There is a new trend in the Chinese gray market, which is the sale of video cards and processors without the main chip. South Korean overclocker Safedisk bought an Intel Core i9-14900K to see if he could find a gold chip, but when he tested it, he discovered that it didn’t have any chips.
The overclocker is one of the biggest in the world, with very high scores on HWbot, being the current number 1 in South Korea and number 3 in the world. It is very likely that he has several models in his laboratory, but he wanted to take the chance without imagining that it was a scam.
When testing the Intel Core i9-14900K and seeing that he couldn’t even get it to boot, the professional overclocker decided to do a delid, which is basically opening the processor by removing its IHS. Inside, an empty space, where the silicon chip should be.
Safedisk received its processor in a package covered in bubble wrap and a label that said the warranty would be void if the CPU was opened, which is unusual. Advertised scam, since when opening, the user would realize what it was about.
Scams have been appearing more and more
At the beginning of the year, we showed here that this type of scam was already happening in China. In this specific case, it is the sale of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 video cards without the GPU and video memories.
One of the Hong Kong victims said that the card, in this case an RTX 4090, was sold for the equivalent of US$1,660. Upon receiving the plaque, “Mr. Hong”, upon seeing that the product did not work, he even went to the authorities, who did not help him. Therefore, he sought out China’s specialized press to report his case.
The situation led to other cases, which appeared as the days went by, just showing that this has been more normal than we imagine in Chinese territory. Instead of those who fell thinking twice when they saw the prices, which were generally considerably lower, they ended up buying anyway.
We are talking about two high-end components, the GeForce RTX 4090 and the Intel Core i9-14900K, which are not cheap. As they are high-performance SKUs, it is understandable to fall for the scam. Who doesn’t want to save money, right? The South Korean overclocker will have to keep looking for the gold chip to achieve greater results in his overclocks.
Via: Tom’s Hardware
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Source: https://www.adrenaline.com.br/intel/overclocker-profissional-compra-cpu-intel-core-i9-14900k-sem-chip/
