 There's nothing quite like new hardware. The smell, the feeling, the... How did this happen? Not only is this completely the wrong model of CPU, it doesn't even fit in the motherboard that it's supposed to. I mean, you did everything right. You knew the secondhand back alley deal from Craigslist Joe was a bad idea, and you bought it from a reputable store only to get the wrong thing anyway. At least that's what happened if your Reddit user Merzus, who alleges that the Ryzen 5 3600 that they bought from Best Buy is so fake that installing it would damage your system. But how bad could it really be? To find out, we contacted Merzus and actually bought the chip off of them so we could test it for ourselves. You know what's not a risk though? Trying out our sponsor, GlassWire. Are you having poor quality video meetings? Use GlassWire to instantly see what apps are wasting your bandwidth during your meeting and block them. Get 25% off today using code Linus at the link below. On the surface, everything about Merzus' CPU seemed normal. The box was sealed, the product intact, and the laser markings on the IHS clearly said, Ryzen 3600. Even the included sticker was right. So far so good then, right? Well, no. It appears that Merzus may have fallen victim to a scam that has been around as long as I've been making videos. Back in 2010, I actually covered a similar incident where a new egg customer received what appears to be a heat sink shaped piece of plaster with a picture of a CPU fan glued to it along with a picture of a CPU. So the idea here then is pretty simple. The thief somehow gets access to an individual box or even a full carton of product, swaps the valuable stuff out with something convincing enough to fool an inattentive warehouse worker, stashes the carton at the bottom of the pile, and flips the real CPUs and coolers on eBay. By the time customers start complaining, the scammer has probably moved on to their next grift. But here's the thing. There's no plaster here, and I mean, this is a real enough looking CPU, isn't it? How bad could it be? Ah, to find out, we must look closer. For starters, the culprit appears to have left a fingerprint on the bottom of the pre-applied thermal compound, but we don't have a forensic lab, so that's not gonna do us a whole lot of good. Let's take a closer look at the chip itself then. Here is a real Ryzen 5 3600, and if you look, you'll notice that our fake one actually doesn't have nearly as many pins on the bottom of it. Not only that, but there's some little gaps in the pins. See that? They are in completely different spaces. These scammers clearly don't pay as much attention to the fine details as we do in our merch, like this CPU shirt at LTTstore.com. But taking a closer look at our imposter 3600, what is it then? Some of you might recognize the old AM3 layout, which means that this could very well be a genuine AMD processor, just an older one. So what exactly is it then? Does it even work? To find out, we dusted off our old Crosshair 5 formula motherboard and some DDR3 memory and threw on an RTX 2060 Super, because just how bad could the bottleneck be, right? Bad heat sink won't work, that's the M4. Then we'll compound on here. This is our $200 CPU. Don't wanna damage it, anything like that. Ooh, full speed fan spin on the GPU, not a great sign for your CPU actually working. Oh, shaved the finger hairs off. This is not what we were expecting to happen. Actually, we had it up and running yesterday, ran Cinebench, Counter-Strike. Holy crap, it's back alive. I don't have the heat sink attached. It turned on, hold on, hold on, I wanna get... Okay, I pulled a classic troubleshooting step. When you're having an issue with a cable or a connection, don't just reseat it, reseat it a few times, because what that can do is it can actually scratch some of the any corrosion or oxidation off of the surface of the contacts, and it can make it so they'll make better, they'll be more conductive. So I put the CPU in and out a whole bunch of times and... Oh, wow, what a deal, what a bargain. We got us an Athlon 2 X2 B22 CPU, an 11 year old processor. I mean, this thing's almost old enough to drive. Cinebench, let's find out how many... Oh, wow, did you see that? Now, Windows 10 Search is a steaming pile of garbage, but that was something else. Okay, oh, Lordy, you put Cinebench R20 on here? Oh, that's not gonna be a good experience. I mean, that was just opening a folder. Is this an SSD? This is an SSD. This is a Crucial BX. I mean, it's not a fast SSD, but good Lord, that felt hard drive-like. Oh, this makes sense. This makes sense. Not only is this a very old CPU, but look at these temps. We were running at 88 degrees with a TJ Max of 90. This thing is probably thermal throttling. Nevermind probably, we can see it dropping down to 800 megahertz here from time to time. Wait, hold on, is it running? Yeah, it's mounted on there. Oh, there it goes, there it goes, there it goes. That takes about half an hour to complete, so I won't be sitting here staring at it. The score is 162. We ran this beforehand, and to put that in context, the Cinebench database has a Ryzen 7 1700X-A core that gets 3,450. That's first-gen Ryzen. So this is like maybe 1 20th of the performance that we should have gotten for lucky. Let's play some video games. CS go, or like CS wait. CS, come on. Okay, all right. Oh man, this is rough, because I'm gonna play with bots, which actually puts additional load on the CPU. Sorry, poor CPU. Now, all I was trying to do was use Microsoft Office or whatever, totally fine. But I would expect to pay $200 for the entire computer and monitor, not just the CPU. That's the problem. Oh boy, well, I don't know if runs is the right word. It's more of a jogging-like experience. Oh wow, look at that, they gunned that guy down. Oh, reload. Do you see how long it took to start that reloading animation after it stopped actually firing? Headshot again, look at this. Got my like auto-aim on here. Got my hacks, Athlon 2 hacks. I think it's time to stop. Oh, and you, whoever you are, switching CPUs out. Shame on you, it's time for you to stop. But you won't stop, will you? We've seen multiple anecdotes of people receiving the incorrect CPU with the heat spreader swapped so it looks like the right one, just like this. And let's show you guys how this scam works. First, you need to obtain an old crappy CPU, kind of like this. Then you're gonna need a delidding tool. We're using this one from Der Bauer. Well, I guess you don't really need a delidding tool, it just makes it easier. If you have a razor blade or a vice and a lot of patience, you can remove your IHS that way. IHS is short for heat spreader. Really? So whatever the last thing in the frame buffer was, it's still outputting it. This has no CPU in it, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, now I'm... We're just gonna leave that there. Oh shoot, this isn't the version of the delidding tool that formally works with AMD CPUs, but we're gonna go for it anyway. You can see the bolt doesn't reach because it doesn't go over the thing anyway. The point is, I'm just gonna try and do this by hand. We have a vice right there, what are you doing? I'm just, I'm doing it the manly way. If only you had a vice. Okay. Ah! Hold on, okay, you know what? There's a vice here. See you later. Okay. Da, da, da. And it's gone. Something to note is that yours might not come off this easily and I would not recommend delidding AMD CPUs that have soldered IHSs because the odds of getting a performance improvement are low and the odds of damaging it are significantly higher. Of course, this one has clearly already been delidded once so it popped right off. And you can see right here that these clearly don't match. Our CPU has a single die and our IHS actually has. You can see where they scraped the existing solder off, both the CPU die and the IO chip, which are separate in AMD Ryzen CPUs. Yeah. To their credit though, they did go and put some, admittedly, very crappy, dry, flaky thermal compound on this, which sort of raises the question, why? Why go to all this work when you could just ship a hunk of plaster? Well, there are a few reasons for that. First and foremost, it's harder for a warehouse worker to identify the problem packages this way. Every single unit would need to be pulled and either carefully inspected or even hand tested. Also, as we discussed in our fake AliExpress GPU video, if the product works at least a little, it can buy the scammer some time while the customer attempts to troubleshoot the fake device. On marketplaces with third-party sellers, for example, that can delay the shutdown of their store, allowing them to make more money in the meantime before they have to start over. Those graphics cards worked enough to at least boot into Windows, for example, which might buy them a week of going back and forth with the customer. Oh, did you try new drivers, et cetera, et cetera. Now, as for this CPU, well, I would say that it's possible an unwitting victim might try to force it into an AM4 socket, bending the pins in the process. If they didn't know better, they might think that they were guilty of destroying it rather than realizing that they had gotten a fake product. I mean, I wrote that earlier, but I don't even know if I, I actually just don't really understand why they bothered putting all this work into it. You know what? I wonder if it's like a criminal code thing where if you, wherever they're from, maybe if you ship the wrong thing, as opposed to just a brick, it's like you could, yeah, there's plausible deniability or something like that. It's gotta be something like that. Cause this is not insignificant amount of work. The good news is that because AMD is PGA or pin grid array, the risk to your motherboard and the rest of your components is minimal. And given that an Athlon X2 these days is worth about five to $10, it's not much of a loss. But if this was an Intel product and you had tried to install it without realizing the problem, you could easily have damaged your motherboard. And nobody wants the headache of explaining why they should be allowed to return their motherboard with bent pins when they are already trying to return their fake CPU. So with all that out of the way, while we know that Merseus ended up with a scam CPU from Best Buy, what we don't know is how. Let's talk through the possibilities. I can say with confidence that Best Buy, the organization had nothing to do with this. These kinds of incidents can have devastating negative PR effects. And realistically, they're going to have to ship a working CPU to the customer eventually. So why bother putting in all this work? Beyond that, well, it's hard to say. A worker at Best Buy's distributor, that's possible, but security in those places tends to be crazy tight. So I doubt it. A Best Buy retail employee, that's another possibility. Theft from retail workers is a significant problem. I remember this team at NCIX that worked together, actually. A customer would come in, walk around the store, browse for a bit, interact with the staff. And then after a little while, an employee who was an associate, obviously, would call out a bogus ticket number, and then the customer would walk up to the counter, take a bag of hardware, and walk right out the door. I mean, everyone's busy. You don't notice the gear missing until the monthly count or whatever. So it's really hard to pick up on something like that, especially when the security footage looks so normal. And especially if that rogue employee eventually returned the thing back to the shelf, but in an altered state. What about a courier? That's possible. Couriers do have unsupervised access to packages, but the outer carton is often shipped with tamper-proof tape, and they're almost always under video surveillance, as controversial as that particular issue might be. On top of that, opening someone else's mail is a federal offense in the US, and probably not worth the 200 bucks that they stand to make here. I'd say a more realistic scenario is a previous customer might've bought the chip, swapped out the real one, packed it back up nicely, and returned it to Best Buy, who put it back on the shelf, thinking everything looked okay. Which kind of leads us to a couple more uncomfortable possibilities. Merzuse lives in Sri Lanka. Best Buy doesn't ship to Sri Lanka, so actually the CPU was shipped to Merzuse's brother in Maryland, who then forwarded it. Now I don't know the guy, and I wouldn't accuse him of any wrongdoing, but since we're talking about possibilities, it is technically possible that his brother was involved in this. And while we're at it, it's also possible that Merzuse is in on it. If that were the case, though, I don't think a refund from Best Buy was really the agenda, because if so, why bother shipping it to Sri Lanka first? It is possible, however, that they wanted some Reddit clout, and this seemed like an easy way to stir up some outrage. I have no reason to believe that's what happened, and if I did, I wouldn't have given Merzuse $200 to buy a new CPU and give me this one, but I've seen much more appalling stunts than that, so maybe I'm just cynical, but it is possible. You know what else is possible? Telling you about our sponsor. TainMobil has sponsored today's video and has new rates that make it easier than ever to see how much you can save by switching. Their data plans start at $15 a month with unlimited data for only $45, and they've got their new Set12 plan with 12 gigs of data for only $35. If you prefer the old way with their pay for what you use plans, they're still there. They're called TainMobil's Flex plans now, and they charge just $5 a gig. Data can even be shared if you have a family plan, so the more phones you connect, the more you can save. You get the same nationwide coverage in the US and award-winning customer service, and they also do some fun promos. Ting is giving away a brand new Galaxy S21 plus 5G and some Ting swag to lucky fans living in the US. So visit linus.ting.com. We're gonna have that link below to get $25 in Ting service credit and to enter to win a Galaxy S21 plus 5G. Sometimes ordering CPUs is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get. If you guys had fun with this video, make sure you check out our testing out mystery Chinese CPUs video. Or actually, you might also enjoy our fake GPUs video from AliExpress. That's a good one too. We'll have those linked down below.