Came here because Dave recommended. Why the Eff hadn't the YT algorithm suggested your channel ages ago, given my interests??? Congrats on a very fascinating channel, mate. Cheers!

Ironically these fake CPUs must worth a lot more than the originals. Collectors are strange, man.

The worst crime is when they chemically strip the gold off the pins and then sell the chip on ebay (now with gray pins).

This is like lottery tickets, except you scratched yourself a lower clocked CPU.

I remember working in a "mom&pop" computer shop in the late 90's and we got several fake chips, some of them from reputable distributors that got the short end of the stick ordering parts. In the end I got so proficient at spotting the fakes I could tell them just by glancing at the reflection of the light on the surface of the chip: usually the fakes were a bit shinier and usually had like a rectangular extra-shiny spot around where the fake engraving would occur - my guess is that they used some kind of fill-and-smooth technique to hide the old engraving. Thing is, with active cooling these processors were easily overclocked up to 200mhz without losing stability (yes; back then you could get a 100% boost by overclocking a processor!) and by the mid-90's Intel binning was mostly about filling niches, as most of the processors where greatly underrated (so, most pentiums were capable of operating @150mhz, but intel needed lower parts because there was demand for the cheaper processors) so probably the clients would have not noticed if we installed these parts.

Repackaged mobile chips from China are still a thing.

Selling overclocked chips must have been fairly rampant back then. I believe this was the reason Intel locked the CPU multipliers starting on the Slot 1 PII's.

Just found this channel! Ive been collecting cpus since mid 90s... Man would I love a fake cpu for my collection :)

You brought back some good and bad memories for me.. I was scammed with a fake cpu back then.

As I remember, it was called "remark" back in the day in Taiwan and China.

The gold chips may be fakes but they sure look fancy! :)

You have amazing content. Don't know why didn't your videos get viral....

So much joy looking into the older hardware. Thank you for the trip down memory lane 😊

Fantastic little lesson into the crazy story of the 90's European Intel counterfeit CPU ring.

How interesting, I never thought there were such well-made fake CPUs.

Great video and very interesting story! Did not know about that at all. I hope I could also catch one day a "Giveaway" from your museum :-)

to me the fake cpu market of the early 486 and 6x86 era is some of the most interesting things.... love that you're covering some of it:)..... found it funny that I seen one of the major retro youtubers reviewing a mobo that had a known fake chipset but they didn't realize it till I point it out:D and showed them articles relating to it:'D

Thank you for the demonstration and very interesting background story.

You need WAY more subs....anyone interested in computers / retro computers / history should sub to this....... What do you use to clean your CPUs?

That's amazing. Makes me want to check my stock of old Pentium CPUs to see if any of them are fake.

Thanks for this very interesting piece of history! And take care.

Didn't know about that the Chinese have made weird laptop to desktop abominations already in the 90s. Linus tested a Chinese laptop Haswell CPU modified to a LGA1150 package.

I am a new subscriber. Your content is fascinating and well done so far. I'm glad I turned on notifications.

Awesome Keep it up It's interesting for me what have people done for money its kinda funny tho Thank Happy new year

This was fascinating. Respect!

The real crime was Intel charging $200 for 13mhz more.

They were probably pretty safe by overclocking them just one iteration (ie 60mhz bus to 66) Since Intel has always been pretty conservative when binning their silicon for chips, most of them probably worked OK for the life of the machine. That being said, it says something about Intel's pricing structure.

Sir, you're one slip away from saying "The processor is fake but the blood is real."

Lottery scratcher tickets for oldschool nerds

This is the kind of garbage that spoiled the fun for the rest of us with multiplier locks 😑

Professor Plum in the library with the Intel Pentium 133.

At that time, I used to overclock my CPU. Pentium 120 running at 133, Pentium 150 running at 166, and lastly a Pentium 200 MMX running at 250 MHz with a 100 MHz system clock instead of 66. This last one was faster than PII-233 when fpu wasn't involved !

Interesting stuff, now I gonna have to check every CPU I got for this and it is quite a few

Wow, all those bonding wires in the X-ray image! Now it makes sense that those ceramic CPUs have such a high scrap value. There's probably a few grams of gold in there.

My first computer was a P120.♥ (now running a 3950x (10billion transistors vs 3million), a little progress in 25years...)

Interesting. This is like older version of the fake capacity flash memory devices from China. But as I understand at least these CPUs delivered, unlike fake flash drives. Think of them as factory overclocked CPU

I imagine this is probably why modern PCs can automatically set clock speeds of CPUs, and/or why modern CPUs have ID strings. I can imagine getting tricked into getting one of those counterfeit CPUs back then, and wondering why the custom-built PC had so many issues. I can also imagine there being adverts about "genuine Intel processors".

You got me, i thought the real one was the fake because it looked different from the others.

I didn't realise Intel had been using those S - - - - codes on their processors and chipsets for so long. That is an SY022 and one of my PCs has an SREJP.

i never knew this was a thing, really interesting how fake cpus existed back then and now its mostly mobile cpus plastered on a desktop socket substrate like the last example

i had a 386 dx 33, i couldnt adjust the clock generator , i just had to swap the crystal. Popped in a 40 mhz crystal and it ran perfect.

It sounds like it's not a multiplier OC but an FSB overclock. I think earlier CPUs get a huge jump in performance due to the FSB speed improvement. If you were a home user that couldn't A/B CPUs, it made detecting this much harder.

The last ones probably are chinese upgrade cpu's. So you can run mobile chips on your old pentium mobo. I have seen that kind of stuff done before.

OMG! I never knew Arnold Schwarzenegger was such an CPU expert! If you're not The Terminator, i bet you are austrian, like him! It's your voice man! Awesome!

Interessant, da muss ich mir gleich mal meine Prozessoren durchschauen

Technically, these are genuine CPUs, they were just re-labeled by someone skilled )

I remember when those painted Pentiums were referred to as "Pentium Picasso"

i want that processor :o what a nice piece of Computing history!

Wow that was amazing learning how they faked them.

Do you have any WinChip CPU? I know, they are not rare but at least interesting. I'm just a little bit curious about what they exactly are. If they are clones or something else. I have one which is WinChip 200MHz.

I got burned back in the day. I found a guy that had a 133MHz Pentium, brought it home and it wouldn't run right. I set the jumpers to 120 and it ran fine for a long time. I paid 150 for it. Must have been a good deal to young me. I was happy to have a P120 still.

The Chinese used to do this with CD-ROM's too, in 1998 I got a CD-ROM from a well known supplier that came in a box that said 16x, the sticker on the drive said 16x and the face-plate had 16x silk screened onto the front but I was using Linux and it detected it as an 8x, so I did some testing and realised its an 8x drive and spoke to the supplier and they did their own tests and realised they had been conned by a supplier and had to recall all the cd-rom drives and exchange them for real 16x ones. If I had been using windows I wouldn't have known the difference.

Remember that one could use a micrometer to check the thickness of the Pentiums, cant remember what thickness one should check for. :P

Tillamook's a pretty decent little town. Has a old WWII-era Navy base that got converted into a aviation museum with some nice specimen including a Aero-Spacelines Mini Guppy. The silage smell gets to be a bit much, though.

Those gold plated CPUs look like they are for decoration. Are you sure you want to open them?

Romania was under embargo until 2004 from importing any Intel chips above 1ghz, namely because a state owned company made lots of Intel clones starting from the 80s. I know people claim we even did Pentium 1 to 3 clones. I would totally want to hear your opinion on those!

Looks like they capped a mobile processor but how do they change the internal clock multiplier?

Also there where motherboards then with fake cache chips on it. It where empty dil packages and the bios was modified to report a number of cache present. Those chips where also pretty expensive then.

Hi, do exist fake speeds on latest MMX non ceramic Pentiums? Like 200Mhz and 233MHz, maybe mine are fake and I don't know :S Thanks!

TDP of 600w but should it be for a 9121 and not a 9221?

Fascinating

I overclocked my Pentium 150 into Pentium 166 with a simple 60 Mhz to 66 Mhz FSB jumper and it was stable.

Where did you get the C4004 fake? I'd be interested in that

Back in the day when they actually put effort into faking electronic components...

Very interesting! I'd love to have one of those fakes. 600w

I remember hearing about a scam where vendors would overclock lower frequency chips but I didn't know they were going through the trouble of trying to reprint the model number on top of the chip. I just assumed that they just overclocked the final consumer PC. Most people never remove the cooling fan and wouldn't think to check to see what is printed on the chip to make sure they weren't swindled. Of course I know mine was original because I was too cheap to buy anything faster than the 75mhz model. Moores law made buying the fastest chip on the market a bad investment back then anyway.

I never cease to be amazed at how far some individuals will go to cheat, steal or misrepresent themselves and or the items they are selling. I guess in the past it was a bit harder for a shady salesman selling crap as it didn't take long for the word to spread to avoid them and if you were unfortunate enough to make contact with them, go home at once and take a long shower.

Super Video - Danke!

i heard of this but wasnt sure whats fake abount it, thanks!

I have an Intel i486 DX2 Chip that says "i66" in the back. Does that mean it is as new as 1996?

Is there a way to identify a fake Pentium chip non-destructively?

I recall fake cache chips, this is new to me ;) I have also heard of incorrect speed settings (ns) on RAM chips.

Oh yeah, I remember the rebadging back in the day...Cyrix CPU’s especially

I had bought a counterfeit Cyrix MII 333, unfortunately.

Appreciate your efforts 🙏😇 🎇

I can confirm , that this practice of REMARKING CPUs was still present up to 2004, cause i was able to buy them trough reputable distributor with ease. They were marked as such , but unfortunately AMDs ones ended up with short end of the stick , cause of the open die and cracking , 4 out of 10 were dead or unable to work. They were usually sold in trays , once they started going with boxed coolers situation changed . However i remember well my P3 Celereon i had in my PC clearly remarked as a 900 MHZ CPU , but it was a 600 MHz one . However i was able to run it on 1200 MHz without any issues for more over than a year , and as far as i remember it went well pass that with 142mhz bus increase but i kept it at 133 and it worked like a charm . So Intel CPUs were well capable of even 2x+ speed they were rated , not all of them ofc.

Take of the golden plate of the MMX...i think they just glued it on!

Try the 300Mhz Tillamook on a PCChips M577 or M537. I tested the 266mhz on these, successfully. (Though i had to modifiy the CPU to enable the L2 Cache onboard which is switched off when you put the stock CPU into the socket) Another board i tested successfully was the FIC VA 503+. They were letting me overclock it to 400mhz stable at 2.2/2.3v Vvore. At a multiplier of 4.0x (FSB set to 100mhz). Would love to see the results with the 300mhz version, where you probably need a 4.5x Multiplier for at 66Mhz.

i have a Pentium 133 that has the A80502-133 instead of A80502133. and a Pentium 75 that is like A8050275, without a dash before 75. some unique looking CPUs.

OMG !... I could have been fallen into one of these fakes since I couldn't believe it is forged that good ....

so cpus use to be a scratch off game?

the coating must certainly have hurt thermal performance, i wonder how much of the reduction in reliability was due to worse cooling rather than the overclocking itself

i remember working on a old pentium like that the coating came off with the thermal and heat sync i nver thought much about but it may have been on of these fakes lol

I Cringe every time you drop a CPU.

Since those fake Pentium CPUs probably worth more than real ones, I guess there might be some fake "fake Pentium CPUs" now on the market.

yeah i thought they looked to dark, i do wonder how many fakes i missed in computer fairs back in the day.

13 MHz more, but the bus ran at 66 vs 60. Quite a difference there.

at that time there wasn't something like CPU model ID? that tells what is the real model by software?

And they're still doing the same thing now, but to NAND flash and DRAM chips. NEVER buy knock-off brand drives.

High Quality fakes from the 90´s ! Amazing haha

Oh man, I totally remember this.

Subscribed.

I remember setting Pentium 100 to 133 and it worked perfectly for at least 1 year before I got AMD K6-2. That's what I call overclocking, +33% for free wintout any investment.

clever, the same thing kind of gets done today, only with the print on the CPU IHS

oh the pretty ones... i used a few of those. atleast it wasnt sold as a fake cpu in my case they were sold as surplus/recoverd moble cpu's put into adapters to fit desktops They could be a little buggy if the bios didnt allso have the microcode for the moble version in it.

My guess was the one on the bottom because it has a lighter color shade.

This makes me want to go and check my Intel 166mhz cpu. Maybe I am rich!

i can't believe it, i have 2 Pentium SL24R (166mhz). One of them gave me that strange colour scrubbing it with a bit of WD40. After a close look, i can barely see, under the new laser engraving that it was a SY022 133MHZ. Even the Intel Pentium logo was repainted. The other Pentium gave me no issues when scrubbing it but the engraving looks pretty much fake. BTW i have no idea if they're unstable or not, cause the motherboards are dead...

I just scratched off a 100 Mhz marked one to find a 75 Mhz hidden under the paint

Back when China made an effort to make it look the part.... hehehehe