I just bought this $2,000 CPU for 428
bucks brand
new it smells like a scam it walks like
a scam might even talk like a scam hello I'm a little scam but I assure you this
is very real a high performance this CPU
has 18 course chip that you can actually
buy right now for less than a quarter of its sticker price and there's tons of
them avail able so what are these why
are they so cheap and where on Earth did they come
from and who's our sponsor origin PC
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description when we first stumbled upon these Intel extreme Edition CPUs for
sale at mind-bogglingly cheap prices my brain jumped to three possibilities one
these could be bck units that were returned to a retailer or system
integrator so they're working but not brand new two they could have been
pulled from decommissioned workstations as part of a large organization's
Hardware refresh or three this is a
classic eBay scam these are actually engineering or qualifying sample chips
being sold as retail and that one's a
big problem because a they are technically still the stolen property of
Intel and B they often have performance and compatibility
issues but after further investigation
otherwise known as actually reading the eBay listing these are advertised as
seller refurbished which lines up pretty well
with my theories except that wait what
100% not used not repaired not
engineering sample see you later theories was nice knowing you I mean it
looks too good to be true but these guys have all kinds of chips available and
every single one of their ads lists these CPUs in the same fashion so I
started to think maybe they're real I
mean look they even come with a one-year warranty all right strong exuberant
Electronics HK Co limited I'll play ball
so I blew a, on not one not two but three of these
chips all in the name of science after
all if I ordered one and I got a working one that could be a fluke but three
that's a pattern you guys know I do this all for you right but lonus cheap eBay
CPUs are nothing special I know I know
it's the motherboards for these things that tend to kill the deal but not for
these the thing is the chips I'm holding
are a 79 4X and 7980 XC 14 and 18 cores
respectively they are formally discontinued but Intel's matching x299
chipset is still an active product which
means that motherboard supply for these things hasn't actually dried up yet and
because of that if you want to save a buck there are pages and pages of
compatible boards on eBay for as little as around
$200 that is not bad compared to a
decent b550 or x570 board especially
when you consider that extreme Edition HDT boards tend to come with a lot more
standard features but just a second from the outside not one of our three CPUs
appears to have been mounted in a socket for any appreciable amount of time these
earlier 14 nmet chips notably Skylink used thinner substrates that had a
tendency to bend at the corners after spending even a few months mounted in a
socket we don't see any of that and there aren't any Telltale pressure or
abrasion marks on the IHS from being held down in the socket or from having
thermal compound on them except there's one small thing consistent with the eBay
ad description there are scratches and dings all over all three of them
including at the edges of the substrate and in between the pads in all my years
assembling PCS for NC and Linus Tech
tips videos I haven't seen this kind of superficial damage on a brand new chip
it's just weird of course I'm not going to care about any of that if it works
which is hardly a guarantee at this point I mean it's not like I haven't
been scammed buying DOA CPUs on eBay before that's why I always buy my CPUs
in pillow form from LTT
store.com you ready for the Moment of Truth here we
go yes
there we go
7980xe 7940x that's two for
two bam exactly as expected so all three
of these work as though I pulled them out of a retail package kicked them
around on the floor a little bit and then Chuck them into a motherboard no
temperature or stability issues and they're even running the correct clock
speeds and they report ret steppings in
diagnostic applications like CPU Z that's a big one by the way because
Intel uses Flags like this that are built right into the CPU to permanently
Mark engineering or qualifying samples so that even if a scammer were to swap
out the integrated heat spreader you still wouldn't be able to hide it I mean
even performance is identical to the retail chips that we already had on hand
from Once Upon a Time before Threadripper gave the people's elbow to
Intel's entire HT lineup now some of you are probably
asking could they be fake or imitation
non genuine Intel CPUs and the answer is
no actually the reason that Intel and AMD can charge so much for these
products is that no one else can make them even multi- deade long attempts to
reach this level of performance in China and Russia are only now starting to
approach the same playing field and getting your counterfeit chip that you
somehow miraculously built to report as an Intel one and then miraculously work
in an Intel socket motherboard good luck so where are they
coming from well as strange as it sounds
the only realistic answer is they're coming from Intel and there's a couple
of ways that something like this could happen one possibility is that they're
just plain leftovers that haven't sold in 4 years I doubt it but it is possible
another is that Intel could have excess capacity at one of its 14 nmet Fabs and
rather than shutting it down they found it was better to make these things and
flip them to resellers and developing markets at a deep discount Intel saves
some cost by not bothering with fancy packaging support and warranty coverage
and that gets passed along to the end user that sort of thing isn't unheard of
and those discount Parts making their way onto eBay isn't unheard of either so
I lean towards the second hypothesis because you guys might have noticed we
bought one 14 core and then two 18 cores
what's up with that here's the thing we actually placed an order for three
different chips one of those 18 cores was supposed to be a 16 core
7960x but the seller fulfilled it with an 18 core saying they were still
waiting for more stock to come in wait
more stock to come in so if stock is
still flowing and it has to be coming from
Intel then they got to still be making them of course just because the retail
price is formally $22,000 for this thing
that doesn't mean anything Intel rarely
actually cuts the price of their top-of-the-line products because they'd
rather just discontinue them so they can maintain that perception that extreme
additions are really expensive and they're for Ballers only so the question
becomes at $400 should you buy
one well if all you're doing is gaming
the answer is an unequivocal no you're better off with a
used ryzen 3,000 or ryzen 5,000 if you
can afford it but if you do anything other than
gaming well now the answer gets a little
bit more interesting considering core counts alone these things absolutely
Crush any ryzen 3000 or 5000 series
competitor for the money but it's also not quite that simple they lack some of
the latest features like PCI Express Gen 4 and this older 14 NM silicon is going
to struggle to keep up with AMD's state-of-the-art 7 nmet you'll notice
this especially on the higher core count models which are going to have much
worse allc core clock speeds however if you've got a workload
that benefits from a any core CPU a brand new 3950x 16 core on eBay cost
$660 on average that is substantially
more than we're paying for an 18 core
and if you drop down to the 14 core 7940x which by the way will be better
for gaming thanks to its higher boost clocks you're paying just over half the
price from our new BFFs on eBay and remember these x299 platform chips have
another potentially huge Advantage they have a whack load more PCI Express Lanes
than AMD's consumer platform so let's say you wanted to build a Nas for Plex
with ryzen 3000 well if you want GPU
transcoding and you want a whack of storage you could end up running into an
IO bottleneck or even running out of PCI Express slots to plug stuff into what
about an editing rig that needs a capture card and fast networking or what
about a home lab or a split gaming setup like we've shown before using
virtualization to run multiple guest operating systems I mean seriously guys
bottom line for a professional or an Enthusiast on a budget these chips are a
steal and they're real that's the deal now I feel like
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might also enjoy the one where one of our viewers got scammed buying a fake
CPU from Best Buy and sent it to us for a postmortem it was very enlightening
h