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This sounds a bit conspiratorial to me. Do you have a source?

It is a bit conspiratorial. Since everything that’s is being made is shipped immediately and nobody has a warehouse to store bad Black Friday electronics I would take such statements with a grain of salt.

Not so conspiratorial, I don't know about AMD but companies like Samsung do sell modified SKUs (I believe mainly TVs) with generally worse processor power than their not BF counterparts. A quick Google (or HN even) search should bring up a few articles about this behavior.

They also have store-specific models which may be the issue. All subtly different and generally only the base model is reviewed.

Eh? Source?

Then you just RMA them. Problem solved.