there's nothing quite like new hardware the smell
the feeling the how did this happen
not only is this completely the wrong model of CPU it doesn't even fit in the
motherboard that it's supposed to i mean
you did everything right you knew the second-hand back-alley deal
from craigslist joe was a bad idea and you bought it from a reputable store
only to get the wrong thing anyway at least that's what happened if your
reddit user merzeus who alleges that the
ryzen 5 3600 that they bought from best buy is so fake that installing it would
damage your system but how bad could it really be
to find out we contacted merzus and actually bought the chip off of them so
we could test it for ourselves you know what's not a risk though trying
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on the surface everything about merzus's CPU seemed normal the box was sealed the
product intact and the laser markings on the ihs clearly said ryzen 3600. even
the included sticker was right so far so
good then right well no
it appears that merzeus may have fallen victim to a scam that has been around as
long as i've been making videos back in 2010 i actually covered a similar
incident where a new egg customer received what appears to be a heat sink
shaped piece of plaster with a picture of a CPU fan glued to it
along with a picture of a CPU so the idea here then is pretty simple the
thief somehow gets access to an individual box or even a full carton of
product swaps the valuable stuff out with something convincing enough to fool
an inattentive warehouse worker stashes the carton at the bottom of the pile and
flips the real cpus and coolers on ebay by the time customers start complaining
the scammer has probably moved on to their next grift but
here's the thing there's no plaster here and
i mean this is a real enough looking CPU
isn't it how bad could it be
ah to find out we must look closely
for starters the culprit appears to have left a fingerprint on the bottom of the
pre-applied thermal compound but
we don't have a forensic lab so that's not going to do us a whole lot of good
let's take a closer look at the chip itself then
here is a real ryzen 5 3600 and if you
look you'll notice that our fake one actually doesn't have nearly as many
pins on the bottom of it not only that but there's some little gaps in the pins
see that they're in completely different spaces
these scammers clearly don't pay as much attention to the fine details as we do
in our merch like this CPU shirt at lttstore.com
but taking a closer look at our imposter 3600 what is it then
some of you might recognize the old am3 layout which means that this could very
well be a genuine AMD processor just
an older one so what exactly is it then does it even
work to find out we dusted off our old crosshair 5 formula motherboard and some
ddr3 memory and threw on an rtx 2060
super because just how bad could the bottleneck be
right well
that heatsink won't work that's the m4
then we'll compound on here it's our 200
CPU don't want to damage it anything like
that oh full speed fan spin on the GPU
not a great sign for your CPU actually working
shave the finger hairs off this is not what we were expecting to
happen actually we had it up and running yesterday ran cinebench counter strike
um holy crap it's back alive i don't have
the heatsink attached it turned on hold on hold on i want to get
uh okay i just i pulled a classic
a classic troubleshooting step um when you're having an issue with a
cable or a connection don't just reseed it
reseed it a few times because what that can do is it can actually scratch some
of the any corrosion or um
oxidation off of the surface of the contacts and it can make it so they'll
make better uh they'll be more conductive um so i
put CPU in and out a whole bunch of times and
oh wow oh what a deal what a bargain
we got us an athlon 2 x2 b22 CPU
an 11 year old processor i mean this thing's almost old enough to drive
uh cinebench let's find out how many oh wow oh
did you do you see that
now Windows 10 search is a steaming pile of garbage
but that was something else okay oh oh lordy you put cinebench r20
on here oh that's not going to be a good experience i mean
that was just opening a folder is this an SSD
this is an SSD this is a crucial bx i mean it's not a
fast SSD but good lord that felt hard drive like
oh this makes sense
this makes sense not only is this a very old CPU
but look at these temps we are running at 88 degrees with a tj max of 90. this
thing is probably thermal throttling never mind probably we can see it
dropping down to 800 megahertz here from time to time wait hold on is it i can't
is it running yeah it's
it's mounted on there oh there it goes there it goes there it goes that takes
about half an hour to complete so i won't be sitting here staring at it the
score is 162 we ran this beforehand and
to put that in context the cinebench database has a ryzen 7
1700x a core that gets 3455 that's first
gen ryzen so this is like maybe 1 20th of the
performance that we should have gotten if we're lucky let's play some video
games cs go
more like cs wait
cs come on
okay all right oh man this is rough because i i'm gonna
play with bots which actually puts additional load on the CPU
sorry poor CPU now all i was trying to do was like you
know use microsoft office or whatever
totally fine but i would expect to pay 200
for the entire computer and like monitor
not just the CPU that's the problem
oh boy well i don't know if runs is the right
word it's more of a jogging-like experience
wow look at that they gunned that guy down oh reload oh do you see how long it
took to start that reloading animation after it stopped actually firing
headshot again look at this got my like auto aim on here
got my hacks athlon 2 hacks i think it's time to stop
and you whoever you are switching cpus out
shame on you it's time for you to stop
but you won't stop will you we've seen multiple anecdotes of people
receiving the incorrect CPU with the heat spreader swapped so it looks like
the right one just like this and let's show you guys how this scam
works first you need to obtain an old crappy CPU
kind of like this then you're going to need a de-litting
tool we're using this one from derbauer well
i guess you don't really need a delitting tool it just makes it easier
if you have a razor blade or a vise and a lot of patience you can remove your
ihs that way ihs is short for heat spreader
really so whatever the last thing in the frame buffer was it's still
outputting it this this has no CPU in it ladies and
gentlemen hold on now i'm
we're just gonna leave that there um oh shoot this isn't the version of
the d-litting tool that formerly works with AMD cpus but we're
gonna go for it anyway you can see the bolt
doesn't reach because it doesn't go over the anyway the point is
uh i'm just going to try and do this back right there what are you doing
uh i'm just i'm doing it the manly way
okay
hold on okay you know what there's a vice here
see you later
okay
and it's gone something to note is that yours might
not come off this easily and i would not recommend deleting AMD cpus that have
soldered ihss because the odds of getting a performance improvement are
low and the odds of damaging it are significantly higher of course this one
has clearly already been deleted once so it popped right off and you can see
right here that these clearly don't match our CPU has a single die
and our ihs actually has you can see where they
scraped the existing solder off both the CPU die and the i o chip which are
separate in amt russian cpus
yeah to their credit though they did go and
put some admittedly very crappy dry flaky thermal compound
on this which sort of raises the question
why why go to all this work when you could
just ship a hunk of plaster
well there are a few reasons for that first
and foremost it's harder for a warehouse worker to identify the problem packages
this way every single unit would need to be pulled and either carefully inspected or
even hand tested also as we discussed in our fake
aliexpress GPU video if the product works at least a little it can buy the
scammer some time while the customer attempts to troubleshoot the fake device
on marketplaces with third-party sellers for example that can delay the shutdown
of their store allowing them to make more money in the meantime before they
have to start over those graphics cards worked enough to at least boot into
Windows for example which might buy them a week of going back and forth with the
customer oh did you try new drivers etc etc
now as for this CPU well i would say that it's possible an
unwitting victim might try to force it into an am4 socket bending the pins in
the process if they didn't know better they might think that they were guilty of
destroying it rather than realizing that they had gotten a fake product i mean i
wrote that earlier but i don't even know if i i i actually just don't really
understand why they bothered putting all this work into it
you know what i wonder if it's like a criminal code thing
where if you wherever they're from maybe if you ship the wrong thing as opposed
to just a brick it's like you could yeah there's
plausible deniability or something like that it's got to be something like that
because this is not insignificant amount of work
the good news is that because AMD is pga
or pin grid array the risk to your motherboard and the rest of your
components is minimal and given that an athlon x2 these days is worth about
five to ten dollars it's not much of a loss but if this was an Intel product
and you had tried to install it without realizing the problem you could easily
have damaged your motherboard and nobody wants the headache of explaining why
they should be allowed to return their motherboard with bent pins when they are
already trying to return their fake CPU
so with all that out of the way while we know that mirzeus ended up with
a scam CPU from best buy what we don't know is how let's talk through the
possibilities i can say with confidence that best buy
the organization had nothing to do with this these kinds of incidents can have
devastating negative pr effects and realistically they're going to have to
ship a working CPU to the customer eventually so why bother putting in all
this work beyond that well hard to say
a worker at best buys distributor that's possible but security in those
places tends to be crazy tight so i doubt it a best buy retail employee
that's another possibility theft from retail workers is a significant problem
i remember this team at ncix that worked together actually a customer would come
in walk around the store browse for a bit interact with the staff and then
after a little while an employee who was
an associate obviously would call out a bogus ticket number and then the
customer would walk up to the counter take a bag of hardware and walk right
out the door i mean everyone's busy you don't notice the gear missing until the
monthly count or whatever so it's really hard to pick up on something like that
especially when the security footage looks so normal and especially if that
rogue employee eventually returned the thing back to the shelf but in an
altered state what about a courier
that's possible couriers do have unsupervised access to packages but the
outer carton is often shipped with tamper-proof tape and they're almost
always under video surveillance as controversial as that particular issue
might be on top of that opening someone else's mail is a federal offence in the u.s
probably not worth the 200 bucks that they stand to make here i'd say a more
realistic scenario is a previous customer might have bought the chip
swapped out the real one packed it back up nicely and returned it to best buy
who put it back on the shelf thinking everything looked okay
which kind of leads us to a couple more uncomfortable possibilities
merzouz lives in sri lanka best buy doesn't ship to sri lanka so
actually the CPU was shipped to merzouz's brother in maryland who then
forwarded it now i don't know the guy
and i wouldn't accuse him of any wrongdoing but
since we're talking about possibilities it is technically possible that his
brother was involved in this and while we're at it it's also possible
that mirzeus is in on it if that were the case though i don't
think a refund from best buy was really the agenda because if so why bother
shipping it to sri lanka first it is possible however that they wanted
some reddit clout and this seemed like an easy way to stir up some outrage
i have no reason to believe that's what happened and if i did i wouldn't have
given merzus 200 to buy a new CPU and give me this one but
i've seen much more appalling stunts than that so maybe i'm just cynical but
it is possible you know what else is possible
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sometimes ordering cpus is like a box of
chocolates you never know what you're gonna get
if you guys had fun with this video make sure you check out our testing out
mystery chinese cpus video or actually you might also enjoy our fake gpus video
from aliexpress that's a good one too we'll have those linked down below