In our testing today at the GearVerify lab, we encountered a specific issue where a user submitted a "GTX 1050 Ti" purchased from a questionable eBay vendor that was consistently failing our WebGPU shading capability checks. Upon closer inspection of the die markings and shader cluster count, it became immediately obvious: this was a flash-modded GTS 450 from 2010 pretending to be a Pascal card.

The secondary market is flooded with these "Franken-cards." Scammers modify the BIOS string to report a fake name to the OS, fooling basic tools like Task Manager. However, they cannot fool raw compute throughput tests.

[IMG: Sanded Die Markings Macro]

1. The BIOS Signature Mismatch

A legitimate BIOS carries a digital signature from NVIDIA or AMD. Spoofed cards often break this chain. When you run GearVerify's hardware probe, we cross-reference the reported Device ID with the actual compute units available.

If the driver reports 768 CUDA cores but our benchmark saturates at 192 cores, the math doesn't lie. You are looking at a Fermi architecture chip, not Pascal.

[CONSOLE LOG: WEBGPU_ERROR_0x45] - DEVICE_HUNG: Texture fill rate mismatch. Expected >32GT/s, Measured 4.2GT/s. BIOS_INTEGRITY_FAIL.

2. Architecture Analysis: Fermi vs. Pascal

The scam works because legacy architectures support basic DirectX APIs. However, they lack modern instruction sets. By attempting to run a simple FP16 compute shader, we can instantly crash a fake card because the physical silicon literally does not know how to execute the math.

Metric Real GTX 1050 Ti Fake "1050 Ti" (GTS 450)
Architecture Pascal (14nm) Fermi (40nm)
CUDA Cores 768 192
Memory Type GDDR5 DDR3 (Usually)
Vulkan/WebGPU Native Support Not Supported

3. Checking the VRAM Speed

Another common tactic is spoofing VRAM capacity. The BIOS says "4GB," but the card physically has 1GB chips soldered on. As soon as you load a texture pack larger than 1GB, the card will begin "memory wrapping"—overwriting the beginning of the buffer. This results in catastrophic visual artifacts or an instant BSOD.

[IMG: Memory Wrap Failure Graph]
Expert Tip: The VGA Port Giveaway Most modern cards (Pascal/RDNA and newer) have dropped analog VGA (D-Sub) support entirely. If your "new" RTX or GTX card has a blue VGA port on the backplate, it is 99% guaranteed to be a fake.

4. Laboratory Final Thoughts

Don't trust the sticker on the fan. Don't trust what device manager says. Trust the silicon's ability to do work. If it can't run a standard WebGPU compute kernel, it belongs in the e-waste bin, not your rig.