this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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If you're building systems, I would assume you're the kind of person that knows how they work.
The system tells you what CPU it has on boot.
The BIOS tells you what CPU you have.
MemTest86 would have told you what CPU you had when you tested it after assembling your system.
Windows tells you what you have in Settings > About and Task Manager.
Apps like CPU-Z have been downloaded a billion times and tell you what CPU you have.
Geekbench would have told you what CPU you have and how it performs.
The article mentions someone paying a bunch for a specific CPU back in April, but then never bothered actually checking it until recently... What the CPU had written on it is meaningless. I couldn't even tell you what my current CPU looked like before I installed it. It could have said Pentium 2 or 486SX or Core i-13. What mattered was that it physically fit, the system booted, and my software said "yup, this is what you paid for."
The issue is if it never occurred to you that you might have been scammed you might not ever think to look.
I built my first computer last year, with all NiB internals, my main concerns when assembling it was does it work. If it underperformed (due to a bootleg part) I might not have been able to appreciate due to a lack of reference point.
This kind of practice is perfect for targeting the person using PC part picker to build a computer without an indepth knowledge or a relative buying it as a gift for someone else.
Considering how expensive individual components can be, it’s always a good idea to ensure you got the exact model you paid for while there’s still a chance to return it or report fraud to your credit card company. Even with NiB items mistakes can be made and the wrong item could be shipped out.
“Trust, but verify”
Would it not be possible to fake most of those by spoofing the model the CPU reports, like what happens with GPUs?
Theoretically possible? Yes, of course. Well beyond the ability of most people including those that print a different model number on the heat shroud? Also yes
Yes, and to be more clear, in order to do something like this, you'd need to manufacture a chip to do so. It doesn't have to be a full CPU, but it does need to intercept any signal looking for the id and pass the rest to the real CPU you're using. If there's any cryptography involved, the problem becomes NP hard to solve unless you can get ahold of a private key, but then you might need to intercept even more signals to keep everything coherent.
And you need to solve any problems involved in having two chips (or more) work together seemlessly. And if you want to fit it on one package, now you need to make a custom one that routes the pins as you need them to be, when the current design already tries to make optimal use of the space. If you could do this, you could probably make more money working with one or more chip makers legitimately.
Odds are all of this will be more expensive than the difference between the price of the high end chip you're pretending to be and the low end chip you're really using. Unless you can sell them at a scale that will attract the attention of the companies that you're trying to steal revenue from who have the tools to make detection easy regardless of what your custom chip does.
Yeah, I think this is the real danger. "I don't know why this i9 isn't performing like expected" is a problem where the cause may be much harder to trace if people can reliably change what the processor reports itself as. And even then, the question only even gets asked by those who actually benchmark it.
With GPUs you can do things like dump its BIOS, alter the identification string, and then re-flash the card.
I've modified a lot of GPU BIOSes to tweak GPU and memory clock timings or enable Mac support.
CPUs aren't that easy to modify. I am not aware of any consumer tools that can simply re-write CPU's internal code.
Regardless, the first time you run a benchmark and it shows that your CPU is really X and not Y, you will know something is wrong.
And on windows just open task manager...
But it seems the person buying doesn't really understand all that, or doesn't seem to have the use of it?
Throw in the buyer never mentions if the product came from amazon or a third party as written in the article. Amazon should be verifying the quality of the 3rd party sellers, it is shit not to, but come on. To not know? It says Sold By: in the main section if the sale. If it says sold by Elite 100 and not amazon... it is sold by Elite 100.
Example: https://www.amazon.com/Intel-i9-13900K-Desktop-Processor-P-cores/dp/B0BCF54SR1/ref=mp_s_a_1_16?crid=3H73JQQ7TJBCD&keywords=cpu&qid=1693852349&sprefix=cpu%2Caps%2C183&sr=8-16