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Unmasking Mis-Labeled CPUs

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the it's-what's-inside-that-counts dept.

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?"

4 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Don't overlook the local scumbags by goldmeer · · Score: 4

    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

  2. MrSmiley (slightly offtopic) by TurkishGeek · · Score: 5

    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.

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    Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
  3. Don't overlook the local scumbags by Skyshadow · · Score: 4
    Well, maybe Dell and Gateway don't overclock PCs, but there are a lot of little local PC shops that do.

    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?

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    --
    Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
  4. I worked at a Best Buy store by Haven · · Score: 5

    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.