Originally Posted by AzzMan

Sorry to quasi-hijack your topic, and this post will probably get deleted and asked to move to the hardware board but I figure maybe some of you could answer this, now that it's kind of come up.

What exactly differentiates real ATI, NVIDIA cards, real processors (do 'fake' ones even exist? I suck with electronics), with 'fake' ones? You mentioned that it's a 'real' ATI and not.. whatever. What are the equivalents for NVIDIA or what have you, price idfferences, QUALITY differences...?

Thanks for any time spent on replying to this post, by anyone.

Bah... This question pertains directly to this sale.


We'll use nvidia as an example:
When you're dealing with legitimate cards, the chips are all made by Nvidia. Nvidia, in the process of designing the chip, has also designed an entire video card. Nvidia sells this "reference" design and the chips to other video card manufacturers. If eVGA wants to, they can design a new video card that uses the Nvidia chip, or they might simply use the reference design and start mass producing cards. Nvidia might also decide that they can make some money by manufacturing their own line of cards based on the reference design.

So, are "real" ATI cards better than a Sapphire ATI card? I dunno. I would imagine that only the best materials would be used to make a card that showcases their own chips. That's not to say that a second party couldn't do the same thing if they wanted to.

Do fake chips exist? Yeah. Most of the time in the form of remarked chips/cards. You'll buy a GeForce 6800 GT only to find out that it's actually a GeForce 3 Ti 500 with a shiny paintjob and a big chip cooler on it! These are obviously black market and illegal. You're not going to find these at NewEgg.com, but you might run into them on eBay.