Is this Ati 9800 Pro a FAKE???

[zephead]

well, i'm glad to hear it's working. let's hope it stays working, as stressed out power supplies tend to die after a period of stress (usually weeks at least).

 

[Majestic_Lizard]

ebay cards are they fake, conterfeit, modded, refurbished...or a bunch of chip & transistor junk?

All eBay sellers are not a collective of identical personalities. There would be no profit in a seller selling you a counterfit card when he or she could just as easily simply take your money and send you nothing.

The fact that you would even ask such a question would be an indication to me that you need to stay away from eBay.

Feedbacks are helpful but they can also be a scam.

For example: a seller can open an eBay account with a new bank account and debit card. He establishes this with a fake address. Then the seller could sell 1000 ten cent baseball cards. Next, the seller recieves around 500 positive feedbacks and no negatives and earns "power seller" status. Then the seller waits half a year so that people looking at his feedback cannot view the items sold to see if they were legitimate auctions for valuable merchandise. As a last step the seller then puts out 40 auctions for Pentium 4 computers fully decked out. People see the feedback and assume everything is good and win the auctions. The seller is paid several thousand dollars. The seller withdraws all money he was paid and closes his new bank account. In one month he recieves 40 negative feedbacks and his eBay account is suspended. However, he doesn't care because he just stole several thousand dollars which he uses to purchase a used Ford Cobra.

The anonymity of the internet is a dangerous thing for consumers.


------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you absolutely have to use eBay you need to know how to the following things:

1) retract your bid.
2) look up and verify contact information of the seller.

What you do is you bid on the item (low ball it). Even if you are outbid immediately, as long as you have bid you can then use the auction number and the seller ID to look up the sellers contact information. Next, you verify the address via internet yellow pages reverse lookup or mapquest. You also call the contact information telephone number to see if the person at that number is even aware that there number is connected with an eBay seller account. If there are any snags in this process or if you get ANY atitude from the seller at all, DO NOT BID. PERIOD.

If your bid is the highest existing bid and you do not want to win the auction, then retract your bid. When you do this it will ask for your reason and honestly eBay doesn't give a sh!t so just say anything. EBay does not police itself worth a da-mn.

 

[Majestic_Lizard]

well, i'm glad to hear it's working. let's hope it stays working, as stressed out power supplies tend to die after a period of stress (usually weeks at least).

People with Macintosh G4's that only had 200 watt power supplies were using the ATI 9800 with no problems.

However, it also depends on what all you have connected to your computer. I would recommend NOT having more than one hard disk or more than one CD-ROM/DVD-Rom in the computer if you are using a card like that with a 250 watt or less PSU. I would also recommend making sure that the power supply has PLENTY of ventilation so that the capacitors (which you are overworking) do not overheat and leak out. (By this I mean don't have the computer in a situation where the back of the computer -where the PSU fan is located- is blocked or recieves poor ventilation).

 

[flipside94]

All eBay sellers are not a collective of identical personalities. There would be no profit in a seller selling you a counterfit card when he or she could just as easily simply take your money and send you nothing.

The fact that you would even ask such a question would be an indication to me that you need to stay away from eBay.



.

Lizard,
First of all I am not saying that their cards would not work, but that they would send you a good imitation from China or somewhere else, where in essence they would make a lot of $$$. After much research, many of these cards clock speeds have notably been much slower than real cards from ATI.

Second, what is the problem with asking if anyone has bought a video card from e-bay...maybe I like to research my product before blindly buying products. The fact that you state I should stay away from e-bay because I question a product is absurd. I would hope that you inform yourself by asking questions instead of acting like they know everything and truely getting ripped off in the end...but maybe thats how you like to buy your products?!?

Third, yes I am aware how people stack their feedback...it is a generally known thing, but understand that on many of these auctions you can see many of the last auctions that the seller was involved in. It is easy to see that they are selling mostly the same product...Just as anything on e-bay, it is understood that there will be risk! We do not need a lecture about the the risks of e-bay. Maybe if you informed yourself before buying a product you, wouldn't feel the need to lecture people about not getting ripped off.

 

[Majestic_Lizard]

Your getting quite defensive. I do learn by asking questions and also by gathering information. It was the context and niavete reflected in the question that basically was a red flag that you need to stay away from eBay. I just gave you excellent advice. As I roughly anticipated you reacted defensively and ignored the majority of it. That is usually how these threads go.

I would hope that you inform yourself by asking questions instead of acting like they know everything and truely getting ripped off in the end...but maybe thats how you like to buy your products?!?

Fine. Then don't listen to my advice which is based on 7 years of experience buying and selling on eBay. Inform myself? Do you realize how little sense you are making? Nothing I have said was pretended knowledge. It was all sound reasoning based on years of a variety of experiences. I have had over 500 successful transactions on eBay as a buyer and seller. I have been ripped off less than four times. On two of those occasions I involved law enforcement and had the other person's eBay account closed. Don't bother telling me you don't believe that; I anticipate that response from you and am ignoring you in advance.

What you are now saying in regard to the cards being "generic" is quite far from what you originally said which was "counterfit". Counterfit would mean selling you something that does not work at all or is completely different than what you believed you bought. In regard to the clock speeds on the generic versions and the original versions: no, they are typically not that different in regard to performance. The chipsets are virtually identical. What is different is the quality of the diodes, capacitors, solder, and other materials comprising the cards and the lack of warranty.

The fact is that a seller is very, very unlikely to take that much time to screw you through deception over a quality issue when they could simply take your money and send you nothing. They would not bother fuc king you on a generic card. Outright stealing is easier and more lucrative. Chances are they will either send you exactly what you paid for and saw advertised or they will send you nothing at all and disappear. In remote cases where sellers are selling generic cards and not indicating it in the auction it is has been my experience that it was reflected in the feedbacks and easy to avoid. I've seen that on Amazon and independent websites more than on eBay.

As far as "stacked feedback" coupled with fake seller accounts for the purpose of fly by night scams; I have had experience with people trying to do this and personally saw to it that one person was prosecuted for it (2001). He turned out to be a minor who was using his father's credit card. Fortunate for him as it would have been felony larceny if he had been tried as an adult. This would have stayed on his record until he could manage to get it legally expunged (which isn't an easy trick). He had made over 4000 dollars by the time he was busted. You act as if the fact that I didn't use the nifty vernacular term nullifies my understanding of the concept. That is not amusing.

You are talking to someone who has been selling on eBay since 1999 and has had only a handful of transactions fall through. I've sold motorcycles, computers, comicbooks, DVDs, VCDs, Monitors, TVs, etc. I've seen every scam by both buyers and sellers that you are likely to run into. Further, I've bought roughly a dozen video cards off of eBay and none of them were ever generic. They all worked and still work to this day. I still own them or gave them to friends after swapping them out; they are still in use. In fact one of them is in the computer I am typing this on right now.

Oh, and YOU'RE WELCOME.

 

[Tedster]

I have bought video cards off ebay and in fact, I just bought another one which should reach my house today. Ebay requires careful decisions, and for the most part sellers are honest. However, I have run accross about 5 or 6 dirtbag buyers and sellers in my transactions (which are well over 100). Out of those 6, two were non-paying bidders, 2 sold me worthless junk, and two more were problem buyers who failed to read the ads. But more or less it has been a reliable source. You can find some real bargains - often well under retail price, but you often have to be patient and persistant and not willing to bid more than what is fair and taking total costs into account including shipping. Just make sure when you buy, use a credit card always. You can ALWAYS charge back unsatisfactory goods -even if paypal denies your claim. There is no such thing as "as sales final" on ebay or "no refunds" as the buyer cannot inspect the goods prior. Courts have ruled on this and credit card companies must comply.

 

[zephead]

what relevance does this have to the original topic of this old thread?

i reccomend that you take your thoughts about ebay to a new thread where more people will see it, and one that follows one topic.

 

[XenaWP]

...this is your problem: the fact that it's a sony vaio. not only is your power supply too weak to drive the new card, but your case doesn't have sufficient cooling. there's even a chance you have a type of case that lacks physical space for the bigger cards. and, because it's a sony vaio (and thus oem), you'll find it impossible to get replacement parts to make your computer able to accept the desired upgrades. and, it uses sony-engineered chips and boards, so it's performance will lag even more. plus, the 4x agp slot more just about halves your potential graphics performance.

the bottom line is, you can't improve the performance of your vaio: it's stuck where it is. if you want to change that bad, a radeon 8500 or something is the best you'll do. it's too bad, but true nonetheless. in the future, i reccommend that you build or buy a custom pc, probably available at a local pc shop to avoid setbacks such as this.

zep, I can understand not liking Sony, but there is no need to misrepresent the facts. Personally I don't like Sony that much, but I have a Vaio, slightly later model than the OP, and I can tell you:

1 The PS is not too weak to drive an upgraded video card, if you don't try to buy a top-of-the-line GPU. I have put an ATI 9600 PRO in mine, and it's been running just fine, thank you, for more than a month. If you take a reasonable approach, you get reasonable results ... you just have to live within the unit's limitations.

Virtually any AGP board will kick the crud out of the onboard Sis video. Virtually all of my 2D results doubled in performance, and the benchmark program wouldn't even RUN 3D tests with the onboard Sis vid drivers. With the ATI board, the 3D results were ok, not fantastic, but obviously better than Sis onboard.

2 His case has plenty of room for the boards that the unit is designed to accept. PCI, AGP, and RAM slots are all there, plenty of room, easily accessible.

3 It is not impossible to get upgrade parts. That's just flat out wrong. I have added 512 mb of RAM (std. Kingston PC2100), a faster DVD-RW (from 2x originally to 16x upgraded), the ATI Radeon, and a new 250 GB Seagate hard drive. I added a USB 2.0/firewire PCI board since it came with USB 1.1. I am currently considering upgrading the cpu. Where do you get off saying it's impossible to get upgrade parts?

4 The difference between 4x AGP and 8x AGP is negligible in all the reviews and benchmark evals I have seen ... NOT "half the performance."

5 No one's Vaio performance is stuck where it is. Adding RAM increases performance for most machines for most uses. Adding the video board dramatically increases vid performance. Adding more storage easily increases performance for disk-intensive apps like Photoshop, which needs large swap space on the HDD, for digital video apps that needs mega space, etc. Adding USB 2.0 significantly increases performance of USB over 1.1.

Zep, I am sorry to say that either through your lack of knowledge or your prejudice against Sony, you have lost all credibility. I am not even defending Sony, since I don't particularly like them, just presenting the facts.

 

[zephead]

the radeon 9600 is obsolete. for the price you paid for a vaio you could have had a custom built PC of much higher quality with all the upgrade possibilities you want.

sony is a corporation that just wants your money. i am a PC repair technician and sonys account for nearly half of my repair business, even though they hold less than a quarter of the market share. i have arrived at my conclusions about sony after dealing with thier systems for many years.

 

[XenaWP]

the radeon 9600 is obsolete. for the price you paid for a vaio you could have had a custom built PC of much higher quality with all the upgrade possibilities you want.

sony is a corporation that just wants your money. i am a PC repair technician and sonys account for nearly half of my repair business, even though they hold less than a quarter of the market share. i have arrived at my conclusions about sony after dealing with thier systems for many years.

Of course the Radeon 9600 is obsolete. What do you expect for $50? My point is it's a MAJOR UPGRADE from the onboard Sis graphics that came with the machine. Plus, it's a major upgrade that stays WITHIN the PSU's limited headroom.

For the price I paid for the Vaio? It was like $900 four and a half years ago. I've gotten that much out of it easily, and have upgraded it for a grand total of about $200, to last until Conroe and Vista are stable. The only things that aren't easily upgradeable in this pc are the PSU and MB. You couldn't have put a MB in that pc 4 years ago that would be upgradeable to Conroe, dual core, or anything else launched in the past couple of years.

Sony stuff is generally overpriced and overhyped, but this PC has been troublefree for nearly 5 years. Maybe I was just lucky, getting one that has never broken. Maybe more recent designs are less upgradeable. But the PC the OP has, and the one I have, are not crippled in terms of upgrades.

News flash: all corporations want your money. That's why they are in business.

 

[Rage_3K_Moiz]

Regarding fake cards, I've seen a SiS card sold to someone on EBay by telling the buyer it was an MX440. The guy went as far as to remove the stickers and put MX440 ones and it took the customer(who is a family friend BTW) 4 months to find out why the drivers he downloaded from NVIDIA's site didn't install. Regardless, he doesn't trust EBay at all now. Leave EBay as a last resort of sorts, when u find that u don't get cheaper stuff on sites like Newegg and TigerDirect, to name two.

 

[tifc8lraz]

I bought a GeForce 6200 off of eBay for around $30.00 US. It isn't a fake, but isn't the greatest card either, only having 64-Bit memory, so it is a little slow on power. Be careful with eBay. I have received broken items (a camera, what a mess) off of eBay.

 

[zephead]

You couldn't have put a MB in that pc 4 years ago that would be upgradeable to Conroe, dual core, or anything else launched in the past couple of years.

the point of avoiding OEM builds is that there is no guarantee that thier systems comply with industry standards. what you said is true, but at least with a standard PC you would be able to interchange those parts with newer ones.

considering the cost and general quality of custom PCs these days, there is no reason to spend money on an OEM build. don't think for a minute that these corporations make killer profits by giving customers their money's worth. sony and others make a big profit by selling low quality systems for as much as they can get away with. the only reason sony and other OEMs are able to sell computers is because of heavy marketing that targets consumers who do not know enough about computers to understand that they are being ripped off.

you may be wondering why such companies do this. it's because sony has a huge amount of overhead, whereas i have virtually none. when i build PCs for customers, they have to pay for the parts, software, and my labor. sony has to pay for the commercial you saw, the guy who answers the phone when you call, the assembly worker, parts, software, shipping, and a multitude of employees that have little to do with the actual computer you get. so how can they still compete with me if they use the same high-quality parts? they can't so they resort to asian companies such as fong kai industries and ATADC to make cheap parts that are much lower in quality and performance. they cut as many corners as possible. technicians such as myself and local PC shops don't have nearly as much overhead as sony does, so that far more of the customer's money goes into what they get.

BTW > i do not think that everyone who buys an OEM build is stupid or foolish, so don't take this the wrong way.

 

[XenaWP]

Oh, believe me, my experiences in attempting to upgrade the Sony have made me a true believer homebuilt computers. Not only is it sometimes impossible to upgrade some parts (psu, mb), but Sony refuses to provide any information at all.

Still, 4 years ago I would not have had the knowledge or patience to build my own. Now, thanks in part to this forum -- as well as to the experience up upgrading my DVDRW, RAM, GPU, HDD, and adding a PCI USB 2.0 card -- I know I can do it myself. But I plan to wait a while before doing it. Conroe and Vista are going to show some real growing pains at first, I'll just let that all pass first.