Oh great, crypto miners are selling repainted GPUs and passing them off as new

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Some Chinese crypto miners are doing everything they can to offload their heavily used mining GPUs now that they have nothing left to mine. They make cool efforts to sell their inventory, like repainting them and tricking buyers into listing them as new on some retail sites.

Thanks to the merger, which moved crypto mining from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, the need for warehouses full of video cards drastically decreased almost overnight (opens in a new tab).

An investigation by Youtuber Iskandar Souza (opens in a new tab) and Paulo Gomes (via Videocards (opens in a new tab)) claims that some third-party retailers in China are selling GPUs that look like new but have been retouched to hide the fact that they were used for crypto mining.

The Brazilian duo shared telltale signs that reveal if a GPU has been used or modified in some way. The easiest method was always to check for a yellow tint on the GPU memory, which is caused in two ways; prolonged use or they have been resoldered on newer boards.

The video shows the memory of a mining GPU at different stages of use, and you can see that the memory is black on the brand new cards. The more they are used, the more yellow it becomes. To hide this, vendors repaint memory chips on GPUs, so they look like new at a glance. In this part of the video (opens in a new tab) you can see the paint peeling off the chip.

The painting is peeled off from the memory of a GPU. (Image credit: Youtube – Iskandar Souza)

There are more obvious ways to tell if a card has been tampered with: missing or discolored warranty stickers as well as missing or loose screws. This issue isn’t unique to Chinese retailers either; TecLab pointed out a year ago that repainted GPUs had made their way to some Brazilian tech retailers.

Resoldering memory to a new card is standard industry practice for repairing and refurbishing graphics cards. Yet in this case the product would often be listed as “refurbished” or “renewed” at retail and not as “new”.

So if you’re on the hunt for a new GPU, stick with first-party vendors with generous return policies.

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