A fool and their money are quickly departed, except for this instance where it took an individual almost five months to realize.
It must be a slow news day if we’re reporting on someone getting swindled by retailers such as Amazon or Newegg who receive modified processors as part of a return only to then turn around and sell said returned product as brand new or “like new” on their official webstore.
Majority of people who have these so called high-end “gaming PCs” are tech illiterates, they don’t really know jack shit about the hardware they actually purchase, so it’s no real surprise why their go to products always undoubtedly feature an Intel Core processor and an NVIDIA GeForce graphics card, especially the poor saps who’ve been willing to pay upwards of over $600 buying the illusive top of the line Core i7 X700K, 8086K then Core i9 branded products.
Especially considering the botched latency that laments Alder Lake and Raptor Lake CPUs, essentially making them processors entirely for benchmarking purposes rather than actual desktop usability.
Anyways I’m getting sidetracked, store outlets like Amazon constantly suffer individuals scamming them by returning products after first delidding them and swapping around the processors IHS or integrated heat spreader and essentially masking a cheaper processor as a far more expensive one, usually the top of the line processor of a given family is the target of such a scam, sorta like how Wallmart will sell you a PS4 that contains a box full of sand and rocks.
This scam is so prevalent even today it just goes to show that the shit kickers at Amazon are barely trained at all when it comes to actually handling and verifying returns on such intricate components as a CPU.
Hilariously enough, another illiterate has fallen victim to this scam curtesy of Amazon’s negligence, reddit user “Much_Designer_8417” had purchased a supposedly brand-new Intel Core i9-13900K processor back in April of 2023.
Allow me to reiterate, the lad bought his CPU back in APRIL of this year, some four odd plus months ago, but only now has discovered that his so called Core i9-13900K was in actual fact a Core i7-13700K.
Who the actual fuck still uses Core Temp anyway?
Clearly the mystery illuded the poor buyer who for went almost five whole months without noticing that his processor had only half the amount of E-cores or “efficiency” cores as opposed to what a traditional Core i9-13900K contains, which is a 8+16 configuration, while the i7-13700K comes in a config of 8+8 alongside differences in cache size and core clock frequencies.
All things considered, Much_Designer_8417 is actually very lucky, normally individuals who commit such scandalous acts to illude massive retail conglomerates usually swap the IHS of whatever processor is being sold with that of a CPU that is far cheaper and slower, usually the likes of Celeron, Pentium and perhaps Core i3 processors are the victims of a IHS swapping scandal.
This isn’t an Intel exclusive issue either, probably because an IHS swap isn’t actually a security vulnerability more rather wannabe scammers have previously done the very same thing with AMD Ryzen processors by swapping on high-end heat spreaders onto Athlon CPUs instead.
Given how the user in question didn’t actually realize he got scammed until four months after purchase he has absolutely no chance of getting his money back or even a partial refund, though I do imagine that the kind helpful liberals of reddit would be more than happy to sponsor the chap by donating reddit gold.
Though to be entirely fair, given his ignorance to actually detect that he got scammed, i.e he’s a tech illiterate, he probably does deserve to get scammed for actually being dumb enough to pay £585 for a “i9-13900K” when the likes of the Ryzen 9 7950X can be had for £523.
