 Engineering samples or review samples. They're cherry-picked so that the media outlets like Linus Tech Tips will see inflated performance and overclocking numbers so that you, yes you Jerry, will get suckered into buying a new CPU every year. Right? Well, that's what people keep telling us and this common knowledge has been around for years now. So today, in our inaugural installment of Sh**t Viewers Say, we are going to either prove that there is something to this or debunk this myth once and for all. Thanks to Zotac, by the way, for bringing us today's video. The MEC-1 PC is an ultra-slim desktop built for gaming featuring a sleek, robotic-themed design. Check it out at the link below to learn more. So here's how we decided to run our test. We grabbed our sample Core i5-8400 and, not to play favorites, our sample Ryzen 5 1600X. Then we went to the local NCI- Oh, sorry. Memory Express to buy retail chips of the same to compare them against. For your peace of mind, we will upload the entire uncut clip of us buying the chips and running our tests on them. We're going to have that linked below. Anyway, let's talk about why it might make sense or might not. For a company to seed reviewers a superior sample. Now, the obvious answer we hear all the time is that they would get articles boasting of better performance numbers or a better overall user experience in that initial oh-so-important wave of launch videos and articles, enticing consumers to open up their wallets, all while not actually having to provide that level of performance or polish at retail. But conspiracy theories aside, would this actually make business sense? Imagine this. You've got a lemonade stand where you sell the freshest, tastiest lemonade on the block on day one. And then you swap it out with Lemon Pledge. Now, a lot of people are going to show up to buy on the second day. But as soon as your reputation for selling what is literally furniture polish spreads, the kids across the street who were selling cheap, powdered lemonade the whole time are going to take the bulk of the market share. Now, we're not saying this has never happened. Think back to Watch Dogs and No Man's Sky. At E3, both Ubisoft and Sony respectively showed off beautifully complex worlds with tons of graphical detail. And then both of them ended up being significantly simplified upon release. Now, while in some industries it is possible to get away with this kind of BS, in general, the negative PR has the potential to completely stall future sales. So it is not a risk to be taken lightly. And in electronics, the up to multi-billion dollar investment that goes into designing and fabricating a processor design makes this kind of switcheroo an economic impossibility. Like it's not a different paint job. So then let's look at one of the other theories. Maybe they're just taking golden samples off of what is otherwise the regular production line. Now, that one is much more likely. But it doesn't really hold up to closer scrutiny either. From my experience and others, earlier CPUs are produced at the tail end of the manufacturing learning process, when viable yields are lower. And compared to the more mature units that come later, can actually require more voltage to maintain a specific clock speed. Not to mention that they might have poorer memory compatibility, or might output more heat at the same performance levels. Even the couple of weeks between early sample shipping out and retail availability can result in improvements. Now, there have been and there always will be exceptions to this. But it is far more likely that we are dealing with the same silicon lottery as any other CPU. Because you got to remember, even on the same wafer, no two processors will have identical characteristics. So if it doesn't make any sense, why do people still think it's happening? Most of the time, as far as we can tell, it just seems to be a fanboy argument, justifying why someone disagrees with the results being published by the dishonest media. And frankly, we're just so tired of hearing it that we not once, but twice, the first time we bunged up the footage so we had to start over, including buying two more CPUs. Anthony! Not once, but twice, went out and bought these CPUs so we could show you this. TLDR. For gaming, we found basically no variance in frame rates, even in DirectX 12 mode, while Synthetix actually favored our retail chips. As for productivity tests, on the Intel side, our chips traded blows back and forth, but it's not a clear-cut victory for either side, and we put this down to normal chip or even run-to-run variance due to the dynamic and reactive nature of Turbo Boost. And then as for Team Red, it was pretty much even across the board. So for better or for worse, AMD appears to be shipping exactly the same product today that they were in April of last year. And then to back that up, we even tried overclocking. Both of our AMD chips, our Intel ones were locked, but both of our AMD chips hit identical clocks at identical voltages and identical temperatures. They even crashed at identical settings. So, in summary then, this conspiracy theory is busted for the two major CPU players, and while nothing that we've said today is going to prevent people from making these arguments in the future, what I hope is that it has at least armed the rest of you with the ammunition that you need to shut them down once and for all. It doesn't make business sense, it doesn't make engineering sense, it just doesn't make sense. But you know what does make sense? Switching to Ting! Ting is the mobile carrier that's focused on customer service and customer satisfaction. When you call Ting, if you have an issue for whatever reason, you do not speak to a robot, you get put through directly to a person, and you don't pay extra for the privilege. In fact, the average Ting bill is only 23 bucks a month per device because of the way they bill. You pay only for what you use. Now, if you're stuck in a contract and you switch to Ting, they'll cover 25% of your cancellation fee up to 75 bucks, and if you use our link, linus.ting.com, to try out their savings calculator and see if you'll save money, you can actually get another 25 bucks in service credit or towards a new device. So go try it out. So thanks for watching guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. Right, that one. Yeah. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Maybe literally these ones. Maybe we'll put them on eBay. I don't know. Also linked down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join. We have so many processors now.