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WTF?! It appears that Amazon still sells the occasional CPU that turns out to be a fake. The latest incident involved a Ryzen 7 9800X3D ordered by a reviewer for a test system that was actually an AMD FX-4100 CPU from 2011.
We’ve been reporting stories about Amazon customers receiving fake processors since 2017. It still occasionally happens, as discovered by Aris from Hardware Busters. He bought a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which has an MSRP of $480 in the US, for a test system.
The box in which the processor arrived was sealed. However, looking through the package’s display window set off alarm bells, revealing some very poor-quality printing on the CPU.
Opening up the box confirmed that the item was about as far from a Ryzen 7 9800X3D as you could get. For a start, the heatspreader is completely different. Also, the CPU in question uses a PGA (Pin Grid Array) design, meaning it has pins on the bottom, whereas the Ryzen 7 9800X3D uses the LGA (Land Grid Array) socket design – the pins are located on the motherboard socket rather than the CPU.
Then there’s the very blocky, hard-to-read text on the front of the CPU. As you can see in the photo from our review (below), the real Ryzen 7 9800X3D has text stating that it was made in Malaysia. The fake claims that it was diffused in the USA and Taiwan and made in China.
This was, of course, a sticker used to try to obscure the real identity of the CPU. Peeling it off revealed that what Amazon had sent was an AMD FX-4100, part of the FX lineup that was launched back in October 2011 at an MSRP of $115.
Aris writes that the fake was bought from Amazon.de, the German version of Amazon, for 478 euros, or $518. It was sold by Amazon itself rather than a third-party seller, which is often the case with these sorts of fake items.
The fact that the packaging was sealed and the CPU was unused suggests that this was not one of those instances in which someone bought an item and replaced it with a fake before sending it back for a refund.
There has been a series of stories since 2017 about users who bought Ryzen CPUs from Amazon that turned out to be fakes, scams that many suspected were perpetrated using RMA fraud. It’s not just AMD processors, either. An Amazon customer who bought a Core i7-13900K in 2023 received an i7-13700K in disguise.
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