Slashdot Mirror
Unmasking Mis-Labeled CPUs
Syniq writes "The folks at Tom's Hardware had an interesting story about a new free utility from Intel that checks the frequency of your processor to let you know if that PIII-500 is actually a PIII-500 or a PII-300 over-clocked and relabeled by the retailer to snag a little extra cash. An interesting story, but is this really all that common? Has anyone personally experienced this from an actual company (i.e. Dell, Gateway, Compaq, etc) and not from MrSmiley on Ebay?"
Intel's number in the US/Canada is:
1-800-321-4044
While fraud is illegal in all 50 states, you may find it hard to get overburdened prosecuting attorney's to wave there "I care" sticks at these people.
-Joe
Actually, it turns out that a lot of PC games have CD copyprotection, and it's not the kind where "Insert CD to continue." [Well, you need the CD in it to play the game... so much bloat...]
Basically, they do lots of standard fudging techniques (680 MB CDs, invalid TOC, etc), plus a few unique ones - unreadable tracks (tracks burned such that they don't conform to ISO spec, or tracks with bad checksums [similar to PlayStation]) that are checked at run time, or digital signatures/keys that checksum the entire CD in such a way that copies will always fail (how, I do not know).
Check out: GameCopyWorld (www.gamecopyworld.com) for more info.
Standard disclaimers apply. (BTW, making image copies of CDs, even your backup copy, can take ages because of these protections [CD-ROM drive just grinds to a halt reading errors on a CD]).
If the K6-3 is anything like the K6-2, then it'll have the processor type and speed on the top of the chip, in nice embossed letters that can't possibly be peeled off or otherwise removed like a label or sticker. Are Intel processors marked in such a permanent manner, if at all? I have to ask, because all the recent machines I've got are K6-2s. :)
:)
Of course, your system may have a heatsink/fan that's pretty much impossible to remove (with or without invalidating your warranty).
Also, the BIOS only reports what the jumpers on the motherboard set it to use. I had to underclock my PC to be able to install Win95 on my K6-2-450 due to a fun bug in Win95; the BIOS reported the processor as being a K6-233. Before you all flame me, the ONLY reason I installed Win95 was to be able to play Half-Life and use WorldCraft...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
The part that is illegal is the vendor is making claims in advertising that are verifiably false. Unfortunately, they can write some fairly "sharp" things that are misleading, but not actually false.
The utility is definitely good for Intel, as it can provide them information that can allow them to pursue people that are overclocking or misreporting things. That can work for both good and for ill...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
It's the same as claiming a car is 300 HP, when the only time it get to 300 HP is when you inject Nitrous Oxide in the cylinders. The problem is:
1) Getting the prosecutor to understand.
2) Getting the prosecutor to care.
It's a fairly clear-cut case of Fraud, at least in my opinion.
Well, there really IS a "MrSmiley" on Ebay and he seems to be a honest Ebay user, judging by his Ebay feedback. Perhaps I have too much time on my hands today, but do you think it's completely germane to mention someone's Ebay name as an example for crooks that pop up on Ebay from time to time?
I guess we should be more careful when we make up those names.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
My current dreambox was put together from parts, too...I got my processor, a C300A, from Fantasy Computing, a small computer reseller. It took a few days extra to get it--the lady who ran the store revealed that she hadn't been able to get the one she'd originally sold me and had to scramble to find another--but it overclocked to 450 MHz like a dream, and still does. I wholeheartedly recommend this company.
With as many things as customarily go wrong for me with computer upgrades, it's nice that this, of all things, went right.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I'm not sure why, but there are an awful lot of really crooked people who run local PC sale/repair places -- it's as bad as trying to locate an honest mechanic. It's probably for the same reason; more people don't really understand either of 'em to any real depth.
I was in our scummy local place (needed an ethernet card Right Now) and I actually saw a PC being marketed as a 500 Mhz, and down the tag a bit it said "Clock Speed Increased for Maximum Performance". It made me sick 'cause I could see my folks dropping $2000 and getting screwed by these kind of scumballs.
Is there some kind of 800 number you can call to report this sort of thing? Hell, is it even against the law?
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
It's easy to see how it'd be possible to get away with this, particularly with home users. The SOHO set tend to be less pathological about bleeding edge equipment; they keep their pc until it won't run most of the new games. Upgrading from a P120 to anyPII/III/Whatever gives a demonstrable increase in speed, so the user is less likely to notice if it's a 400 or a 450 or a 500...
Of course, it'd take bastardy of a truly prodigious nature to take advantage of this; the third time you try it with a geek your name is probably mud, so you'd have to be very careful about whom you sold the dodgy systems to.
Of course, there's always the Apple manoeuvre; drop the speed by 50,000,000 Hz across the board.
I'm sorry to see that it's an Intel utility for Intel chips. I just bought a K6-III-based system, and I'd love to have some verification that it's really a K6-III, and not a K6-2 or something else entirely. Operating systems just identify it as a K6-family chip. It does claim to be a K6-III in the BIOS, but that would seem to be fairly easy to fudge.
Also, I doubt that the Compaqs and Dells of the world misidentify what they're selling, but how many home users really buy from them? I bought from a web retailer who offered a competitive price and a good warranty, but I have very little information on the company itself. Maybe this is just as dumb as buying from eBay, but I'd like to think there's some kind of middle ground.
-bc
During my lean times,(when I couldn't afford the latest technological toy) I've done work at various Mom+Pop computer shops, and I can tell you that overclocking isn't exactly foreign to them. Granted, with the 'locked' (grin) PIIs and PIIIs, things have become a bit more difficult, but the practice remains. In one instance, a shop had orders for a dozen custom-built K6-2 450's. Unfortunatly, they were short four processors and didn't have time to order from their regular vendor. They substituted 350s, tagged the heatsink down with cyanoacrylate, and overclocked them. The owner figured when/if they came back with instability problems, he'd swap out for the correct chip, blame it on the customers inevitable Windows goff and cover his losses with the repair fee.
In another, a store was selling two identical K6-3 systems, both containing 400mhz processors, but labelling some as 400s and some as 450s. Plus, they were charging $70 more for the '450'.
I've also seen stores passing 66mhz SDRAM off for 100, and NON-PC-100 for PC-100. Some boards will run 66 well enough on a 100mhz bus (DFI, most MVP3 based, etc) and will sell those customers the slower memory at the faster price.
You don't even want me to get into the older horror stories, like the fellow who was substituting V chips and a manual clock tweak (in the customers old board) for a new 286. Or the woman who just couldn't sell a bunch of DX4-120 systems, so she stuck a sign reading 'Pentium 60 Closeout' and sold them fifty bucks cheaper than a REAL P60. This same woman just LOVED when the 5x86 came out; Now she could refit $20 DX2 MBs with 5x86-133's and truthfully label the computer as a '133mhz Pentium-Clone'.(Note the hyphen)
.sig: Now legally binding!
I worked for best buy as a service technician, and we got tons of Compaq computers coming back that just died. The processor had died... upon inspection they had put AMD k6-2 350's in the machines and clocked them up to 400. Compaq had to buy the people all new computers with true 400s in them. I had to give a statement to compaqs lawyers saying that they were 350s clocked up and sold as 400s.
Labels and etchings have been counter-fitted over, and the ultimate speed of the CPU is not generally known at mask time.
However, a *physcial* tab could be put on the chip along the lines of
500 450 400 350
etc. All tabs above the rated speed would be broken off, leaving the "true" speed identified.
I remember those days. For a while, I had a Epson(Olivetti) XT board with a V-20 (Siemens stamp, stolen out of a Wyse terminal) clocked to a whopping 23.2MHz. As a bare chip, I could only ever get it up to about 18MHz. A pair of smallish heatsinks stolen from a 12v power-supply and some Radio-Shack 'Heat-sink' compound are what made the final 5.2 MHz difference. I would have gone farther, but that was the fastest clock I could get out of the oscillator.
If I remember, the V-20 was designed for a 16MHz clock, but I may be wrong!
.sig: Now legally binding!
Besides I think that intel machines are more oriented to math intensive operations wheras AMD chips are focused on graphics rendering.
You are dealing with obsolete information. This may have been true of the K6 family and earlier, but the Athlon's FPU beats the Pentium III convincingly and across the board even for pure numerical calculation. The question really is, in the long run can AMD stay ahead since they have considerably smaller resources than Intel. This will become especially difficult for AMD once the Itanium ships, because it looks like AMD has a long road ahead to build a competitive 64 bit architecture. Luckily for AMD in the short run it will be quite a while before the Itanium is much of a factor due to costs and availability of software that will take advantage of it.
This could be arguing apples and oranges, but I think what I'm really trying to say is that people need to know a little more about what they buy. That is why the magazine Consumer Reports exists.
But what about those situations where the chip has been overclocked and there is no fine print? Maybe it is time that BIOS chips reported the CPU configuration. It seems that overclocking has gotten much more exposure in the last few years, and it seems that a new chipset comes out for each new processor, so why not create a hook in the chipset (for the BIOSs' sake) that reports what the chip should be running at and what it is running at? In the startup screen of your computer, report if the machine is running above it's spec'd speed. It'd be a benefit to the hackers out there who like to overclock because they can see what they've achieved, and it would be informative to the consumer because they could see that their machine is the correct chip. If Intel can write a program to detect their CPU configurations, then this should be a snap.
I guess the big thing is that Intel has been cracking down on overclockers for some time new because (supposedly) of the abuses by the resellers overclocking and repackaging. This at least would bring to the surface situations which might normally be hidden without extra software. Maybe it'll hinder Intel's efforts to block overclocking? Who knows.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I am glad to see this, I am about to purchase a 466 celeron bare bones system from a web based company. I havent bought computer equipment since 1992 because of money issues. Atleast with this I can be careful about overclocking issues.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
Processors are remarked and overclocked; but the culprit usually isn't the local mom-and-pop computer store, but their supplier. There are many cpu-selling wholesalers and middlemen in the world. Some buy trays of Intel OEM CPUs and re-sell them. Or they buy them from somebody else and then re-sell them. Usually, these folks are working on tight margins, well below ten percent. Many local computer stores use these people as a source of supply, and many get burned. Usually, the CPU gets passed on to the consumer, it works as advertised, and that's the end of it.
On the other hand, I've seen some incredibly egregious examples. When Pentium-166's were current, it was almost impossible to buy a legit one for a while. People were buying 133's, and adding $100 to the price by calling them 166's. An educated eye could tell the difference, but you really had to know what you were looking for.
It hasn't been as bad during the PII-PIII-Celeron era; the clock-locking has helped, especially in the US. But there are ways to defeat it, and since you can make upwards of $100 doing so, it's worth some effort.
For example, I once bought two Intel Retail Boxed PII-400 CPUs from my local mom-and-pop shop. Usually I would go through authorized channels, but I didn't have time, and buying the retail boxed versions is fairly safe. But not completely. When I went to build the systems using these CPUs, I noticed that the two boxes had slightly different shades of purple. Upon further examination, I found that one was marked "100 MHz Sustem Bus", complete with misspelling. There were also slight differences in some typefaces. Clearly, one was a fake. Since I was a regular customer, I simply returned it to the dealer, and they exchanged it for me without hesitation. But it helped that I caught it before opening the box; if I had only bought one CPU, I might not have noticed.
So, yeah, I buy all my CPU's either from a trusted dealer where they know me, or from name-brand channels. No, you won't get re-marked CPUs from Dell or Gateway, nor from authorized wholesalers like Tech Data. If you buy retail boxed, you're probably safe with the larger mail-order houses like CDW or warehouse.com who have relationships with the manufacturers. But as you slide into the gray market, the odds begin to turn against you.
Here's a page that details some re-marking schemes. Slightly out of date, but interesting nonetheless.in q3 my amd k6-2 450 sucks
However, the K6-2 is also a previous generation, the K6-3 is a little more competitive in floating point and overall performance to the Celeron and Pentium II/III than the K6-2 and original K6 were. The K6-2 is, on the other hand usually significantly cheaper than even Celerons. The Athlon was just the first time in a long time that AMD has actually convincingly beat Intel in flat out performance. In price/performance, AMD has always been very competitive.
I've been going to a place for years now that's local (PC's for everyone in the Boston area.. just a customer, not an employee yaddah yaddah) and haven't had a problem with them. In fact, I picked up several chunks of what will be my dual Celeron system from them the other day.
One of the first times I bought parts via mailorder, I did get burned... I got a 486 Moboard with fake cache RAM on it. This was a scam going around years ago, when cache RAM was soldered onto the board. They would take 8K (or something) ram chips, solder them onto the board, then hack the BIOS to make it look like there was more (I forget how much cache was usual back in those days... 64K? 32K?). Needless to say, the system locked hard very often. Eventually, I pinned down the problem when I started getting internal errors from GCC while recompiling the Linux kernel.
Local places, if they do rip you off, are at least in arm's reach. You can go to the attorney general of your state and hope they'll take action. You could even take them to small claims court. You could warn your local Better Business Burea about them. Action against a company that's in another state is a lot harder.
And, finally, you get what you pay for... my local place does charge higher rates than the web vendors... but you know they've been around, and that they will be around in the future...
I had heard that this was only done for PC's outside of the country...I don't remember ever hearing that this was done inside the US?
Either way, my Packard Bell 75 would only overclock to 90. At even 100 Mhz it would barely post...
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
That's easy enough.
If the CPU is square shaped and fits into a socket on the motherboard, it's a K-6... If the CPU is in a big black box and plugs into a slot in the motherboard, that's an Athlon.
That's all assuming that they're AMD chips, but that's not too hard to verify.
Great! Intel has always said they multiplier (bus speed x multplier - CPU speed) locked the Celeron's to prevent these dealer fraud problems. They didn't care about overclockers.
:)
Anything that makes it easy to detect the fraud will mean that it's harder for Intel to have a leg to stand on for preventing overclocking of there chips. After all it's easy to detect fraud, right?
Call me silly, but I took great pleasure in spending on other things the $400 I saved not buying a 450mhz PII and overclocking a Celeron 300 instead
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
A while bank I ordered a PII400 from a web-based vendor. What I got was a re-marked PII233 (or PII300, can't remember). I called Intel and explained my situation. They asked me to call the vendor back and ask for a refund or exchange. The vendor told me to send them the CPU and they would "test it". Right. I called Intel back and they asked me to send them the processor. They sent me a boxed PII400 (with fan). The one I had received from the vendor was an OEM cpu. From talking to the lady at the Intel fraud department, I got the impresssion that this was a common occurence.
The relabelling problem is a serious one for the Do-it-yourself audience, and I suspect a large number of Slashdot reader are also into DIY.
I, personally, have never bought a prebuilt system. (neither have I ever owned an Intel processor). I get my parts from local hole-in-the-wall component stores which may be shadier than they look. I still wonder what kind of K6 I have in this system. Its supposed to be a 200, but the old K6's were very easy to relabel, so it might be a 166. I guess it doesn't much matter. I have run it at 166-233 without any troubles, but I do wonder.
Someone like Dell or Gateway would never try relabelling. If anyone ever found out, the company would lose all credibility with their customers and their market would completely dry up. Its the local companies, which often come and go quite quickly, which may be interested in some quick money and not too concerned about reputation.
And I suppose its nice for Intel to provide this, but its really for them and not us. If the customer is willing to pay the huge premium that Intel charges for their high-end chips, than Intel really wants to see that money. That is where they make the real money...the massive margin on their current top-of-the-line.
out of things to mutter,
--Lenny
For those who mentioned getting bad hardware because they bought the cheapest stuff they could find on Pricewatch, there's another site you should look at before you decide to where to buy. Check out Reseller Ratings to find out how lots of electronic retailers are rated by their customers. When I was shopping for PC parts a couple months ago, I went back and forth between these two sites extensively to find the best place to buy, and I didn't have any problems with my purchases (yet) even though I ended up buying hardware from 7 or 8 different sites. They list an absolute ranking for each site in several categories, and also display any submitted comments in case you're more interested in anecdotal rankings of the sites.
I should point out that I'm not affiliated with either site, I've just been happy with the information found there. Your experiences may vary (and I'm sure I'll hear about it below :).
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
How many of you have taken the cover off your computer case and taken out a manufacturer-placed add-on card with a better one (ie better video card, sound card, whatever)? If you have, you have probably voided your warranty on the entire system.
The reason Dell and Gateway can't let you *totally* configure your system (meaning, I want this video card, not any of the ones you guys offer) is because they are required by law to sell you a working product. Otherwise, the corporation is subject to a false-advertising lawsuit.
So, if Dell and Gateway and Compaq are overclocking their CPUs, they had better watch out when the thing starts crashing and the CPU fails much sooner than its MTBF.
On the other hand, if you buy a CPU, and place it on your mobo that you bought from a mobo manufacturer, why should it be illegal to overclock it? Yes, I might void my warranty, but it's my property - I should be able to change it. Is it illegal to hack at my Playstation or something similar to make it faster? I don't think so - I bought the object, I should be able to change it, granted I understand the consequence of losing my warranty.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
Hey, I resemble that remark.
Hey, leave comments about my mother out of this!
As someone who worked in a computer store as a techie as well as a salesman (much against my better judgement) I can concur that some of those I worked with were completely unscrupulous when it came to these things. However I made a point of being honest when selling machines, because the profit that goes to the company and any commission you get is categorically NOT worth losing your job over. To keep a long story short, the company I worked for folded soon after I left (I hope it wasn't anything to do with me?!), but many people came back to me, and I built them machines as a freelancer for a year before I went to college.. Moral of the story? If you can find a blatant geek at your local PC store, you'd hopefully do well to trust them. Avoid the most obviously shark-like salesmen, and always, if you can, take someone who knows what they're talking about with you, so you don't get blinded by jargon.
I just thought I'd stick up for the honest small retailers (or their even smaller-fry employees) that could be tarred by a broad brush here.
On top of this, I'm from the UK, I don't know if the US system is any different though.....
l8rz,
Tc.
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
As if CDs had a proper copyprotection scheme, and even if they did, wouldn't hold.
[I think they actually have one]
Some CD-ROM's have copy protection schemes. This is especially common with game console CD-ROMs like the Sega Saturn. Even so, this is fairly weak since most CD readers can make a direct digital copy of any readable CD, which you can then write to a CD-R. I don't know of any audio cd's that have copy protection, although you need to be able to rip the digital samples off the CD (some CD readers used to interface directly with the sound card).
In the end CD audio copy protection is a moot point, since most CD audio is made into MP3s and if one can play a CD on a computer one can make an MP3.
DVD copy protection is a bit more clever, but they also have the problem that anything that can be displayed on a computer can be converted into another digital form.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
It says my Pentium III 600MHz is actually just a G4 running VPC. Sheeit.