Replacing video BIOS on fake GTX video cards on ebay

For a 3rd or less of the price of a new video card it's possible to purchase the "same" thing from ebay, also new, with slow boat shipping from china. Sadly, the cards are fake, with real GPUs but much older low-end that what's advertised. 

 The fake cards I purchased had been reprogrammed to show different, much fancier GPU names, but also more memory than they really had. Thankfully ebay refunded my money with little fuss. Next question: can the cards be reflashed to their original BIOS? A fake name is no big deal but faking more memory than you really have causes massive issues in games.

 Here are the tools I used:

 A $3 USB eprom flasher called the CH341A. Software to drive this is here (not sure if it has malware, virus total thinks so, so I used a burner winxp image). 

 The general method for using the CH341A to flash nvidia firmware is written up here, with some errors (extra steps, not harmful).

 The replacement firmware can be found online in this excellent database, for instance here's all the GTX 550 Ti firmware that could be tried for a 1GB card.

 After using the CH43A1it's possible to use a hacked version of nvflash to swap in new firmware without using the finicky hardware. nvflash XYZ.rom -4 -5 -6 

 I was able to flash 2 out of 3 cards, but only for 1 card could I find a BIOS that made it work properly. So "success" but not full success. Kind of a lot of time wasted! Later I'll discuss each card in detail and post photos.

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