How many people even register their graphics card (or really anything else) online on the manufacturer's website? And considering it is impossible for people to buy cards from legit sources, what exactly do you expect them to do?
I had a fan bearing go bad on an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. It was literally two days out of warranty, and I was pissed. I was near one of their main offices at the time, and ended up calling their reception and driving to drop off the borked card after speaking to an engineer who wanted to see it. They handed me a brand new card, no questions asked, and thanked me for bringing the problem to their attention.
I’ve been such an ATi fan after owning an FIC-branded 9700 that was flashed to a Pro and went bad in the first year or so. I was ~13 years old, called up ATi and told them the situation, I was honest that I had flashed the bios, and asked if there was anything they could do. They sent me an ATi branded 9700 Pro.
First company to do me a solid like that and I’ve stuck around since.
I had a similar experience with AMD back in the day. I was probably a similar age and damaged the pins on my new Athlon XP 2500+. I called them up and they ended up sending me a 2800+ as a replacement.
Had a mouse go bad 20 years back, called up support, they told me they’d send a new one. I was shocked, wondering what if I was lying and didn’t they want evidence?
They replied they took it on trust but I could cut off the usb plug and put it in the trash if it made me feel better (that is, of course, a very easy repair).
I had a similar experience with Logitech - when I first got into sim racing I got their cheapest wheel and pedal set - it started not keeping a calibration so contacted them.
They paid for me to ship it to them, and then just sent me the next model up as a replacement as mine had been discontinued.
Same. I last bought a mouse in...damn, 2008. They've replaced it 3 times since, with the new equivalent model regardless of it being in or out of warranty.
I had a similar experience, something borked on my Radeon 9600 Pro (assuming a busted capacitor) a week or two after the warranty expired, but I figured I'd try my luck and ask if there was anything they could do. They promptly sent me a new card for free (though it was probably refurbished), didn't even ask for the old one in return.
Back when IBM was making Thinkpads, I called their support number to get the FRU for a HD in a second hand laptop that was well out of warranty. The next day I had a package waiting for me with a new drive and prepaid postage for the return. Easily my best customer experience, without a doubt they made that money back - I went out of my way to direct my business their way for years.
Apple hardware support was legendary before they became The iPhone Company. I had the first Intel MacBook Pro, and if stuff broke or the battery started getting a bit weak I’d just walk into the Apple store, talk to someone there, and most of the time my problem would be solved that day (with the battery they just gave me a new one for free, including once even after AppleCare had run out).
Nowadays when I go to the Genius Bar I feel like I’m being cross examined so that they don’t have to replace anything. And the examiner doesn’t know the first thing about the computer but is just reading a script someone gave them. This is despite paying for the most expensive warranty.
I’ve had the absolute worst experience with Apple.
I wanted to buy Apple Developer Program subscription. It wouldn’t let me add any of my credit cards, saw an option to add payment via UPI (Unified Payments Interface) in India. Added $99 to my Apple account and was still unable to pay for the membership. Spent around 7-8 hours speaking to customer support but no one had a clue what was wrong. I asked for a refund and was told money added to Apple account as credit can not be refunded.
Not apple but I recently wanted to get some work done on fiverr. The dev completed the stuff and when it was my time to pay, I couldn't. No card I used worked. RBI international stuff. I tried like 5 banks cc with international payments turned on.
I asked support and the dev for crypto and they banned me for soliciting third party payments.
I have been unable to find either an Indian dev for a small job or someone who can accept crypto.
Today you have to be careful when dealing with apple repair as they have been found to repeatedly engage in money grubbing tack ticks which border on fraud.
And that is ignoring the fact that in general they tend to not repair component but just replace whole components (because it easier) while hindering others from providing proper repairs (because money) even if it necessary for e.g. data recovery (because from their POV you are stupid if you don't auto-sync everything with the iCloud).
It's also ignoring the fact that apple had in the recent years repeatedly some very questionable design flaws (like strangely over sensitive power management chips, missing heat pipes and similar).
And ignoring that by soldering everything including the ssd on the main-board preventing on-main-board repairs a lot of damage from a problematic USB hub to a broken SSD will always lead to a whole main-board + ram + cpu + ssd + ... replacement which makes many repairs unreasonable expansive.
Not an Apple fanboy but when I got an IPod 4(I think) they started having problems with the included headphones. Read about it on Slashdot then soon after mine failed, I called(!) support and they sent me a box with new ones and a return label for the old ones so they could do failure analysis.
Commodore did something like that for me. I had an early A3000 that got fried somehow (probably by a NewTek Digiview) and we received a brand new A3000 2 days after talking to them.
Happened to me once too. I got a lemon, it went in for service 3 or 4 times (this was right after the Intel transition) and eventually AppleCare just apologized and mailed me a new laptop - the next generation of them.
Compare this to 3Dconnexion, a maker of expensive 3D mice for CAD software. They rubberized their mice but the rubber decayed after a couple of years (spent $200+ in the 00's and got a gooey piece of junk 3-4 years later). For a decade, they've been ignoring customers and saying the issue was fixed in a later version.
How long are you covered there? It's 5 years here in Norway for anything "you should expect to last five years", which means basically all computer parts and mobile devices.
The legislation just says products must last a reasonable amount of time. As you can imagine, retailers and consumers usually have different ideas about how long something should reasonably last. I've never had much luck getting products repaired or replaced once the manufacturers one-year warranty runs out.
"You have 2 or 5 years to make a complaint if you purchased from a professional vendor (Consumer Sales Act (in Norwegian)).
The statutory warranty period depends on how long the product is meant to last when subjected to normal use. Sofas and mobile phones are examples of products with a 5-year warranty period.
When buying from a private individual, the warranty period is 2 years (Sale of Goods Act (in Norwegian))."
You can't have been trying very hard. I have never had any problem.
What does a private individual mean? If I sell you my MacBook Air you are entitled to some kind of warranty? Is the seller or manufacturer obligated to provide the warranty?
A lot of things are easier if the state owns a fund valued at approximately 2000 billion dollars and you only have to share that between ~5 million people. [0]
It's a crazy amount of money. In 2017 that fund owned 1.38% of the global stocks. I heard at some point they had trouble because they couldn't use the money to build roads or whatever without affecting the global economy.
That helps, no question. But the causality is the wrong way around. Norway had that fund in the first place because they are a sensible country that made good decisions. Their government clearly functions at a level the US today can only dream of - where they can barely agree on not shutting down every time they near the debt limit. Here in Canada we're maybe a little better off, but not close to Norway.
FYI Ubiquiti slashed their US based employees a couple of years ago, both engineers and support. Don't expect similar treatment in the future. You can see the change in responsiveness looking at their support forums.
Lucky you. I had to spend an hour a few months ago proving to Apple my warranty had 9 days left it. And they did nothing for me when my warranty replacement iPad Smart Keybpard died in less than a year other than offer a replacement for 90% of MSRP but with another useless 90 day warranty.
This, every time.
I had my iPhone 11 start to booloop back in July, literally the day after the warranty expired. Called up their support, explained the issue, and they issued me an exemption and I got a replacement for free.
Not trying to be an Apple fanboy, but I don't think Samsung or Google would extend the same offer.
Just out of interest was yours a Sapphire branded 9800 Pro? The fan died in mine and the only bad behaviour it exhibited was that it overheated in games (Half-Life 2 and Unreal 2 were the big killers), for anything else it was perfectly usable in that crippled state.
It might've been, I still have it somewhere probably.
To this day it is still the hottest piece of hardware I've ever owned. I swear you could cook on that card. It definitely didn't help that the fan died, and it melted itself into a broken state not long after I suppose.
This is anecdotal but EVGA replaced my 1-month out of warranty 970 with 1070, after the card gave up to work about 2 years ago. And I registered it after the failure, although I was able to establish that I bought the card legally and was the only owner.
All my contact with their customer support was stellar.
To provide a counterexample: I had a still-in-warranty EVGA 1080 that had a fan die. They cross-shipped me 3(!) bad cards in a row that were clearly returns they hadn't tested (two had obvious physical damage upon arrival in pristine boxes), and on the final card that sort-of worked (a 2070 I had to underclock to stop blue-screening), never acknowledged my return of one of the previous bad units, even though I sent them shipping proof from the UPS store.
When I tried to get the 2070 replaced, they refused unless I paid full retail price for a defective card I had proof I'd returned.
I really regretted buying from them at that point, and wished I just had my original card back, which they couldn't provide.
QA on their refurb units is definitely out of whack.
I bought a B-Stock GTX 580 from them which was rendering artifacts iirc. A replacement 580 also rendered the same issue. The next replacement was a seemingly new GTX 960 which has worked without issue ever since. Having received a $200+ card for $80 + some hassle was a net positive experience in the end for me.
Different locations, I'd assume. It's well known that EVGA outside of the US is... not great, when it comes to customer service anyway. Within the US itself though -- no idea!
Over the two-month period this happened, I don't think I ever spoke to the same rep twice, and several times when I referenced notes that I know for a fact $previous_guy had, $new_guy had nothing. Most (not all, but most) were nice enough on the phone. I have a feeling that turnover is/was a large contributing factor.
Some time ago I bought an EVGA 560 Ti and they threw in a 10 year extended warranty. A couple years in it failed and they replaced it with a 660 Ti. About a year later that failed and they replaced it with a 960 Ti. I appreciate their warranty policies.
This. Buyers will have no way of knowing the card they buy-- at 2x retail-- was stolen. This penalizes buyers in a marketplace that doesn't have the structure in place to ensure 90% of its product doesn't end up in the hands of scalpers.
Expect anything bought from a scalper to be stolen. I thought that was "you're buying from a scalper 101" (or possibly "lol").
People buying from scalpers is why scalpers can continue to exist. There's pretty much no way of stopping that, outside of making scalping illegal, then strictly enforce that. But, then, that pretty much kills the first-sale doctrine and I am not sure that is a good trade-off.
I do, because I want manufacturer warranties. I've lost out in the past by not registering and the warranty expires. I'm certainly cautious and frugal, but not too abnormally so (I think at least). I'd guess there are a handful of others like me.
My EVGA card from a decade ago had a lifetime warranty if you registered it with them. I didn't, so when it stopped working 3 years later I had to buy a replacement.
Registering for an extended warranty is a requirement that many companies enforce.
Update: Why is this being downvoted? Literally from EVGA's website:
"Limited Lifetime Warranties are available to the original owner on applicable parts if registered by the original owner within 30 days of the date of purchase." [1]
[1] https://www.evga.com/warranty/2011/graphics-cards/
As in, lifetime doesn't mean your lifetime. Or the time you own the card. It means whatever expected lifetime the item has as per the manufacturer. The manufacturer may define the "regular lifetime" of their item to be 3 years for example and then it would not have helped you at all.
I've never registered for any warranties in my life.
I'm not sure if this is a thing where you are. But where I am for example, there are warranties guaranteed by law that require manufacturers to warranty their items for a "reasonable" amount of time (regardless of what their actual terms say). What is reasonable is up to interpretation and different for different items. They do give a few examples for common items like a washing machine but otherwise it's up to consumers and companies to figure this out together and if they can't you can make an official complaint with the government. Helped me w/ NVIDIA who wouldn't replace a broken tablet shortly after their official warranty ran out.
EDIT: No idea on the downvotes, when I started replying there were no downvotes yet, when I submitted there was.
Yes they're obligated to offer a 'reasonable' warranty but this isn't what you get if you register. You get a significantly increased warranty as stated by other commenters getting a card upgrade years after their card failed.
EVGA are particularly generous in this regard compared to others.
> If the company is willing to warrant the card for X years if you register it, then surely X years is the minimum bounds of a reasonable lifetime?
What makes you say that?
Depending on who you ask, a reasonable lifetime for a phone is 2 to 6 years. But if I want to make my customers feel nice and secure I might offer a 10 year warranty, knowing that very few people will actually keep it that long.
IME with EVGA, it's the working lifetime of the card.
I had an 6600GT which died. Over ~4 years, EVGA replaced it twice, the second replacement they gave me an upgrade (to a card one generation newer). Almost 10 years later, it still works.
So the manufacturer must honor the promised warranty, but they certainly have the option to offer an extended warranty at no charge provided that the consumer registers with them.
You have the legally required warranty regardless, but to the extent the warranty isn't required by law, you have whatever you’ve jumped through the manufacturer’s hoops for.
One data point but I have had issue with EVGA support, and their cards for years (I owned two before I swore to never buy another one). They had heatsink issues at one point and it was incredibly hard to get it fixed without me paying shipping and I would have been out a GPU for 4-8 weeks. I just fixed it myself and voided the warrenty.
Fixing it yourself did not void the warranty. It's against the law to void warranties just because someone else fixed it (unless they, aka you in this case, break it).
I register nearly all computer components. Sometimes parts go bad and that’s the point of having a warranty. Thankfully I’ve only had to replace a motherboard and a PSU. Actually they were EVGA, hence why I normally buy their stuff. I got a 3060Ti through them also. I just happened to sign up for an out of stock notification and to my surprise they changed that into a queue giving you the option to buy a card. I mean I waited a year but it’s better than trying to deal with whatever nonsense Best Buy is doing or Newegg.
In addition to the warranty mentioned by others, registering an EVGA product of a certain value or higher gets you into their Elite program, which gives early access to queues for new products. This is what allowed me to upgrade to a 3080 Ti for MSRP in the middle of a shortage.
So it may not be immediately useful but can pay off down the road.
A lot of products offer longer warranties if you register. For example my ice maker comes with a 1 year warranty but registering within 30 days automatically extends that to two years. It's an under-counter unit that makes nugget (aka Sonic) ice and wasn't cheap so I registered.
I register all my EVGA purchases specifically because they have very good warranty + customer service, and they have a great trade-in program for registered hardware.
I do with all the tech I buy and sell. I was burned about ten years ago by two apparently-grey market Intel CPUs that I had purchased from a reputable distributor, and had to eat the warranty replacements when they both failed.
Once I started checking proactively I took delivery of a few hard drives that turned out to be "of questionable warranty period", again from various reputable distributors. I immediately had them replaced with no hassle.
3yrs no questions asked warranty (at least in EVGA's case). There's considerable value there - in some cases surpassing the value of the card itself. What's interesting is EVGA now requires you to register the purchase date and location along with a scan of the physical receipt.
Yeah...I tried my damnedest to claim some Call of Duty game that "came with" my 3080 last year. By the time I was done, I had to sign into "GeForce Experience" (which I'd avoided up until then) and install battle.net, reset my old account from the last time I had it (I think when Diablo 3 was new), then I had a hell of time because the authenticator was tied to an old device but I couldn't manage it without logging in.
I forget what eventually happened, but I never was able to play that stupid game and I only even bothered because it was "free".
If you are buying a new sealed video card, never used sold on craigslist/ebay, I'm guessing your not very suspicious and probably not looking for a warranty.
In the current market, you have essentially no way to buy from a manufacturer or primary retailer. You have to get _insanely_ lucky to be able to do so.
So you're essentially saying nobody is going to be looking for any warranties on any cards, which is quite wrong.
In the current market, you have essentially no way to buy from a manufacturer or primary retailer.
It's not impossible. Central Computer, Silicon Valley's main chain of computer stores, has a buying office in Shenzhen. So a lot of stuff goes directly from factory to them. This avoids the detour through Alibaba to somebody's garage to Amazon.
Now days PS5's and graphics cards are bought up quickly and sold by scalpers. So I am guessing some may not be suspicious at all but assume it is just a scalper and may even expect to pay a mark up on said items.
If 20 years ago a cyberpunk author pitched a story to me about thieves that steal a truckload full of AI-grade processors in order to profit off a digital gold rush I'd say "cool story bro but it doesn't make sense technically"
Yeah, maybe I am missing something, but what is new or interesting about this story? In the first Fast and Furious movie they were hijacking trucks to steal DVD players and TV/VCR combinations to sell on the black/grey market. Isn't this the exact same thing except with newer tech?
This. The boost is undoubtedly tied to organized crime, and organized crime is very aware of mining operations (particularly in Asia). These won’t be showing up on eBay. Spot on observation.
Organized entities don’t take a truck unless they have a guaranteed outcome in mind.
This just gives Nvidia an excuse to ship cryptographically signed firmware that checks serial numbers burnt into the card and disables the card remotely.
Make no mistake; they have the capability to ensure that those cards are paperweights. Just look at the nouveau project and how post-Maxwell cards are effectively locked into proprietary drivers via cryptograpgic signature verification of the firmware blob gating access to the power management and reclocking API's.
Well, the real life GPU thieves probably didn’t do a high speed heist by driving cars in formation with the truck. They say the cards were stolen en route, but it’s probably just that they took the truck at a truck stop.
In these cases the driver is generally paid to walk away, play dumb, or some combination of the two. Escalating to violence taking a truck undermines long-term success doing the same, just like modern piracy somewhat forced shipping lines to enhance security, thereby making piracy harder.
Organized crime in the US figured out a long time ago that hurting a driver generally leads to the collapse of the whole operation and indictments. Ask any trucker how often they’re approached.
The whole romantic scene of a hijacking or theft is plausable. But I also have my money on inside jobs. I knew a truck driver who was a thief. One story:
PS2 is released. He goes to the Bestbuy warehouse to pickup a skid of 20 PS2's to deliver to a Bestbuy. They seal the trailer BUT the supervisor at the warehouse was busy so he hands the seal to my friend to put on the trailer. My friend slips it on and makes it look like he snapped it together but didn't. Warehouse guy sees the "sealed" trailer and signs the paperwork. 8 of those 20 PS2's didn't make it to Bestbuy. He unloaded them with the help of his wife and then simply snapped the seal on. The store manager accused him of the theft since it was a local point to point delivery and inspected the trailer for holes or signs of theft but found nothing. He shrugged and said well your guy signed for this count and sealed the trailer so not my problem.
He also told me the owner of the trucking company used the warehouse as his own personal shopping mall. Turns out the whole trucking company, drivers, warehouse workers, management, owner, all of em, were stealing. And yes, they eventually got caught. But it happens all the time.
About 23(?) years ago, just after the 2(3?) chip factories in Taiwan burned down, there were Vietnamese and Chinese gangs in San Jose / Milpitas robbing stores/warehouses of ram and pentium chips, which were in very high demand.
"More than 400 Silicon Valley businesses had been robbed by chip thieves in the last 18 months. The businesses range from giants like Sun Microsystems to small companies of 100 employees. The apparent record for a heist was $9.9 million worth of computer parts stolen from Centon Electronics in Irvine, Calif., in May."
CPUs, and unsoldered GPUs are the most smuggled item into China, bigger than gold, cash, booze, and other valuables.
I think deficit MCUs are now joining this list. China similarly sees mass break-ins into warehouses of component distributor companies now. Some MCUs fetched up to $100 bucks from their original <$1 price at the peak of the shortage.
My colleague's theory was they were likely going to the oil and gas exploration modelling or nuclear research for middle-eastern states that couldn't get state-of-the-art gear.
I remember something similar happening at "AboveSecure", Abovenet's silly "super secure" vaulted datacenter in that downtown San Jose building that used to be the massive sports bar. The thing there was storage though, like 2 or 3 racks of EMC jbods. A datacenter tech thought they were legit and helped them get the kit on the truck.
If I would buy a card on eBay for example, I paid for it, install it and during registration I learn it is stolen, am I just basically f-ed? I mean, will anyone reimburse me the money I paid for it?
I would assume EVGA won't (since it was stolen from them), police won't, seller won't, eBay will say that it is between me and the seller.
eBay's terms should cover you here. You go through the same sort of procedure as "I didn't get what I was promised" for the sale and you should get the money back.
This is fine as long as you realise during the initial window (30 days?). I bought a cellphone a few years ago in the UK and 3 months after buying it it just stopped working. I spoke to my network and they told me that the IMEI had been listed as stolen. eBay basically said "it's been too long, nothing we can do".
I don't think they ban you for chargebacks, similar to how they don't ban you for PayPal claims (which I've used several times), unless there is an unusual amount of them or other such circumstances.
They just deduct it from the seller (along with a dispute fee, depending on circumstances).
In this case you should be able to issue a chargeback by showing that it's stolen goods and the credit card company will try to get its money back from the merchant.
Well, yes, you should instead do a dispute through eBay. But "I bought stolen property on your platform" is exactly the kind of problem that they have policies for and for which they will reinburse you.
Yes, if you open a dispute through eBay. Not if the first thing you do is initiate a chargeback with your CC provider. Chargeback is supposed to be done _after_ you've reasonably exhausted your options with the merchant.
At least here in UK you can issue a chargeback on a debit card just the same. Call your bank, tell them what happened, they will reverse the transaction. Have done that in the past, credit card not required.
You should ask for the original receipt when buying. Otherwise I would assume it's like with any stolen goods like bikes, you'll get no compensation/lose the product unless the seller can be reached and held responsible.
You can act innocent and make an insurance claim or do a chargeback or call EVGA that you are a third party to this crime, but that's kind of picking which big guys to fuck up microscopically. Everyone is kind of fucked once the theft had been committed. Value is destroyed, not merely moved.
This is preventable by the totalitarian combo of serial numbering + point of sales reporting + hardware root of trust + account registration + mandatory activation, though it is also an almost immediate danger against an free and open society.
I still catch "EGA" when I read it occasionally, even with lots of time with EVGA as a brand.
I think it has more to do with impact and experience than how recent something is.
Example: I spent a lot of time reading the phrases 'EGA' or 'VGA' in my life, much more so than I ever dealt with the brand 'EVGA'. When my eyes cruise over those letters together, something in my head always trips the concept 'EGA/VGA' first, even though I have known for years and year that EVGA is a brand and that EGA/VGA are now obsolete phrases.
I don't know why that is , and maybe that's exactly the concept that parent was trying to get across : when you get older your brain tends to keep certain biases that were built during an earlier (now obsolete) era, even when they serve no real good purpose anymore -- likely because that concept was so exercised mentally at an earlier time.
Now, if I were an actuary or accountant or business person working for EVGA and I had to write their name out 100+ times daily, i'd probably be singing a different tune.
Honestly I’m surprised that they cant just be remotely disabled. I’m not advocating for this feature by the way. I’m just surprised that it’s not a thing.
How would it be a thing? You don't even need a network card, much less a network connection, to use a GPU. I guess they could manufacture these in a way that requires online activation of the firmware, but that would be a big step in the wrong direction of consumer rights.
Each and every second-hand buyer in the world would block nvidia in the firewall after that. You know you need to tighten the screws when your GPU is trying to phone home.
In that case, it can easily be swapped around: card won't run unless it can reach an online endpoint.
E.g. to fetch some binary blob that must be loaded in firmware. Only handed out and signed when requester is known to be legit.
Not saying I'd like this, or that I endorse this, though.
And yet I would bet they already do phone home and send shittons of information.
But to use that to self destroy if stoken or the like would likely generate way too much negative PR to nvidia and bring unwanted attention, so they wont.
I know for a fact my drivers do not phone home. The only GPU driver I've used for years is the one that comes in the linux kernel. It's open source, I haven't read all the code, but I know I could and I know the developers wouldn't be phoning home.
I'd bet a large number of linux users are in this situation since nouveau (nvidia), intel, and amdgpu drivers all exist in the linux kernel and work well.
I'd also bet that whoever buys this type of nuclear-powered graphics card does not plan to use a driver that will not allow 3D gaming or bitcoin mining.
Consumer rights haven't taken a loss because there is no consumer and no rights. Users have no right to use stolen property. The have rights when they legitimately acquire the product.
Even if its changed hands, its still illegal to purchase stolen property and the police will just take it from you without compensating you.
You never "really owned" a TV because they were never open source. If the feature never activates, it never affects the user in any way and it may as well not exist. If it does activate wrongly, you have consumer law and protections to get your money back.
I'd argue that serial number checks would be the company protecting it's property. It would be far better if the company could rely on the state to protect its property.
I also really don't see activation lock as consumer rights taking a loss, thieves aren't consumers. Being able to brick hardware that thieves steal is a consumer protection. If EVGA started to block resale, that would be a completely different story, but I was happy to activation lock my stolen iPhone. Apple lets you resell, but if you steal a truck load of iPhones I doubt they would activate.
I mean doesn't Microsoft already phone home a unique GUID identifying the hardware in your computer that it ties Windows key activations to? And since Microsoft owns Canonical, probably in Ubuntu as well (on the defaults)?
Easy. Gate critical API calls implemented in the hardware behind cryptographic signature verification. You sign the firmware using your private manufacturer's key. You validate with a public key burnt into the Silicon.
They apply the same type of gatekeeping to power management and reclocking in post-Maxwell GPU architectures. This is why the nouveau driver hasn't been able to maintain parity with the proprietary driver.
I can't quite remember the search engine contortions I did to home in on it the first time, but I think "Falcon high-security power-management reclocking firmware signature verification Maxwell 970 GPU driver" should get you in the right direction.
Basically, Nvidia cryptographically signs the firmware blob (digest), and I think uses asymmetric crypto implemented through a public key embedded in the silicon that can decrypt the firmware signature shipped with the driver for comparison by the Falcon microprocessor to gate access to what firmware code can gain access to the power management/reclocking API's that make modern gfx cards useful. I was doing some research on it at one point between jobs, but it's been a while. Long story short, if Nvidia doesn't bless your firmware, you can't get full use out of your card. Anti-competitive/anti-user as all hell, no network connection required, and you can technically still "use it" at a near useless base clock rate.
This practice is part of why there was all that controversy around that hash-rate limiter added to 3060/70 GPU firmware?
A signed development version of the driver without the hash-rate limiter was leaked, meaning all the miners just used that as their driver to get full performance cryptocurrency mining on the cheaper cards.
This is why, God as my witness, I will do everything in my power to never support Nvidia as a company ever again, and I have become increasingly vigilant against other actors trying to sneakily push cryptography based anti-features elsewhere.
I was never interested in hardware at this level of gory detail before, but now that I've seen it it can't be unseen; and I must protect open computing for those who come after me.
It could be done if nvidia cooperated. It's basically impossible to use a nvidia gpu without the driver software which _is_ networked. Nvidia already added malware to their drivers before to stop mining so blocking some stolen cards would not be out of the question.
Nvidia drivers work just fine with no networking, I've used them so frequently.
The anti-mining technique that Nvidia uses depends on firmware modifications as well. Thus the firmware of these stolen GPUs must already support such a banlist.
You could in theory keep it fully offline but at some point you are likely to accidentally allow it network access or want to update the driver and if that happens, the card is bricked. It also makes the cards completely worthless on the second hand market.
They absolutely can though. The driver has the ability to connect to the internet and the company has shown that limiting hardware via software is something they do.
How about this... some of these will probably be sold to unwitting gamers, right? So push a driver update with the hot serial numbers and have it pop up a window saying "tell us who sold you this GPU and not only will we let you keep the card, but we'll even throw in a free year of GeForce now" (EVGA can foot the bill). Then track down the thieves, done.
> some of these will probably be sold to unwitting games, right?
Probably not, they’re more likely to get used for mining by someone who knows they’re stolen. The thieves already know that selling them is extremely risky. Which is why tracking from the driver is an interesting idea, but also probably won’t work. But then again, we’re only speculating, so maybe it’d work!
"push a driver update with the hot serial numbers and have it pop up a window"
Sure that runs foul of computer misuse act, millioms od people were downloading a driver, and you used it to get admin rights and take control of their computer, and 99.9% of them have no stolen GPU.
It's like if you broke into and searched every house in London to find a batch of srolen iPhones, you aren't allowed to do that
Let's ignore the privacy and consumer rights implications of what you're proposing for a second. Is the cost of adding remote tracking and disabling capability to every EVGA video card worth it? How does that impact their ORM customers knowing that they're now on the hook for any security failure EVGA has? They could introduce a vulnerability far worse than anything they prevent. Any hacker that compromises EVGA's remote kill switch keys could now hijack their entire user base.
So EVGA loses a truckload of hardware in a theft in an event so rare that the fact that it happens makes the front page of hackernews. Unless this starts to be a pattern, it makes far more sense for them to file an insurance claim and write off the loss than to try a risky technical solution - which might not even work, given that hackers are really good at bypassing DRM solutions anyway.
Auto-updating software and drivers have been around for ages by now, quite often with pretty lousy security. A lot of companies even require you to register your hardware to use all features - NVidia, for example, but AFAIK Razer does, too. Oculus comes to mind as well. Wacom even tracks you from within their driver [0] and I won't even go into the insanity that AV software does.
They might theoretically be on the hook for damages they introduce, but in reality, there's already a ton of services running on every device that can compromise you if the infrastructure behind it is hacked. EVGA wouldn't even be a worthwhile target.
And, as mentioned above, NVidia already has the necessary infrastructure in place. So the effective cost for doing this would be close to zero.
> which might not even work, given that hackers are really good at bypassing DRM solutions anyway.
Hackers are, yes. But the price you fetch for a card will go down massively if you need high technical skills to run it.
Would you purchase an Evga card if you knew they could disable it remotely? How about if you’re an OEM and you’re bundling video cards, would you risk the hit to your brand?
From the pov of the end user this is an anti feature. It makes the product worse.
I don't disagree that this is an anti-feature. My point is, companies get away with far worse and people probably wouldn't stop buying EVGA because of it. In fact, they obviously don't, as the NVidia driver already has that capability. Windows does, too.
So the answer to
> How about if you’re an OEM and you’re bundling video cards, would you risk the hit to your brand?
is clearly yes, as has been shown in the last years. Hell, we have cars that can be disabled remotely. Nearly nobody cares about about them creating a capability you could reasonably assume they already had. You and I might, but most consumers care about FPS - and getting a card at all - much more.
Thinking about it a bit, there are physical solutions EVGA/NVidia can take that don't rely on introducing DRM components into the software. One that comes to mind would be stamping a red embossed serial number into the plastic around the entire chassis around the card. It wouldn't look very nice but it would be nearly impossible to remove and sanding it down would look extremely obvious that it was a stolen card in any product listings.
Is it dumb? Many manufacturers already do this. Samsung had a case recently where they bricked all of the stolen smart TVs. Apple would do this as well. Basically any technology product company has or is considering having the ability to brick stolen devices.
And I'm not against this either. The law can provide a strong set of rights for actual owners, but if your product is stolen, you have no rights over it.
For laptops and smartphones, sure being stolen a common risk, and that kind of functionality grants the end-user some protection, and perhaps a chance to recover the good.
For TVs and motherboards, GPUs, printers, etc it's basically superfluous DRM that typically only serves the manufacturer.
Overall Smart TVs have been the polar opposite of user-respecting technology.
Of course anti theft serves the manufacturer. And I think that is ok. If you have a stolen product, you have 0 rights to use or posses that product.
Once you purchase the product legitimately, you now have legal protection so that the OEM may not lock you out. Products should respect the owner. Stolen products are still owned by the OEM and not the person physically holding the product.
Almost appropriate. 99.99% of houses are never robbed and yet everybody locks them. Of course we can leave our doors unlocked and that's the difference: choice. We should be able to turn off DRM. I can accept that without DRM I can't watch that streaming service (even if there are many ways to circumvent and/or to prove a purchase) but not to use a product for my own sake (eg: run my software on it.)
Without going to entirely FOSS TV firmware, I'm not sure how this matters at all. It will never trigger for legitimate buyers and if it ever does somehow, you call the company. If they do not cooperate, you take it up with your consumer protection agency and they fine the company for you.
But the reality is that it never will activate and you wont ever know about it so it can't possibly impact your life and there are appropriate safe guards against misuse. It's about as useful as asking why you are forced to use a specific brand of flash chip on the image processing board.
Ebay can definitely (as in feasible) block or delete listings for stolen goods based on serial numbers. Not sure if they do that but I think they do this for bikes?
If they disabled mining on all GPUs and hardware not intended for that purpose, video card prices would return to normal in a month.
Unfortunately it's too late; we just entered the era in which every appliance consumes less power, yet there is an unprecedented demand for energy, and it grows steadily. What will happen when everyone on the planet will want their own mining machine on 24/7?
"They" == "those who can do that", that is, developers under their employers direction.
Not every sentence containing "they" is necessarily a flat earth like conspiracy.
Intent definitely matters in this case. Like, if these end up on Amazon or eBay and you buy one at a market rate you are pretty safe. If you saw a “too good to be true deal” and proceeded, it gets murkier.
Setting up a mining farm with hundreds of free stolen GPUs isn't easy or cheap at all. You still have to find power and cooling and buy a bunch of motherboards, power supplies, networking, shelves, etc.
(Likewise I suspect the weed is the cheapest part of a grow operation.)
That's not relevant, though. The question is whether "there's a safe and easy way to launder expensive hardware into currency". The fact that it's expensive now doesn't conflict with the fact that it could counterfactually be even more expensive.
North America is literally the best market for this, we have the most robust and efficient mining market and supply routes. One level of efficiency is that large scale mining operations allow for space leases and profit sharing at their data centers. If you wanted to fire off a message saying “I have a bunch of GPUs” they will give you a quote about their terms.
Several of these companies are publicly traded its really not that hard to get done.
Once you move past the Internet forums debating the existence of this market, try actually research this market its very fast paced and robust.
I mean you would just say they’re from a Kazakhstan or Chinese operation looking for a new home
Its not distinguishable, even for liability purposes and nobody cares, the battle for network control and resource share is far bigger than the worrying about this. I doubt people are going to try to register these gpus and be like “ruh roh this one didnt register”
You wouldn’t need to colocate this since bandwidth isn’t a big issue with mining. Power is a bigger issue since most home circuits can’t support maybe more than 3-4 high power workstations.
Seeds are cheap (~$10 USD/ea), whole ready to harvest plants are not (and hard-ish to estimate). If you grow inside the expensive part is the electricity. Indoor and outdoor both spend lots on labour for harvest/cure/trim processes (variable cost, hourly). Expensive equipment are things like CO2 extractors $XXX,XXX USD. So yea, seeds cheap, loads of other higher cost items to get ~$10/g flower on the shelf at your favourite retailer
Weed ops don't grow plants from seeds fwiw, unless they are trying to discover the next new varietal, as each seed is different from the next. Quality control at scale is accomplished using clones.
It'd be more efficient to just fence the cards. There are so many communities of flippers / eager buyers out there that it would take minutes to move an entire truckload of 30 series GPUs to buyers of all types.
Just like with setting up a weed farm. The cops need to follow spikes in power consumption that are out of the ordinary and they'll find you. However, growing weed may be illegal in most places, mining is not yet.
Cultivation of Cannabis Sativa with low THC is legal in 46 US states afaik with the 2018 farm bill. So you can say growing weed is legal in most places.
Right, except that me, and a large chunk of the world population, don't live in the US, so I was trying to draw a conclusion about the general global status on this.
The cards are what's expensive. PSUs are getting more expensive but by far the cards are the toughest thing to get. Just getting serviceable motherboards/CPUs/RAM is just about as easy now as it has always been.
Most multi-GPU farms run like 4-6 GPUs off a single machine. Although some specialized "BTC" motherboards have whacky scalper prices it's not hard to find other motherboards with OK multi-GPU support. You do not need a 'gamer' high performance motherboard to mine effectively. The only thing that really matters is being able to run as many GPUs as it's supposed to without bluescreening.
The power requirements are also not as high as you would expect from the typical power consumption of 30 series cards because it's overall more efficient to mine on much lower overall power consumption than you would get from a gaming workload. Mining just puts stress on different parts of the GPU than gaming and requires less power than a full throttle gaming workload. So you are able to run many more 3080s or what have you on a smaller PSU than you would be able to if you were using those 3080s overclocked and with a high power limit on gaming workloads. You just do not get that much extra hashpower if you go past certain levels of power consumption: it's easier / more efficient to just add another card.
I make about $10-15 a day from mining with my RTX 3090, while my electricity costs are around $2 a day from mining. That's still very much a profitable endevour.
My video card has completely paid for itself almost double what I initially paid for it ($2K in cash from a seller on craigslist, back in January).
I'm using NiceHash on Windows, since it automatically switches between mining the most profitable cryptos. It always seems to just mine Ethereum for the most part though.
The reason I mine this way (instead of with ASICs or dedicated hardware) is because this is all equipment that I would have bought anyways for gaming and/or programming work. I do a lot of gaming in 4K at 120 fps, and the RTX 3090 is pretty much the only video card that can actually pull that off.
Being able to toggle the gaming rig into mining mode whenever I'm not actively using it means that the equipment pays for itself. It's a lot easier to justify spending $6,000 on a gaming rig when that same gaming rig earns you over $100 a month worth of passive income!
Electricity isn’t expensive everywhere.
Let’s say you want to mine ETH. 3090 can do 125 MH/s. At peak load they consume about 360 watts. If you’re paying $.12/KWh (a little higher than national average) you’re making $276/day.
The easiest way is always to sell for cash at a lower price than market. Criminals are evil geniuses only in movies and complex plans have many more ways to fail than simple ones.
A variety of reasons. Some think that crypto is a socially pernicious bubble that’ll get people hurt. Others still have to deal with the ransomware attacks that are only viable with crypto. Most of us are pissed off that crypto comes along and keeps ruining the price of hardware we want to buy. The environmentally minded are angry about the energy usage. A lot of us are sick and tired of the naked scamming and the dumb ideas that get floated on the subject.
> I feel that if most HNers would just build a crypto business (DeFi, arbitrage, NFTs, tokenomics, etc.), they'd basically be overnight millionaires.
Obviously not. That’s just not how anything around money works. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. Just because someone got rich off a thing doesn’t mean everyone will; after all some people got rich in pyramid schemes too, doesn’t make it a good idea.
Even when there is legitimately easy money to be made, the rush of people trying to exploit the opportunity usually drives the per person profits down to $0. If someone claims that there are easy, guaranteed millions to be made, your alarm bells should be going off.
Furthermore, even this tiny whiff of “you’re just jealous you didn’t make millions flipping NFTs” is an ugly look.
Decades later, we’re still hearing “crypto is a bubble.” I’m still waiting for that to be true.
I’m sorry there’s demand for popular hardware. That’s how markets work.
Green dot / prepaid gift cards used to be (and still are) accepted as payment for many of these scams. This isn’t a crypto problem.
The environmental claims are all FUD. None of them hold up to the slightest scrutiny.
Getting scammed sucks, but that’s a social problem, not a crypto problem.
Decades later and I’m still waiting for a use case for crypto. I’ve yet to see a legal use case other than “number go up”. If something has no actual use case and still continues to rise in price, then that seems like a bubble to me.
> The environmental claims are all FUD.
This is hilariously unpersuasive. Not even a hint of an argument, just “please ignore the TWh behind the curtain”.
It’ll be great if they do that, but I’m not gonna hold my breath.
Meanwhile Etherium seems extremely bubbly to me too. At first smart contracts was the only thing that made any sense to me (bitcoin struck me as goldbug nonsense early on), but over the years it seems like it’s mostly used for gambling and making tokens. Nothing that couldn’t be done more efficiently and conveniently off the chain, especially since the oracle problem always looms large over any given hypothetical use case.
At least if they go to POS it’ll be less wasteful.
> Decades later, we're still hearing "crypto is a bubble." I'm still waiting for that to be true.
Decades? With an S? It's barely been 10 years since Bitcoin's public release and that's ignoring the fact that it wasn't particularly popular (and nowhere near as valuable) for another couple of years. Other cryptocurrencies wouldn't come into their own for another couple of years after Bitcoin, either.
For reference, the dot-com bubble began roughly in 1995 and had popped by 2003. Crypto, especially with the fact that it picked up in value an incredible amount in 2020, is a prime candidate for being a bubble.
> I'm sorry there's demand for popular hardware. That's how markets work.
And the actual demand is being exacerbated by the somewhat artificial demand crypto creates. It also likely means that if crypto is a bubble and it pops, there's going to be a glut of pre-owned crypto-abused graphics cards flooding the market. All of this is definitely a knock-on effect of cryptocurrencies booming.
> The environmental claims are all FUD. None of them hold up to the slightest scrutiny.
Would you like to back this claim up with anything? The way proof-of-work crypto works demands computation, which demands power. Imagine if somebody did take this entire pallet of GPUs and start mining cryptocurrency with it; that'd be a pretty good amount of power consumption. Tack on the fact that there are multiple cryptocurrencies and a lot more than just a trailer full of GPUs working on mining them around the world, plus the fact that those GPUs are unlikely to be as efficient as the latest, and you've got a lot of power consumption.
Obviously, I'm not doing the math here, but just thinking about the (apparently hypothetical) power consumption of something like Etherium or Bitcoin is enough to raise red flags in my mind.
It's wild. HN of a decade ago was very much in favor of anything cypherpunk or otherwise wrestling control away of the Internet away from authorities and corporations. I guess those people "grew up"?
It's cool to take power from authorities and corporations.
It's uncool to give power to those who already have it.
Crypto just takes power from banks, it gives it to other powerful groups and corporations. Due to the fact that you still need significant investments to keep it running, it's not actually any more democratic.
During 2016 and 2017 I worked for a very large principle trading firm. We traded crypto currencies a lot because one of the higher up traders was a true believer. I always giggled when people claimed with a straight face that crypto would destroy Wall Street; big financial firms were and still are all over crypto because they have the tools and money to handle such things.
Any idea that crypto would hurt traditional financial instituons (aside from maybe savings banks, which are generally the least noxious financial institutions around) was pure fantasy
How do you factor DeFi into this? Major existing players may continue to be so in such an ecosystem, but they don't have total control of it and retail gets to play too.
The more apt comparison is probably gambling or the financial sector making money from speculation on obscure financial instruments and my guess would be people on HN are negative about it for the same reason most people in general are negative about these things. It doesn't have anything to do with innovation, it's just meta-gaming obscure markets so the nouveau riche can buy themselves sportscars.
I mean you said it yourself, not particularly bright people get filthy rich, why would actually bright people think that's cool
A lot of the crypto world is "morally dubious", let's say. To play in many of those sectors you mention you must be ready to live in very grey areas of the law, or even right outside of it.
> Imagine being able to steal a printing press that makes bills that can't be linked back to a specific press, that's what they did
I don't know if you understand how crypto mining works, the electricy expense, the infrastructure expense, the actual expertise in setting up geth/mining nodes, etc.
What I don't understand is why people who claim they know these things are acting like you can't make money off a free Ampere card.
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Like 99% of mining is initial capital, everyone knows that. GPUs alone don't make a farm but you realize the thieves are also motivated to not go to literal prison?
Figure that a fence for stolen goods with trackable serials is already taking a substantial cut if they try to sell.
Mining in an inefficient hacked together "farm" doesn't seem so crappy by comparison suddenly.
It's not like anyone is saying they have to do that, but it's a very unique property of what they stole
But plenty of folks here work for [insert-evil-mega-corp] which has all kinds of "global downsides". Unless you're a hermit (or Stallman), this argument won't really work. Crypto's here to stay whether you like it or not.
These GPUs will be resold without a doubt. Moving pallets of GPUs and setting up a mining operation somewhere will be quickly noticed. Much better to sell these at markup on Craigslist.
> I’m sure they will just end up on Craigslist though
Why so sure? This doesn't look like a crime of opportunity - one has to know the truck will contain graphics cards, and that such cards are valuable in today's market. It doesn't say how many cards were stolen, "a shipment" could be the whole truck - and robbing a truck is no joke. If there is some organization behind the heist, I would expect them to be sent directly to a lined-up buyer that has a use for them - possibly an unscrupolous miner, possibly not in the country. At what price-point will it cost less to hire a bunch of goons than to pay RRP...?
If thieves selected trucks at random they would more likely get toilet paper than graphics cards. This could be just circumstance but more likely at least some targeting.
Truck thefts are tipped off by workers in the logistics chain that have access to the bill of lading.
It isn't particularly sophisticated or uncommon. They look at the shipping paperwork and see "Sony", "EVGA", "Nike", etc. and text the container number to their friends.
Normally insurance deals with this and the public never hears about it. This is extremely odd to issue a public announcement.
Where else could you efficiently move product like this? I mean you can move it on amazon eBay etc but the serial Numbers would pop up on registration. Perhaps it’s not a big enough crime that police will investigate but if it is it would be too hot
PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that on October 29, 2021, a shipment of EVGA GeForce RTX 30-Series Graphics Cards was stolen from a truck en route from San Francisco to our Southern California distribution center.
These graphics cards are in high demand and each has an estimated retail value starting at $329.99 up to $1959.99 MSRP.
PLEASE TAKE FURTHER NOTICE that under state and Federal law:
It is a criminal and civil offense to “buy or receive” property that has been stolen. Cal. Penal Code section 496(a).
It is also a criminal and civil offense to “conceal, sell, withhold, or aid in concealing selling or withholding” any such property.
PLEASE TAKE FURTHER notice that:
If you are able to successfully register your product and see it under My Products, then your product is NOT affected by this notice, you can also check the serial number at the EVGA Warranty Check page to see if it is affected.
EVGA will NOT REGISTER or HONOR ANY WARRANTY or UPGRADE claims on these products.
If you have or receive any information relating to these products, please share that with us at stopRTX30theft@evga.com.
> It is a criminal and civil offense to “buy or receive” property that has been stolen.
Just the other day there was a whole article on here about a guy who bought a house from a scammer and ended up being allowed to keep it because he bought it legally and was under the impression the scammer was the real owner. Nice of EVGA to put this warning out but it's not quite as simple as they make it out to be here, possession being 9/10ths of the law and all that. A person buying one of these at retail prices from a store would have no way of knowing that it was stolen, and someone buying one second hand at a reasonable price for the second hand item would likely also not be aware of its history. Of course buyers need to make sure that what they are buying is legit but that burden is not exhaustive, you don't have make more than a reasonable effort.
This seems like a nasty move from EVGA to shift the downside onto whoever ends up unknowingly buying these cards on eBay. It’s weird, they normally seem like a company with a decent customer focus, and it’s not like this move is going to make any difference to their loss from the shipment, it just screws customers.
Honestly I disagree with this. They are refusing to honour warranty claims on the stolen cards, which given the situation is totally fair.
The alternative for them is exacerbating the financial losses caused by the theft by offering free repairs/replacements on a product that they already haven’t generated any revenue on.
How could a customer tell before buying from EBay though? No sellers going to let you try to register the serial so the end customer would get screwed.
That makes it _more_ rather than less risky to buy from random people on eBay because they know that you're desperate, allowing them to charge more and figure someone will buy without doing too much diligence about the seller.
Think about how people have received defective parts, or even things reflashed to list a different model. When the market is tight like this, those abuses become that much more tempting.
Yes, that's the point — this thread was in response to someone acting like it's unfair for a company to decline warranty coverage for a stolen product. That seems perfectly reasonable to me: anyone buying stuff on a site like eBay needs to factor authenticity into their buying decisions.
(Here I'm reminded of a certain office manager in the 90s who “saved” a fortune on Microsoft licenses until it turned out that the floppies they got from some guy at a swap market had a virus & the resulting downtime cost them more than the savings.)
It is unfair though - a warranty covers a product being free from defects in materials and workmanship. The product being stolen happened _after_ it's manufacture, which is the thing that is actually being guaranteed.
What would be fair is a company refusing to repair/replace a counterfeit product, but (presumably, given the response) the stolen cards are genuine articles. Articles that people will inevitably purchase at around 150-300% MSRP in the current market. This is just EVGA leaving ardent supporters of the brand, enthusiasts willing to pay many multiples of what the product is worth, out to dry.
This concern should be purely between EVGA, the courier, their respective insurance agents, and local law enforcement. I'm honestly amazed it's even being mentioned by the company on a public forum.
You’re leaving out some key factors to think about: they aren’t going to take responsibility for problems caused by mistreatment while the thieves are moving it around (heat or vibration can take time to manifest), or the possibility of something being modified before the buyer gets it. A common scam in many industries is someone taking legitimate packaging and using it to sell counterfeit or returned/failed products at full price.
This is EVGA saying they don’t want their reputation and finances on the line for any of those things which can happen outside of their control, which seems reasonable.
More importantly, they’re also sending a message to potential thieves that this is not a good thing to repeat. Publicly warning buyers and preventing those cards from being treated as equally valuable as the legitimate ones threatens the profitability of stealing them. Given the high prices in the market currently, that seems like a good message.
Actually you can. EVGA has a step-up program that allows you to buy just about any EVGA graphics card, register it, and pick the new better card you want when it's available. I bought a 2070 about a year ago and just got an email today that my 3080 is in the mail. I had to jump through a few hoops, but nothing onerous. And I had to pay the difference in price, but it was the only way I could come up with to get a registered high-end card. As far as I know EVGA is the only company that offers this, and it's the reason I went with them instead of another.
Serial numbers should come in two parts! A public portion and a private portion.
You can use the public portion to confirm the GPU isn’t stolen, look up its warranty policy, etc. The extra private portion is need to actually register and claim ownership.
You don't need to register it. You can just do a warranty check. Asking for a serial number is probably a good idea at this point, considering the counterfeit market.
Naive question: did EVGA actually suffer any financial losses from this? If I was shipping millions of dollars of product, I wouldn't let it out of my sight without some sort of insurance.
Not naive. I work for a logistics company and every shipment is insured. Standard amount of cargo insurance is $100k for a full truckload but that goes up for more valuable items. So the question of losses boils down to the amount of insurance on the shipment and also of course the length of time required to process a claim…it could take a long time to get the cash.
This entire post seems pretty unnecessary. Not honoring warranty for products bought from unauthorized retailers is pretty standard in the industry. People buying graphics cards from the back of someone's truck or an eBay scalper are well aware of that. And are they implying they will take legal action if you buy one of these cards? Not like they weren't insured anyways.
> Not honoring warranty for products bought from unauthorized retailers is pretty standard in the industry.
USA is a free market. Everyone is authorized all the time to sell every safe product. The term "authorized reseller" is a linguistic manipulation which benefits manufacturers at the expense of everyone else in society.
Warranty goes with the product until it is used. Companies cannot refuse to honor a warranty because they dislike the person who sold it to you.
Because eVGA did not sell the stolen cards, business laws do not apply to eVGA's dealings with holders of the cards. Therefore eVGA does not have to honor any warranty that would have applied to the cards if eVGA had sold them (to anyone).
Yes, but that is because those states have passed laws specifically prohibiting automakers from directly selling to customers. Those laws were enacted long ago to protect auto dealers (as opposed to some sort of anti-Tesla maneuver). Such laws do not exist for most other goods.
The post isn’t intended to harm unwitting buyers. The post is sending a message to the thieves, before they try to sell the cards. Should they try anyway, educating buyers to watch out for stolen goods is a great idea that will make the cards harder to sell if it works.
Uhh - that's pretty normal. If I buy my full frame Nikon off craigslist - no warrenty comes with this.
"nasty move".
Only on HN would this even be an issue. Most places, if you don't buy from an authorized dealer - no warranty. My HVAC system was the same way. If you bought grey market / off market - no equipment warranty.
That's a very weird perspective. I bought my monitor, camera, lenses, etc all second hand, and obviously I've got warranty nontheless. Manufacturer Warranty is unaffected by resale, no matter the reseller. And if the seller is a commercial reseller, I get 12 months of Retailer Warranty on top, too. (I love in the EU).
The concept that warranty would suddenly be void due to "unauthorized" resellers or retailers is very weird.
They are tackling the demand side of what could become a very lucrative business for thieves. If people are scared away from buying “dodgy back of the van” GPUs then thieves have no incentive to steal them.
Except it's not the back of a van, it's places like eBay, just about the only places you can find cards, including that majority that are not stolen. I've read through enough reasoning here that I'm not sure what the right answer is-- from a business and customer-friendly standpoint. But I think there's more gray are involved than with items that are readily available through normal retail channels.
Then again, these stolen cards may be earmarked for crypto mining operations by organized crime, and then the issue warranties to those who knowingly use stolen goods is much less grey.
I think they're trying to dissuade anyone from purchasing the cards from third parties to disincentivize future theft. They're a very appealing item to steal right now... small, hard to get, expensive, no real security in the supply chain (unlike trying to steal money or gold).
Assuming customers notice this quickly after buying (e.g. by trying to register their card within some short deadline, not sure what the policies are), they should be covered by buyer protection.
Right, that's kinda difficult to do when you don't yet have the GPU in your possession. Why don't they post a list of serials of the stolen cards? I assume every shipment contains a list of the serial#s of the devices in the respective shipment?
You ask seller to confirm the card is not stolen. If the seller lies to you, you get a refund, eBay will side with buyer if seller lied via official communications.
If you know about the theft and specifically don’t ask, you are knowingly receive stolen property and deserve whatever penalty EVGA does.
(This leaves the question of people who just buy stuff on eBay and have no idea about this news story. It would be nice if marketplaces could show warnings next to certain classes of items, but I am not holding my breath on this)
> You ask seller to confirm the card is not stolen. If the seller lies to you
Do the platforms really expect you to ask the seller first? "Not stolen" seems to be kind of implied when buying products, like "not defective", "not smashed into small pieces", or "not actually a box of rocks".
I don’t think you have to ask the seller to confirm goods aren’t stolen to be protected under eBay’s policies. Listing stolen goods is a violation of eBay’s policies to begin with. eBay says that following their policies is one of their criteria for a seller meeting their obligations under the buyer protection.
If I were EVGA, I'd contact eBay to flag all sales of the stolen GPU models, and that providing the serial number is required for the listing to be accepted.
Because Bitcoin is mined on ASICs. It's not a graphics card, instead a single chip optimized for one function only: mining (by generating hashes).
GPU based mining is mostly done to mine Ether. Ether will switch to Proof of Stake somewhere in the next 1-2 years, after which the competition between gamers and miners for GPUs will end.
That's the optimistic outcome, the pessimistic outcome is the miners will fork "eth-classic" and keep going. It's up to the reader to decide which is most likely, or both.
Or they will move to some other coin that is rising in popularity and doesn't have GPU resistance built in. The latter is something that feels like a negative these days if you want a lot of buzz about some new crypto tokens...
You could mine bitcoin on them, but it would be so inefficient compared to ASICs which can hash many magnitudes faster, you would have an astronomically small chance of mining a block.
They almost certainly do. However this is a notice for consumers so they know that if suspiciously large numbers of EVGA GFX cards show up on Craigslist that maybe you should ask for serial to verify warranty status before you buy.
The possible cases I can see are: the insurance prices are reasonably fair (roughly equal to risk percent times insured value, plus some profit buffer), or they're significantly higher or lower than that "fair" amount. Given that, I have trouble seeing a case where the rational action is insuring part of the value. If the cost is significantly higher than the risk-adjusted value, then it wouldn't make sense to insure at all, and if it's roughly equal or significantly lower then it would make sense to insure as much as possible.
It's no different to choosing your level of cover on life insurance or your level of excess on car insurance. Different companies and circumstances will have different risk profiles and will therefore require different levels of insurance.
I'm not sure any of those are the same though. Everyone dies exactly once, and you can plausibly never need to invoke your car insurance, but a business shipping large amounts of good will surely incur some stochastic but average-able level of loss.
EVGA's warranty explicitly grants warranty transfer to second owners with proof of the transaction. Denying this for stolen cards isn't very customer friendly when the vast majority of cards are (legally) hoarded and sold by scalpers to customers who have no way of knowing it's stolen.
Especially considering that EVGA or whoever owned the cards when they were shipped will undoubtedly be insured and get paid on the cards regardless.
I've mentioned the same things before but their vocal customers are price sensitive gamers, otakus and teenagers who require a boogeyman for their place in life
The thieves who stole the trailer truck stand to make quite a bit of money.
The internal storage space of a large trailer truck is ~50ft long × ~8ft wide × ~9ft high, give or take.
The box containing each RTX 30xx card is at most ~1ft × ~0.5ft × ~0.5ft, give or take.
Assuming the stolen trailer truck could be packed end-to-end and floor-to-ceiling with cards, there could have been up to (50÷1.0)×(8÷0.5)×(9÷0.5) = 14,400 cards inside the trailer. That's the upper limit on how many cards were stolen.
EVGA RTX 30xx cards retail between $1000 and $3000 each, depending on the model.
Even if I'm off by a factor of 10× on the number of cards, we're talking about a fortune.
Where does it say that they stole a trailer's worth of GPUs? LTL is a thing[1], so it's totally possible that there's only a pallet or two of GPUs on board. If that's true, even a factor of 10 adjustment wouldn't account for your overestimation.
* It is a criminal and civil offense to “buy or receive” property that has been stolen. Cal. Penal Code section 496(a).
* If you are able to successfully register your product and see it under My Products, then your product is NOT affected by this notice, you can also check the serial number at the EVGA Warranty Check page to see if it is affected.
Sounds to me like, if you bought a card in some shop, and you're in good faith, but you check by registering, then you risk turning yourself in for a crime you didn't know you committed, from there, you cannot do anything to amend the situation since you already committed the crime.
> 496.(a) Every person who buys or receives any property that has been stolen or that has been obtained in any manner constituting theft or extortion, knowing the property to be so stolen or obtained, or who conceals, sells, withholds, or aids in concealing, selling, or withholding any property from the owner, knowing the property to be so stolen or obtained
It's a crime to knowingly obtain stolen goods. Otherwise it's not a crime but you will definitely have to return the item and recover your money some other way.
Seems like the person/business/entity whose goods were stolen should have insurance to cover the loss rather than putting the burden on an innocent, unknowing receiver of stolen goods to recover their subsequent loss in some nebulous way.
You can't sell what you don't own, so legally you didn't buy anything.
The alternative would be the state going: you reported a theft, we apprehended the thieves and found your stolen goods. However we can't give them to you, they belong to someone else now. That's absurd for any good that isn't fungible. Imagine losing a family heirloom, your photo collection or a Picasso that way.
As you've done well to compare, the problem you describe arises only when dealing with individuals, but not with the large companies that (I presume) OP implied.
> You can't sell what you don't own, so legally you didn't buy anything.
An exchange of money for an item/product is a purchase.
It might be confiscated by the Police and/or given to the rightful owner.
If you bought a thing and have the bank-/card-statement to prove the amount, you will probably get the money back, but if it was with cash, you technically don't have proof of the amount given when purchasing.
If I lived in the area, I'd definitely cross EVGA off my GPU shopping list having seen that announcement. I truly don't think they thought it through..
(I'm saying that with two EVGA SuperNova P2 1000w PSUs in my household.)
Instead of accusing the buyers who might unknowingly buy these cards, how about cover your losses using insurances? How about calling the police? Maybe paying more to buy a better insurance next time or hiring a government with better funded police or more efficient justice system?
Nvidia would have to approve it, and they might not be too willing to risk headlines of "Nvidia update bricks cards", regardless of the amount of actual units it would actually affect.
Unless you mean EVGA putting a method to brick cards within their own software, such as "EVGA Precision X1" (their overclocking/fan control/rgb lighting tool).
Both are terrible options in my opinion, as the most likely destination for these cards would end up being a mining operation, with most likely little care for keeping slightly outdated drivers if it meant lower hardware costs. Or an unwitting customer, who ends up with a nice brick.
This makes the most sense out of all the arguments, kind of a chain of custody for warranty claims and how they flow from upstream (manufacturers) to downstream (end users I guess). Thanks
What first principles are you using? A warranty only makes sense when money was paid for the product, no? How else could you afford to provide support otherwise?
The strange part is that they're discussing a warranty at all. Legally these are still their cards, if they find out you have one they can demand it back without offering any compensation whatsoever, not just not fix it for you for free.
They can demand all they want. They would need the police to charge you with felony receiving of stolen property, which means the card needs to be valued at over $950 and they have to be able to prove you knew it was stolen.
I've dealt with this plenty of times with stolen employee laptops that get resold on craigslist. If the buyer purchased it in good faith, and the asset is replaceable, you aren't getting it back.
I don't know that for a fact - but I do know that companies fuck me with warranties all the time when they want to get out of paying for things so that was my immediate thinking. If something is obviously not damaged and has been designed (as is typical in our modern era) to not be opened, lack of any clear indications of opening should not constitute voiding the warranty on its own.
the other poster's argument that it interrupts chain of custody is a bit stronger of an argument, but at the same time - this sounds like a great way to fuck customers who participate in the resale market even if the original company could theoretically fix a 3rd party sale of a core product.
I call this a dick move on EVGA's side, mainly harming consumers. I'm pretty certain they have insurance for incidents of this kind (theft), limiting the financial impact for them.
I disagree. Theft like this doesn’t benefit anyone other than thieves. They should be doing everything in their power to recover the cards and ensure the thieves are caught.
To be clear: I do not support theft and law enforcement must follow up on the offenders, recover what's left and seize the assets. But I just think a lot of people won't receive the message about these stolen cards and will be left with a rather shitty situation.
