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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 $401 in 1,000-unit quantities without a motherboard, according to the company's most recent price list.'"
> Zhan defended Chuanghui's sale of remarked chips, saying the company makes no attempt to hide what was done to the chips or to pass them off as more valuable processors. "I tell them the truth," he said.
> But Zhan acknowledged that Chuanghui has no control over how its customers represent the remarked chips when they resell them.
Maybe I can help him out with an argument there. Obviously, the "remarked" Celerons are more expensive, since he is selling the service of remarking. The chip itself is not changed: it is still as dead slow as it always was. Charging a premium price is obviously only possible if you trick your customer, which of course means selling the "remarked" Celeron as a P4. So by setting the pricing structure of the product he makes sure that the product can only be resold using fraud.
Claiming ignorance is not going to help there, it remains a big scam. Remember the empty cache ICs in 486 boards? This is no different.
"I'd probably buy one of those combos at 70US$ regardless of their fraudulent business practises, though."
Then you are also part of the problem.
Consumers supporting known businesses which have no ethic drive the good businesses with ethics out of business. Why don't you just see what hardware Microsoft has to offer you for your evangelical services?
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
50 years ago Chuanghui Genuine Gold Jewelry Company was stamping "14K" into brass jewelry. The enclosed warranty assured the buyer that "any discoloration of flesh is sometimes maybe."
BBQ promotes Global Warming
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.
No wonder those AMD64's are wipping the P4's!!
Zeb
You are Chineese Off-shorers are loosing their credibility! What you say?
I didn't know it needed to be tightened anyway
Irony? Yea, it's like goldy and bronzy, only it's made of iron!
How many people really have "half a clue?" First, go out on the street and randomly ask people about current events, a few historical figures, a couple of science questions, and geography. Almost too many news programs to count have found that most people are pretty ignorant of the world around them and history. You'll get the same result. Next, ask them what's the difference between a Socket 478 and an LGA775. How long would it take until someone on the street can answer this?
Make love, not reality television.
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.
Perhaps it was just because they find it easier to say 'Pentium' than 'Cereron'.
This is an example of "Free Trade" and "Free Markets" in action!
No, this is exactly not an example of free trade. Fraud is not a component of free trade. A market economy depends on the customer's ability to actually get what's purchased. Scam artists like the Chinese company in question are parasitically abusing a free market's expectation of consistency and reliability in a brand (Intel, in this case), and the only people who call such BS examples of a free market are those who don't want a free market.
it sure shows one of the limitations of outsourcing to the cheapest source
No, this is not the cheapest source. It's a person lying about being the cheapest source. That doesn't show the limitation of bidding out your purchases, it shows the problems inherent in dealing with "businesses" in a country that, at the highest levels, encourages rampant copyright/brand scams.
You get what you pay for!
No, you get what's delivered to you. If what's delivered is fake, then you did not get what you paid for. In most western countries, one of the things we do pay for is a law enforcement framework that doesn't much put up with the fraudulent sales of such items. Since that's not being paid for in China, people doing business there frequently get exactly what's not being paid for.
I wonder who will be checking the authenticity of those upcoming Olympic medals?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Next, ask them what's the difference between a Socket 478 and an LGA775. How long would it take until someone on the street can answer this?
In fact, I wouldn't be able to answer this question right now, and I'm a programmer/sysadmin who sets up several servers per year. We simply have hardware people, and I get a ready box where my intervention doesn't exceed attaching a disk.
Of course, the last time I built a computer myself, a P2-era Celeron 300A oc/ed to 375, I researched such issues. But nowadays, I simply don't have time to deal with the hardware -- other people are paid to do that. I wouldn't notice the scam in the article unless I happen to glance at the messages during a system boot or notice the discrepancy while resolving some driver problem (non-Windows), or somehow notice that the system is way slower than it should be.
So... if an experienced person who just doesn't deal with hardware wouldn't spot this scam on the first glance, how would a layman get it?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
If your company purchases volume quantities of electronic components, or depends on suppliers that do, you need to be aware of what is happening in the Shenzen area of China. It has become a hotbed of counterfeit components and other criminal activity. Guangdong is another region of China where this is happening. The Chinese government appears to be doing little or nothing to interfere. Many companies pop up just long enough to do a couple of shady deals and then vanish.
Our company buys wholesale quantities of electronic components, occasionally (but warily) from the Shenzen region of China. We have received re-marked and counterfeit parts which are accurate enough to get by our modest QA process. In one instance, a military customer of ours discovered a very expensive counterfeit part via industrial X-Ray before mounting it on their boards. As a result, we lost face with a good customer and had to take legal action to get our money back from our stateside supplier. Our supplier was stuck with the bill, as they purchased/imported the parts from Shenzen.
What ever you do, never pay up front. This sounds like a no brainer, but these people will feed on the buyer's desperation. If they won't accept NET 1 terms, then run away. Once a deal goes bad, you have no legal recourse. Buyer Beware.