Especially nowadays that the bitcoin mining craze has driven graphics card prices through the roof, at least in some countries, many people are desperate to upgrade their gaming PC for a reasonable price, rather than having to pay exorbitant prices inflated by supply and demand. Many of these people may be lured to search on eBay, to see if somebody is perhaps selling such cards for cheap.
You should be very careful with this. If a price for a graphics card on eBay seems too good to be true, then it's most probably so. Especially if the card is advertised as new (but also many times even if it's sold as used).
China in particular, and by large, although this is not solely restricted to them, is notorious for scamming people with fake products, and this includes fake graphics cards.
In this case it's not that you buy a graphics card and you receive a brick. You will get a graphics cards, and it will actually work... but it won't be the one you thought you were buying. For example, the graphics card might have been advertised as an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970, but in reality what you get is something like a GTX 460, which has like one fourth of the speed of a GTX 970, or even less. Sometimes it can be even worse.
Many times these scammers will actually go to great lengths to hide this fact. Sometimes they will, in fact, distribute the card in a cardboard box that has fake "GTX 970" info and logos on it, they will print "GTX 970" on the heatsink shroud of the card, and even on the PCB itself, and sometimes they will even go so far as to re-flash the firmware in the card to make it look like a GTX 970 to the operating system. This means that when you connect the card to your PC, your operating system will report it as a "GTX 970", and everything will look like it's the genuine thing.
However, the actual chipset will be that GTX 460, or whatever. You'll quickly notice that something is horribly wrong when the card doesn't actually have as much RAM as it's supposed to have, and when benchmarks will report just a small fraction of the score that a GTX 970 should get.
It's a sad fact that eBay sellers cannot be trusted with this. They may masquerade themselves as being some kind of genuine big-name corporation selling graphics cards, but in reality it may just be a small shop creating fake cards in China or somewhere else.
You should be very careful with this. If a price for a graphics card on eBay seems too good to be true, then it's most probably so. Especially if the card is advertised as new (but also many times even if it's sold as used).
China in particular, and by large, although this is not solely restricted to them, is notorious for scamming people with fake products, and this includes fake graphics cards.
In this case it's not that you buy a graphics card and you receive a brick. You will get a graphics cards, and it will actually work... but it won't be the one you thought you were buying. For example, the graphics card might have been advertised as an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970, but in reality what you get is something like a GTX 460, which has like one fourth of the speed of a GTX 970, or even less. Sometimes it can be even worse.
Many times these scammers will actually go to great lengths to hide this fact. Sometimes they will, in fact, distribute the card in a cardboard box that has fake "GTX 970" info and logos on it, they will print "GTX 970" on the heatsink shroud of the card, and even on the PCB itself, and sometimes they will even go so far as to re-flash the firmware in the card to make it look like a GTX 970 to the operating system. This means that when you connect the card to your PC, your operating system will report it as a "GTX 970", and everything will look like it's the genuine thing.
However, the actual chipset will be that GTX 460, or whatever. You'll quickly notice that something is horribly wrong when the card doesn't actually have as much RAM as it's supposed to have, and when benchmarks will report just a small fraction of the score that a GTX 970 should get.
It's a sad fact that eBay sellers cannot be trusted with this. They may masquerade themselves as being some kind of genuine big-name corporation selling graphics cards, but in reality it may just be a small shop creating fake cards in China or somewhere else.
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