fair question to ask me. The answer is simply that I'm broke. If I had $100 on me right now after doing all the research on this post that I have, I would buy it in a heartbeat! Hell, I would bet money that it was real. Everything... and I mean everything matches up perfectly to show that it's legit. The PCB, the fans, shroud, power inputs, even the pictures are taken by someone who owns this card. It's honestly incredible and I hope that someone in need of an incredible GPU on a budget buys this. That's why I wrote this article after all. It is a new listing, but I can guarantee that it won't be available for long and there's only one available so get it while you can!

I'm blown away by this, honestly I am! It's a legitimate GTX 1070 for less than a fifth of it's original price. GPUs are probably a bit cheaper in China (as they're usually made there), but still I'm in shock. Buy it while you can (if you can)!!!

Since I know someone will ask, here's the link to the posting if you want to snag this incredible GPU for an even more incredible price! GTX 1070 8GB

As always, I hope that I helped someone out and I'll see you in the next article! Have an incredible day! :)