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Remarked Celerons Sold As P4s
Lam1969 writes "Sumner Lemon reports that a Chinese company, Shenzhen Chuanghui Electronics Co., is remarking Celeron chips as Pentium 4s and supplying software to mask the chips' real pedigree from operating systems. From the article : 'The remarked processors Chuanghui sells are actually 1.7-GHz Celeron chips and are currently available for $78 each, including a motherboard, in quantities of 100 or more, said James Zhan, a company representative named online as a contact for potential buyers. By comparison, Intel sells the real thing for $401 in 1,000-unit quantities without a motherboard, according to the company's most recent price list.'"
please tell us something we don't know. i think a point of reference was being made so we could understand how much less they were pricing the chips.
They're offering the masking software because some unscrupulous OEM (the sort who sells people pre-built computers with $7 power supplies so they know they'll be back in the shop soon) will buy these rebranded Celerons and sell them to consumers as the real deal.
I'd imagine that they don't really worry about masking it on non-Windows OSes, since the proportion of users that buys a machine from a vendor like this and puts Linux or something on it is likely rather small. The people buying from this sort of vendor aren't techies, or even really mass market; techies would be buying parts individually (and hopefully from a reputable vendor) or, like the majority of consumers, buying from Dell or HP or whichever big OEM is offering the best deal at the time.
This is an annoying, amoral practice, but it's not really any different from scams in any other industry. The solution is, as always, to buy from people you know and trust and avoid Comps'R'Us, no matter how sweet the deal seems.
Schlock Mercenary
This may not be your answer, but most of the times, a part of the chip is disabled for a reason.
A lot of people think that manufacturers just enable/disable functionality and sell them as premium/standard offerings. This is a wrong thought.
Caches take a decent amount of silicon. Very often the silicon yeild is not good, in which case caches are not 100% reliable, which is why they are instead marked as disabled, and the chip sold at a lower rate.
Even if you manage to enable these caches, they may not work for you reliably.
This is why I always run Sandra (http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/) benchmarks on every system I build. I remember one time I bought a motherboard/CPU combo and when I ran Sandra it came out to be about 3 speed grades lower than I had paid for. I brought it back and the fellow at the store (who also built whitebox machines) wanted to know how I knew. Then of course he apologized profusely and gave me what I'd paid for in the first place.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Article mentions the remarker is providing "software". This is very likely a patch to Windows to intercept the calls to the chip fetching its stats, and provide false information back to the caller. This means that windows, and most tools you run under windows, will report whatever the software wants you to hear. ("p4") Others here have kicked around ideas for other ways to verify what sort of a chip it is... try to execute instructions that are p4-only, etc. This is probably the only way to really verify it, besides benchmarking your machine and noticing the huge descrepency in average instruction speed.
So this is not something you'd miss if you were buying the board and chip stand-alone. But if you bought an assembed system, the person that did the assembly is probably full well aware it's a 1.7 and has pre-installed windows and that wonderful "patch" so it reports to you, the consumer, it's a P4. And that's almost certainly what they willl advertise it to you as. The average consumer might just think their machine isn't quite as fast as they had expected, would just blame windows or something else for the slowness, and would eat the $350 fraud without knowing it.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Hardware from Microsoft? You want him to buy an Xbox?
More seriously, there is actually a way past a lot of this. The fraudulent vendor may have replaced the BIOS on the motherboards, to lie about the specs of the hardware to the display screens and in turn to the operating system. Some interesting hacks are available that way to set the system clocks to one speed, and lie about it to the OS. Alternatively, they've simply replaced the bits of Windows that display the processor characteristics.
To get past the Windows operating system flaws, use a Knoppix live CD/DVD to boot the system and record its characteristics. To get past BIOS whackiness, you need an open source BIOS. BIOS's are currently a closed source nightmare, stuffed with legacy features they don't need at the cost of features they should have. But the LinuxBIOS and OpenBIOS projects are doing good work, and I'd love to see them polished up enough to use commercially. This would flat-out solve a lot of problems talking to the guts of your hardware from the operating system level, to read its temperature or read out things like the actual chipsets while the system is running, even resetting the BIOS options while the system is running and without needing someone sitting there with a keyboard and monitor at the next reboot.
Not only would most people not know the difference, but while the fastest P4s are on the new socket, you can still buy a retail 3.4G P4 for the 478 Scoket for $280.00 on Newegg. Even a 2.4 P4 on the 478 is going for $116.00. Even if people knew the diffrence between sockets, there are real P4s for that socket available.
Someone save me from this sanity.
I just got back from a month-long trip from the US to China with my wife, who is originally Chinese. One Chinese person we met described China as "king of the fake". It's scary - there is so much fake stuff everywhere. Some of the clothes are not very good quality, so it's obvious (plus you can see a girl over in the corner ripping the Chinese label out and sewing a Dolce & Gabbana label in with needle and thread). But the handbags, watches, that sort of thing? You're going to be hard-perssed to tell the difference between that and the "real" thing.
When we arrived, my wife's dad told us not to buy tea in small towns, because he had seen a report on CCTV (China Central Television) saying that people were taking other leaves, dying them with green dye and using formaldehyde to cover the smell, then cutting that with a small amount of real tea. We laughed - until it happened. We brought them back a small canister of "best quality" tea that we'd picked up on our Yangtze River cruise. When they steeped it, the water turned bright, neon green. We looked closely - it was *not* tea. We don't know what it was, but it went in the toilet. Mind you, most of the people on our cruise were Chinese nationals, not outsiders!
One of my own coworkers who is Chinese has told that you can't even trust bottled water - there have been reports of companies filling the bottles with tap water (unboiled, of course) and just sealing the lid, and selling it with fake Chinese "brand" labels. We found some bottles with suspicious lids, just buying from regular markets. I'm thinking my lucky stars that I didn't get sick.
It's a bit scary. There's a certain level of trust required for capitalism to thrive. China has the capitalism in spades; but not the trust. It's absolutely the Wild, Wild East over there.
China has also signed numerous treaties as well. China has to comply with those treaties in order to remain in various global organizations, such as the UN, WTO, among others.
One treaty China has signed is the Berne convention, making copyright infringement illegal in China. The only reason it remains rampant is the is little enforcement other than token displays to appease other treaty signatories.
Yeah, except they are Chinese, and Chinese people have no problem pronouncing 'l's, it's the Japanese that do.
Fabio Aquotte
http://redhill.net.au/b/b-bad.html
No, they are just changing the bios text string so people dont see it on bootup as CELERON 1.7GHZ
Probably a fairly easy BIOS modification, just hex edit the bios bin file and flash it.
Windows probably just looks at that same text string. CPUID however looks at actual cpu registers to check out the specs. You cant really change that stuff, at least not easily. So this would only fool ppl who look at the bootup stuff.