Gadgetory

discount sites like dealextreme Aliexpress and eBay can be a great way to get awesome deals on used or off-brand tech products and if you're like me and you're kind of a gigantic cheapskate the prospect of saving money can be pretty enticing but today's video is a cautionary one a buyer beware tale of making sure that you think critically about a great deal before pulling the trigger because even spending $1 is a waste of money if you don't get anything useful in return for example this USB to Ethernet adapter that is advertised as being 10 gigabit ready for just over $4 a piece is very eye-catching but as we are going to see a lot of the time things like this are just too good to be true unlike our sponsor Thermaltake and they're a 500 case which features a modern minimalistic design brushed aluminum panels and dual hinge Swing tempered glass doors check it out today at the link below so you might understandably find yourself thinking wow a 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter for 4 u.s. dollars well gee that sounds like a way better deal than this 10 gig adapter from a kiddy oh that costs a whopping $200 I mean why is this thing even so expensive well now that they're both here these products don't even seem to be in the same universe as one another via kiddie Oh uses a high-speed Thunderbolt 3 interface it's got a large well ventilated aluminum chassis it's got a nice premium feel to it including a removable cable and we actually haven't tested this yet but theoretically if we plug it into a device like oh say a laptop that was a 5-4 gig file ok so 10 gig working on a laptop and that's nice it's bus powered - it doesn't need any external power adapter now let's turn our attention to our dealextreme adapter this one is made of cheap plastic with flimsy connectors and the cable that I think could probably best be described as flaccid as driverless that's pretty nice but what in the world could that be 100 megabit per second let's take that same 4 gig file and have a real bad time this doesn't even make sense why is it going at 20 megabytes a second oh my Wi-Fi is still okay and you're done Biden oh boy yeah that's what we were expecting literally slower than Wi-Fi so at this point it's fairly clear that this product has been misrepresented by the website that's selling it but the problem is that by the time you've got it in your hands to test it unless you're gonna pay you know 25 bucks to ship back for dollar item it's a bit too late to find out that your steal of a deal was just a steal of your money so how do you differentiate between a scam like this and the real thing before you pull the trigger you know what I'm gonna use this 10 gig adapter for my web browsing for the rest of this video because it's sexy now because there are cases where you can find extraordinary value from up-and-coming manufacturers or on liquidation deals we're not saying that you should just dismiss outright anything that seems to be a bargain we're just saying that your spidey sense should be tingling and you need to make sure that you're doing extra research so the first thing that we're gonna check is whether there is blatantly conflicting information on the product page check out for example this blender that's advertised as 3 horsepower and 2200 watts for a cool $90 the problem here is that the most you can consistently pull from a 120 volt circuit is about 1500 watts before you risk tripping a breaker and the description of the item actually does correct this misleading title so then in the case of our adapter here we can actually see that the title and the detailed specs below are at the very least consistent both claiming to be 10 gigabit per second but then getting into our next tip if we look closely at the product photos we can actually see that this adapter is clearly labeled Fast Ethernet which yes young kids out there is the actual official name for 100 megabit Ethernet that is only 1% of the advertised speed and this is far from the only example of blatant miss labeling on sites like this one it's a very common practice used to lure in unsuspecting customers there are the scan SD cards that we recently did a video on fake brand name fashion Goods cables that are supposedly certified for Apple devices and of course misleading batteries some of the batteries we found even used quotation marks in the title around the capacity and then show the real capacity in the description below although I'm pretty sure that real capacity is probably a load of bunk as well it's almost like clickbait titles except in this case you're paying for it and it's definitely false advertising back to our Ethernet example though we've already got enough evidence to turn us off of this thing but there is still more for us to learn here conflicting specifications can be a surefire way to identify BS so then we've got that cleaned 10 gigabit per second transmission speed well that's pretty cool but what's also included here in the description is that it's USB 2.0 type C now most people understandably might see a USB type-c connection and go oh well that's really modern and fast but as a tech nerd I know right off the bat that type C is a physical standard that can carry all kinds of different signals and the USB 2.0 protocol is inspect for anywhere near 10 gigabit per second speed actually it tops out at around 5% of that now if you're not so technically inclined you might not know or even have the desire to know what the differences are between all the USB versions and that's where our next tip comes in if you don't know what a specific term means that doesn't mean it's not important so Google it and this can be applicable to any marketing terms or buzzwords because those might not mean anything at all even if you know less bondage on your new phone sounds really enticing back to this specific title again though if you search up USB 2.0 the first thing that's going to come up is the Wikipedia page for USB and it shows that USB 2.0 is maximum signaling rate is 480 megabit per second oops oops the final nail in the coffin here is actually the model number which we can see in the photo remarketing of existing products is very common on the types of marketplaces see soldier council so with a quick Google search we find that this part number actually corresponds to a real tech Ethernet controller that's designed to run at 10 megabit or 100 megabit speeds now that I think of it we should probably crack this open and find out if it's even a proper Realtek controller not yet though we'll get to that after our last tip you might have noticed that one thing that we didn't mention is user reviews and we'd love to say that that's a good way to avoid scams and negative reviews should be heated for the most part it's just that they're not the Silver Bullet that you might hope fake positive reviews have become a huge problem even on reputable online stores like Amazon as for these ones well simply put they've been pretty misleading from our experience this particular item actually doesn't even have any reviews yet but dealextreme shows items with no reviews as having five filled in stars and that only changes if our review is submitted all right anyway we've had our fun now I think it's time for us to crack this nut open Jake what was the plan here ah cut stuff I guess so this is cool as expected we've got only four conductors here which tells us that yes of course this is not going to transmit it anything more than USB to speeds you would need nine conductors for USB 3 and 20 yeah how many for 24 yeah for Thunderbolt 3 so yeah this is clearly very clearly not anything other than USB 2 yes it is a real tech controlling well at least it's printed as that so one question you might ask yourself is if you've only got four conductors here why do you need this 24-pin connector on the other end I mean it just comes down to convenience USB type-c is reversible it's durable and of course modern devices are switching over to using it it's just that we're clearly only using a couple of pins for the actual data interface on it so everything else is just blank it's just not connected to anything by contrast let's open up our 10 gigabit adapter here and this is one whoa beefy beefy friggin thing although I gotta say the design of this chassis is not really that amazing because there's no like heat conduction yeah get your face between smaller or maybe I can bet you it's very strong I'm sure you could probably play hockey with it and then come back and use it as your adapter just Canadian things so there it is if you want ten gigabit connectivity you've got to have a 10 gigabit ready chipset and of course you've got to have an interface at the other end that is actually capable of taking that 10 gig and transmitting it to something and you've got to have a way to dissipate all the heat and whatnot apparently wow this chip is so gives off so much heat they've actually got a thermal pad on the back that IHS here is almost as why this is this entire board what's under there not bad be round probably oh you're probably right seems fine oh oh God what the hell kind of thermal pad is this excellent where's your pointer thing I don't know I'm just pocket I just want to see oh my god no man is that like an actual like just bare silicon to that you're just like can only think so no no I think it's on a package oh god the noise is a stop chill just chill it's all good well I can't read it anyway don't have to replace those the faster yeah you mind Jake so we have much choice about noise yeah oh god I hate it so sorry I'm sorry it's like the tech nerd equivalent of nails on a chalkboard scratching a microcontroller with a knife and I can't read it the markings are like what like scratched off with a knife no they're just really faint and not like obvious anyway somehow Oh like scratched alright well here you go so conclusion time then we know that four dollars versus two hundred dollars is it a huge gap and this is a pretty obvious example of seems too good to be true but the point of making this video was to go through some of the steps that you can take for something that isn't quite as obvious to determine the fake stuff from the real stuff and we hope that even if this might not have been useful for you maybe you can share this video with someone that you know who has been hoodwinked before math drop and Sennheiser have teamed up to bring us the PC 37 X gaming headset it features angled drivers and an open back design for a nice natural sound and better stereo imaging and those drivers actually come from the same family as the HD 5 9 8 and HD 600 series headphones they come with a noise cancelling microphone and they're available on mass drop at the link below for just one $19.99 for a limited time go check them out so thanks for watching guys if you just like this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or even consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description like to be very clear as long as you know what you're getting four bucks is like 4 bucks is four bucks if you need a 100 megabit adapter while you're down there you can check out our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum that's totally worth a joint