Tampered Athlons Hit Oz

Lucien Wells writes "I have some bad news to spoil your weekend -- it seems like fake Athlons have hit Australia, and at least one of TechWatch's readers has personally recieved a fake. More worrying is the fact that the reader only very recently purchased their Athlon." (Read more below.)

"This is some very bad news -- thanks to Tim for alerting us. Rather than paraphrase, I will just quote his email:

'Well it looks like they [fake Athlons] have hit Australia I just recieved my K700 from [an undisclosed source] in perth and have opened it up to put the cold plate on it and to my horror the cpu is a 650 ... the resistor has been changed and serial numbers do not match ...'

We managed to get some pictures of the Athlon in question, and all the pictures are posted, including a summary with each picture, and help for those interested in finding out if their CPU has been tampered with.

More details are available on our frontpage.

We are working on finding an easy way (ie, for 'general' consumption) for those possibly affected to test their processor, and any updates will be posted, again, on our main page :)

Kind Regards,
Lucien Wells.

---
Lucien Wells
Editor/Assistant Reviewer & HTML Developer,
TechWatch"

The well-labeled pictures also serve as a primer to understanding the cryptic labels on the side of your processor. But as Lucien points out, checking this out will void your warranty.

Comments

"Fake" is not the right word

[Frac]

No one is stamping out bogus Athlons in some secret chip fab in Mexico. Those Athlon CPUs are actually remarked CPUs that are overclocked past their actual make. For example, some evil retailer remarks their Athlon 550 to a Athlon 700 will make a hefty sum.

I wish they actually disclosed the name of the retailer. Such retailers hurt customers AND AMD, and their names should be widely known and disclosed.

Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)

Useful Utilities

[fremen]

AMD has several useful utilities to determine information about your Athlon. You can find them at the following URL:

http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/bin/

Among the programs listed here are things to measure the clock speed, find the CPUID, and other information. Binary and sources are available.

I have no clue how useful this would be in these cases, but it's certainly worth looking at.

Foil remarkers.

[Asmordean]

What I really wish would happen would be for BIOS manufactures and CPU manufactures to get together and make the BIOS display both the real CPU speed and what it is currently running at in large letters during POST. If it was overclocked it could even display a message stating that in a very clear way (text that fills the whole screen saying "Warning: Processor overclocked"

People who overclock wouldn't be hurt because the banner would be there only for 5 or 6 seconds and would remove Intel's excuse so maybe they would stop locking the clock (yeah right.)

Normal people would freak out if they put thier new 750Mhz Duron in thier motherboard and see such a message.

I am sure that some remakers would get around this by hacking the BIOS, but it would stop people from getting remarked CPU upgrades. Also if someone happend to flash thier BIOS in the future after buying a new PC, they would be informed of the trickery then.

As far as software, could H. Oda's CPUID program be used to verify what exactly you have in your system. It tells me I have a Celeron 300a running at 450MHz. Maybe it is different with AMD CPUs.

Re:Clock and bus locking

[FullaDumbAnswers]

Wouldn't a clear plastic case make amaturish tampering like the one described here less easy to hide? Is AMD listening? As long as the case is solid black, bums can stick anything they want inside and expect the "warantee void if opened" sticker to keep their secret for a long while.

AMD should consider burning the rated CPU speed into a custom instruction too. All CPU vendors should have started doing that a long time ago. (Intel got burned by folks scratching off the real speed and painting on a higher one a few years ago.)


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