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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
A few years ago I bought an 8086 chip on eBay and it turned out to be fake, a random logic array chip relabeled as an 8086. It made for interesting die photos at least. It hardly seems worthwhile for someone to fake a chip that gets sold for $3.80.
Those scammers who will sell you a chip with whatever you wanted printed on it probably profit the most from "collectors" who don't ever try to verify what they actually have.
Why would you go that far to make a fake? If the buyer can’t do a chargeback, you can just ship a rock, and if they can, how does shipping something that’s obviously broken help you prevent a chargeback? I don’t get it.
Plausible deniability? I feel like sending a literal rock puts a banner on it for being a scam but something that looks like the chip although doesn't function leaves lots of room to argue & misdirect: the issue is elsewhere with the receiver's computer setup, it was installed incorrectly, a legitimate CPU was sent but was damaged in transit or by the user and has no warranty, etc.
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.
I still don’t understand how they make any money from this, who wouldn’t immediately dispute the purchase if they put the CPU in their PC and it doesn’t boot? As a customer, I don’t really care what happened to the product before if it arrives and it’s broken. I ask for a return and if the seller gives me trouble, I do a dispute with PayPal and get my money back. I don’t even have to diagnose the issue.
I understand that OLX is like Facebook marketplace where how money is transferred is up to the buyer and seller, so often it's transferred in a way that doesn't enable disputes. For e.g. in Canada if you etransfer someone you have no way to dispute the transaction.
I'm theorizing here, but if you're a novice PC builder and you buy a bunch of parts and put them together and the system doesn't boot, you're probably going to think you fucked up. You don't have an easy way of testing parts individually. Maybe you replace the motherboard first, and of course that doesn't work, so then you order some new RAM, and so on. If you spend long enough troubleshooting then it's too late to return the CPU.
I don't think I'm exactly a 'novice' system builder*, but when my son's computer died a couple of years back we bought replacement RAM, Motherboard and Power Supply before realising it was the CPU that had died (didn't have spare compatible parts to try out).
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!
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.
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.)
I did think I had killed the CPU at the time, but being an impoverished student at the time I had no choice but to see if it was OK - and thankfully it was.
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.
Thank you for sharing this story! I've long wondered what would happen without a heatsink, but have been too chicken to try it myself. It's a bit of a curse to learn best through destructive means :-)
I imagine this wasn't shipped, it was a person-to-person transaction. Probably cash or equivalent. A rock wouldn't pass muster, but a regular buyer would look at this "chip" and be fooled. By the time they figure it out, the seller has moved on to the next target.
Bought on OLX, which is an Eastern/Central European version of Craigslist. Not a place that you should be buying expensive electronics without considering a possibility that you’re being scammed
OLX is basically a second hand flea market. Only form of protection you have is the price: should be so low as to not hurt you much in case the product is defective and seller ghosts you. I never had a problem and bought many things on it, most expensive a ZX Spectrum clone with CP/M and floppy drive for 400 euro. My brother bought a couple of brand new smartphones for like 50% discount and they were genuine. It works more often than not but there's always the risk.
That’s quite a bit of effort gone into a plausible looking fake. As always buy from a reputable seller. There are few real bargains out there.
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!
Maybe a small batch that was never meant to be used by scammers. For exhibition at trade fairs of for photographs? Then one dude might have thought, why not try to sell them, make a quick buck.
I bet you could do this by the following and I would hazard a guess that they do something like the following.
1. Buy a real CPU
2. Measure where the layout of pins are, the different parts visible to the naked eye, and then rip the top off to draw up a CAD file.
3. Use a cheap desktop mill to mass produce a bunch of the top metal pieces, buy any small resistor part you might need.
4. Get a PCB design that mimicks the CPU layout with contacts on bottom that look realistic enough.
5 assemble your fake metal piece, any visable nockoff component, to the cheap PCB.
6. Do a fraud where a good CPU is purchased from a company not likely to disassemble the CPU and might write it off as a DOA chip or a damaged in shipping. Return the fake CPU in the box/system, and you just got a free CPU you could resell on the black market or sell to sanctioned parties.
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.
We are in 2024 and somehow people still falls for the same scam as they did 30 years ago. But I guess it is good these stories get reposted and hopefully more people are aware of it.
