'Mindblowing' fake AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D chip investigated – buyers beware
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
Perhaps this was made for warranty fraud?
Then I saw one of the sellers had a note that the processor would not show model number, so you had to look up the serial number to determine model, and it'd benchmark 10% slower.
Totally not rejects...
That's way too positive. Aliexpress is loaded with counterfeit products as well.
I've also purchased used pre-Rowhammer RAM from there, and it was perfect too.
Would have been funny if it was real, but was actually a 486, or something. Probably not possible due to motherboard compatibility\pin configurations or something, but still.
https://www.righto.com/2020/08/inside-counterfeit-8086-proce...
The vast majority of buyers do not have the ability to open up the CPU and tell what they're looking at. OLX presumably does not want outright scams but also doesn't want to put any effort into warranty, returns, customer service, etc. You mostly just have to make it murky enough I would guess.
At least we've got spare parts if the other components die now...
In my 25-odd years of building and using PCs (and the odd few servers) I'd not had a CPU die on me, so it was the last thing I suspected. Wasn't until after we'd worked it out that we looked it up and found that it was somewhat a systemic problem with these specific CPUs after ~1 year of use. I was determined it couldn't have been the CPU - until it couldn't have been anything else.
*Although in hindsight I may have acted like one.
Extra story: 20-something years ago I had a slightly misaligned heatsink on AMD CPU which caused the machine to crash after a few minutes of gaming. I took the heatsink all the way off and decided to put my knuckle on the die and boot up the machine. It took what felt like a millisecond for the die to feel 'nuclear' hot and the machine, thankfully, auto-switched off. I've had a LOT of respect for the job heatsinks do since then.
Once the heatsink was properly seated, the machine booted up no worries, and that CPU kept going until it was system upgrade time. Bulletproof!
You're lucky you didn't get a severe burn on your hand or kill the CPU --- early AMD CPUs, notably from the late 90s / early 2000s, were infamous for catastrophically overheating without a heatsink. There's a video from Tom's Hardware showing that, after which AMD started adding more thermal protection.
(There are various assertions floating around that that video was fake, but given that no one seems to have made a "myth-busting" video in the 20+ years since it was released, despite the clear incentives for YouTubers to do so, and instead others have shown how hot those CPUs can get, I suspect it's real. Now that those CPUs and other hardware from that era are actually somewhat collectible, the likelihood of someone trying to repeat that video is even lower.)
The heat was quick and intense enough that I took my finger off very quickly - it may have actually overheated and shut down faster than I took my finger (knuckle of my pinky) off, which might have saved me from a more lasting burn.
Perhaps they got a “deal” on a tray of them, or are fencing things they thought “fell off a truck”.
It’s usually less interesting on the EE side where you’ll get something that looks like an expensive opamp but turns out to be an LM358. It might even partially work in circuit!
This is stupid because of the effort needed to make a fake chip and your betting your life in jail no one does a decent inspection. Hell you need to laser etch the CPU to match whatever legit thing your stealing, so many ways to get caught.
If you're living in a poor economic location, it could make sense. That could be a few months living money for a few days of work.