Beware the latest wave of remarked AMD chips

THE EXISTENCE OF remarked AMD chips prompts a lot of laughs. Who would want to remark a $79 chip so they could get $89 for it? Even if it only takes an hour or so, and every fourth one is fried, it doesn't make much sense. The economic incentive just isn't there, and money drives remarking.

Late last week, I got a phone call and some e-mails about a new round of AMD remarking. From what I gather, this is a new batch of cretins since the last reports about a month or so ago.

AMD's crack anti-fraud division has sprung into action and is ferreting the dirtballs out. In the mean time, check the companies out before you buy the chips. Reseller Ratings is a good place to start.

How can you recognize the bad chips? I am not sure right now if there are any physical identifiers, but there are a few warning signs if you know your history. Most CPU vendors sell in large lots, and through a few distributors. The price in these channels are set, and don't vary much. If you buy more than about 10 chips at a time, you get a low price, that is why you see most reputable dealers Pricewatch with something close to the same price.

The grey market - large companies selling off their overstock - is the real kicker here. If companies bought a snotload of 2800+ chips for the big Mothers Day selling frenzy, and it turns out that Mothers all over the globe wanted 3000+ chips, you are stuck with a lot of 2800+. As we all know, semiconductors go stale faster than a US journalist's "sense of humour", so you get rid of them, fast. Fast in retail tends to translate into ‘loss', so you buy chips on the grey market cheap, and then sell them cheap.

Grey market chips tend to be large volume, and tray chips, not retail boxes. They also tend not to be cutting edge, high demand items. If they were high demand, you wouldn't need to dump them, would you? The savings can be from a bit to a lot, usually more toward the bit side.

Getting back to the current situation, there are a few people on Pricewatch selling Athlon64s and Opterons for a good deal below what the authorized channel can get them at, much less sell them. In fact, they are in such high demand that many people are having a hard time getting them at all, and selling them as fast as they can get them on the shelves.

This is not a situation where you would normally expect to see either grey market chips or people selling at a discount. Supply and demand says you should see things above retail price, not below. When you add in things like the description of 'PGA 754,SIMULTANEOUS 32-AND 64-BIT COMPUTING CAPABILITIES. OPEN RETAIL BOX WITH FAN AND HEATSINK. MANUFAC', things start to smell funny. Not the misspelling, I do that all the time, the part about the open retail box.

It's an altruistic vendor which inspects everything before shipping it off to valued customers, but opening the box without replacing anything in it seems a little fishy to us at the INQ. It is either a harmless person who bought a large quantity of open boxed processors, and they are a true bitch to open, or a remarkably stupid petty criminal.

So, how do you protect yourself? Like we mentioned earlier, Reseller Ratings is a good place to start, and beware of anything priced in a ‘too good to be true fashion. The AMD Buyers' Guide also has lots of information. If you think you have one of these remarked chips, you might want to drop AMD a line and ask what to do about it. Hopefully, it turns out to be nothing more than people buying marketshare. µ