Recently in the philippines and even some other countries, around february, there was a news regarding confiscated AMD cpus from...take note...RENOWNED computer shop dealers who remarked these chips! Now I live near and even bought stuff from these stores...how would I know if my recently bought AMD Athlon XP 2400+ is the genuine stuff?!

See the link for the full news:

http://www.inq7.net/inf/2004/feb/07/inf_1-1.htm' ">http://www.inq7.net/inf/2004/feb/07/inf_1-1.htm

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AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton overclocked to 3200+ (2.2Ghz with 1.68VCore)
Motherboard: Micro Star International K7N2 Delta2 - Platinum Edition
Memory Modules: 2x256Mb GeIL Value DDR PC3200 (CL=2.5-6-3-3)
Processor Fan: Thermaltake Extreme Volcano 12 with Artic Silver 5
Video Card: Inno3D FX5200 128Mb - 128Bit
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Hi Jid,

What an interesting like you've posted there.

Got no concrete stuff here my friend..just my own thoughts.

I don't think engineers could actually "clone" one of AMD's chips, so it looks like they're unclocked and/or overclocked, possibly with their OPN numbers replaced with fakes.

With the new Duron's it's pretty easy to get a 1600 or 1800 to run several hundred MHz higher with overclocking and make it appear to be like an XP2200+ (PC Chip's boards even encourage this), but how they'd go about hiding the L2 cache issue and some pencil marks, I'm not sure!

With the Athlon I presume they'd just go about unlocking the favourtite models that can give most headroom - namely the 2500+ but that may not be the case.

The only thing I would suggest is to look at the OPN (Ordering Part Number) on the CPU itself to see if it matches up with the information link below; how easy it would be to erase this on the chip I don't know, but all Athlon's and Duron's give different part numbers:

http://www.amdboard.com/amdid.html' ">http://www.amdboard.com/amdid.html

Hope this info is of some help. It is a pity that the report didn't point to any giveaways so that you could quickly identify whether your CPU is fake either through visual inspection or a piece of software. Maybe the OPN sticker looks like it's been replaced with a suspect one?

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. AMD CPU Data: http://www.tomshardware.com/20.../amd...ult/page23.html & http://www.amdboard.com/amdid.html
. Belarc Advisor: http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html
. GPU Comparison for Laptops: <a href="http://www.notebookche

The only weapon at your disposal is knowledge of the specification of the product you purchase. And in the case of overclocked and remarked XP chips thats not enough a 2500+ and a 3200+ are phisically and function wise the same chip the only difference is the 3200+ was suspossedly a better quality fully able to run a 200mhz fsb when it came off the assembly line.

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( Quote )
Possession of a powerful computer is no substitute for a working brain.
A working brain is no substitute for possession of a powerful computer.

There's a mod you can do to the Athlon XP with a Thornton core, to increase it's 256k l2 cache to 512k and hence turn it into a Barton..

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/c...ay/2...0930171549.html' ">http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/c...ay/20030930171549.html

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. AMD CPU Data: http://www.tomshardware.com/20.../amd...ult/page23.html & http://www.amdboard.com/amdid.html
. Belarc Advisor: http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html
. GPU Comparison for Laptops: <a href="http://www.notebookche