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Comment by alecsm | Hacker News Reader

I expected a real working clone of the Ryzen chip. Calling it mindblowing is a bit exaggerate since it's basically a piece of metal/plastic with no electronics in it.

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It is very unusual that someone would go to this much effort instead of using a real dead CPU or re-lasering a lower spec one.

Indeed, remarked CPUs have been a known scam for decades by now. At least those will somewhat work and delay the arousal of suspicion, while this is an instant fail.

Perhaps this was made for warranty fraud?

Yes. Repeat business will be zero. The seller can't sell very many before they have to shut down and go into hiding. Yet it takes a lot of cost and effort to set this up. As a scam business plan, it's not a good one.

That's exactly the Amazon scammer business model. They can have a new store with a new name in seconds and be back in business with none of that pesky customer service and other accountability.

With a chinese manufacturer, I think you could probably make about 100 of these for less than a few thousand bucks easily. With all the cost in the cnc'd heat spreaders. Maybe 100 for < 1k.

Recently saw some interesting AMD Ryzen motherboards with integrated Zen4 laptop CPU on AliExpress.

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...

I was going to say - I didn't think it was plausible that anyone had the capability to manufacture competitive chips, without the world knowing their foundry exists.

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.

“Mindblowing” is in there as click bait. It would be great if we can remove it from the HN title.

I'm not an overclocking enthusiast, but my read on it is that it's mindblowing for reasons alluded to in a sibling thread and enclosed in quotes to reference the video creator's remark on the extreme, almost nonsensical measures taken (though understandable in hindsight) to spoof the hardware[0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7C_x5EI-fQ&t=7m40s

Same. Was immediately worried since I bought a 7800x3d for a “too good to be true” price off Aliexpress earlier in the year that works flawlessly and appears to be the real deal.

Did you benchmark it? Could be an old chip relasered to fool consumer

7800X3D is really easy to verify because you can just check the cache amount. 7800X3D is the cheapest chip that fits into AM5 and has the 96MB L3.

lscpu |grep ^L3

Aliexpress is legit, they'll usually be "tray"/OEM CPUs but there's no reason to assume that they're fake.

> Aliexpress is legit

That's way too positive. Aliexpress is loaded with counterfeit products as well.

There are also plenty of used CPUs of older models, but those tend to be fine since they don't really die unless abused (or are certain Intel 13th and 14th gen models...) and were probably run at stock settings for the few years the server it was in was warrantied for before being sent to recycling (creating tons of unnecessary waste, but good to see people have figured out how to encourage reuse while also profiting from it.)

I've also purchased used pre-Rowhammer RAM from there, and it was perfect too.

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