The ORIGINAL SCAM Graphics Card!

If you like those 3D Models go check out our channel artist here: youtube.com/shorts/csw-7F4sPjw?si=WmwXa3ZrM3_7poWB

Budget builds seems to be attracted to scams. And scams are attracted to him! Truly a match made in heaven

The funny thing is that despite originally being a scam, at this point this card is likely valuable more to rare PC hardware collectors than it was when it was new.

The real gpu was the frames and money we lost along the way

I just looked on Wikipedia and XFX is a division of Pine Technology Holdings Limited to this day. Fascinating.

Sorry but I have to say this, you did in fact find a common scam architecture (SiS based AGP cards) of the time but you somehow stumbled on one of the few non scam versions of it. Pine was actually quite reputable at one time but fell prey to the idea that offering budget options was a great idea in a time where that was a terrible and volatile market to target. They ended up rebranding their graphics division for that exact reason. Prior to that they offered a fairly comprehensive product line from motherboards to graphics adapters. Pine didn't actually scam anyone with these, yes, the marketing and packaging could be misleading, yes, some of the info on the box was wrong but that was common at this time even with brands like Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, Gainward etc. The drivers were for the correct SiS graphics chip, the manual mentions SiS is the core of the card etc. They were also priced accordingly even though not really worth the money, production costs + marketing + shipping etc meant they were simply not competitive or good value. Pine may have exaggerated their 3d capabilities/performance but they never hid the fact that these were very much budget cards. SiS based AGP cards WERE used on scam cards however, particularly sold to 3rd world countries. It was common to find "Radeon" branded cards that were in fact simply SiS 310/530/630/730 based cards with a BIOS mod that lied about the name. If you tried to install legitimate ATI drivers they would fail to detect the card and the legit SiS drivers wouldn't install either. These scams relied on the low availability of internet to actually work. You needed to install the supplied drivers from the driver CD for the card to even work. I personally purchased several versions of these while living and working in Africa around this time: Radeon 9200: SiS 6326 based Radeon 9500: SiS 310 based Radeon 9600/9600xt: SiS 530 based Radeon 9700: SiS 630/730 based I bought and tested all of these out of interest while living and working in Uganda and Rwanda in around 2003/2004. They were cheap, cheap enough to buy them for a laugh as a foreigner but for the people who actually lived there they were an expensive luxury. I gave them away to my students after fixing the BIOS mods to properly identify them as what they were (so the latest drivers would work). To my students any dedicated graphics card was better than old PCI or worse cards with no 3d capabilities at all. I had almost forgotten about those scam cards, some even went the extra mile of trying to make the cards visually look like the card they pretended to be. I wish I had held on to a few now. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. [edit] After a lot of searching I found some images of them: Google search "AGPX8-RADEON-9600-256-MB-SAPPHIRE-100-iU" The green PCBs with "Graphics by Radeon" or "Powered by ATI" are fake SiS based cards. Some are even for sale from Poland right now.

Time to watch funny British computer man to distract me from my crippling Saab addiction

To be fair, Pine were a relatively reputable budget manufacturer who had been around for well over a decade by this point. These will have been sold by them extremely cheaply (I'm pretty sure the like of Aria and Micro Direct were selling something very similar in around 2002 for a tenner). It's really the sheds that were ripping folk off here. As is usually the case - if you wanted to buy computer hardware from the like of PC World and Maplin, make sure you bring the lube. ISTR Maplin selling floppy drives for £60 when they were £8 at CCL...

"You are selling a graphics card, and your main quote that you're going for, is suffering." -Budget-Builds Sounds about right for a graphics card scam like this.

I'm surprised you can do ANY research with the modern search engines.

I remember these. It was the sort of hardware you'd always see in the window of an independent computer repair shop.

this is an absolute scam of a graphics card, HOWEVER I have heard about 3DPhantom all these years back.. I might even have had that card, maybe not the exact model in the video, but one of the models on the side note, I'm glad you're making more videos nowadays, it's always a pleasure to watch

That whole "no online info or brand presence" reminds me of my current card, a 3080 by a no-name OEM named OCPC, which i paid a suspicious MSRP for during the scalpocalypse. It's still working a couple years later, but i made sure to video the unboxing in case the generic GPU box it came in was filled with rabbit turds or something.

Oh god, I am now using an XFX Radeon 6700 XT... I searched for the company and found news that their Chinese office has been raided by police because they faked their cards to be lower value so they can pay less tax

HL2: LSD Edition, truly the peak of gaming.

I've always found the "register for warranty" very puzzling until I realized it's not normal to get a 5 year warranty by simply having a receipt from a store. No registration needed, and no hoops to jump through. If they don't want to honor it, they can't sell it here.

8:21 the 3d render of the crap card is priceless but cool.

1:18 I've seen wireless adapters larger than that.

So first it was Pine, starting with SiS and then started with nvidia as XFX... and then shifted to Radeon full time. I won't fault anyone's scammer-radar going off at the prospects of such a company shifting repeatedly, for the name of shifting such sketchy stock.

I had a piece of crap like that. It wasn't exactly the same card, it was taller, it looked a bit like a Gf4ti. Back then, people were idiots and bought video cards based on the amount of megabytes they had, and not based on their specifications (kind of like today, people being idiots and not realizing that processors with astronomical TDP are expensive, inefficient, and problematic because they are squeezing more than is possible for the current silicon technology). Back then I had an incredible Celeron 300A, which I overclocked heavily (I won the silicon lottery), and I was looking for something better than the onboard video card (some 8MB piece of crap) to run GTA Vice City. I bought this piece of crap, I think it was my first AGP card. It was a SiS chip, it was like a SiS card from the late 90s, but with 32MB of VRAM. At that time I knew I should have bought an Nvidia or ATI, but I didn't have the money, and I knew that this card would probably be some crap, but I expected it to at least be enough to play Vice City. Well, I can't say it wasn't, but running the game on low at a horrible frame rate like 18fps is not what I expected.