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YouTube channel Hardware Busters claims it purchased what looked like an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU from Amazon for processor testing purposes. Good for them! Upon opening the box, however, a few things stood out. One, it wasn’t the correct socket and heatspreader design for an AM5 chip, and two, an eagle-eyed viewer noticed that the supposedly silkscreened logo on top appeared to be a sticker.
Closer inspection (and a bit of fingernail prying) revealed that underneath the sticker lay an AMD FX 4100, a 14-year-old Bulldozer chip that can be found on the used market for around $10.
The quad-core, four-thread FX 4100 is a socket AM3+ chip with a 3.8 GHz boost clock and support for DDR3 memory. The $479 AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, however, is an eight-core 16-thread, 3D V-Cache-imbued powerhouse of a gaming CPU on the AM5 socket with support for DDR5 memory, and a 5.2 GHz max boost clock.
Basically, they couldn’t be further apart if one was one of the best CPUs for gaming, and the other was a ham sandwich.
So what tomfoolery has occurred here? Well, this is likely a case of some unscrupulous Amazon customer buying a near-$500 gaming CPU, then marking it as faulty and returning a much, much cheaper processor back to Amazon—with a sticker on top.
Returned electronic components are unlikely to be checked by someone qualified to tell whether they’re the correct model or not. After all, it came back in the right box, and even removing it from the packaging reveals what looks like the correct CPU model to an untrained eye.
The unscrupulous buyer gets to keep their mega gaming CPU for free, a nearly-worthless processor is lost in exchange, then the box is plastic wrapped, put back on the shelves, and some poor soul buys it for their next gaming rig. Or in this case, test bench machine.
As Hardware Busters concludes, it’s vitally important that you check hardware components inside the packaging as soon as you receive them to see if they really are the ones you paid for, even from an otherwise reputable retailer.
Return windows vary, and the sooner you can get a mislabelled (or in this case, poorly-stickered) component back for a refund, the better.
At least in this case the differences were obvious, but it might not be quite so clear in the case of, for example, a GPU. The less-tech savvy among us could quite easily fit a lower-model graphics card with misleading branding on it without realising they’d been ripped off, so always verify your hardware after installation with handy hardware diagnostic tools like CPU-Z or HWInfo.
The more you know, etc. What I want to know is, who’s going to all the trouble to print fairly convincing stickers in order to rip off retailers for gaming CPUs? Still, it’s more convincing than writing “Ultra fast AMD superchip” on the heatspreader in marker pen, I guess.
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Kurt Indovina
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