All PC gamers want the best and fastest graphics card for their gaming PC. So when they see a graphics card having great specs and very low price available on some online shopping sites, they go for it and buy it. But chances are that they have just wasted money in buying a fake graphics card.
It is not that these fake graphics card are just a brick packed inside a cardboard box or that they do not work. They will work and you can install them on your PC to play the games. The only thing fake about these graphics cards is that they are re-labeled and modified to appear to be a more expensive model. For example, if you pay for Nvidia GTX 750 Ti, you might get a Nvidia GTX 550 Ti packed inside the box of Nvidia GTX 750 Ti with all the labels changed and even the BIOS modified.
With a modified BIOS, even the operating system assumes this card to be a different model having different specs. The GPU specs reported by the system information window (press hotkey Win+Pause) could be entirely different from the real GPU information. Sometimes the sellers modify the BIOS in such a way that you cannot even flash updated BIOS. Earlier the only way to find out fake graphics cards was to examine the hardware manually.
Fortunately, GPU-Z has made it very easy to find out the fake Nvidia graphics cards. However, it works only for a limited number of graphics card. At this moment, it can detect relabeled NVIDIA GPUs for models G84, G86, G92, G94, G96, GT215, GT216, GT218, GF108, GF106, GF114, GF116, GF119, GK106. Perhaps they will add detection of more GPU models in the future. When you launch GPU-Z, it will display a yellow alert icon instead of the usual GPU manufacturer icon (Intel or Nvidia or ATi etc). The name of the GPU will also have “[FAKE]” attached in front of it.
If you want to avoid buying fake graphics cards, then do not fall for the really cheap graphics cards being sold on some shady online shopping site. You should buy the graphics cards from reputed online or offline stores only where they provide options of returning the items if you are not satisfied.
You can download GPU-Z from https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-gpu-z/.