I was going to put this in the thread that I remember someone posting about 5700x3d’s for cheap on aliexpress, but for the life of me I can’t remember what thread that was in.
Roman just posted a video with an incredibly intricate fake 7800x3d cpu a viewer got. No spoilers, go check it out, only 13 min. Worth your time IMO, I was quite shocked by the “reveal”.
Anyway, point is, be careful. Is that better-than-everywhere-else price worth the risk of it being fake? At least one of these was in the wild, this one was bought off of a local craigslist/facebook marketplace type thing. I know every so often I’m tempted to go “scrapyard wars”-ing to save a buck (that post I was looking for about the 5700x3d’s made me think), but seeing stuff like this reminds me to just stick to official channels.
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It’s such a precise fake that they must’ve made thousands of these to make real money.
I initially thought they did some IHS swap but as soon as I saw him bust out the multimeter I knew it was a blank PCB with shit glued on it. It was also pretty easy to see that it was a blank PCB too. Usually some traces in the substrate are near the surface and they can be seen.
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But, what would be the play here, wouldn’t they have to come up with some tooling to create this “fake” IHS ? I am not able to grasp how many of these they will have to manufacture to make any real money.
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That’s why I (and presumably Roman) thought it was worth sharing. This is obviously a fairly major operation. It wouldn’t make sense without doing something like setting up as a Temu/Aliexpress/Amazon marketplace seller. Maybe even something as crazy as trying to get in the distribution chain for real CPUs.
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Every time I think about this aspect of faking I think that someone either got a hold of a mold, tooling or process that was used for prototyping and should have been destroyed, an extra was made or something went missing at some point. It’s not impossible that there was some “after hours” effort being done as well but it’s less likely since the factories are very dependent on good reputation so any corruption is a big risk.
That is where my mind wanders when I think about the cost to profit for fakes.
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