Remarked CPU's?

[taz1004]

I'm beginning to hear that remarked CPU's are coming back and saw a few pictures of these. And some of these looked pretty damn good. Is there any other way to check if the CPU is remarked or not other than looking at it?

--BrianC

[David]

the code on the die should corrospond with codes on the die of similar processors I think

[oc jason]

i feel stupid but what the hell is a remarked cpu?

[David]

Its when dodgy suppliers take a CPU and basically overclock it to run at a faster speed. i.e. take a cheap(er) Thunderbird 1GHz and pencil it to do 1.2. they then make a lot of money. This obviously causes problems.

There was a scandal waaaaaay back when Intel released Pentium 150s and 166s. Some unscrupulous people took the 150s, OCed them to 166 and sold them on for more money. This caused some problems.

As Remarked CPUs are already OCed, they wont OC much more. If you buy a TB 800 remarked to 1000 then it probably wont manage 1.2 where a 1Gig would.

[taz1004]

Remarked CPU's are also what keeps CPU manufacturers from unlocking their CPU multipliers.

Nelly, some of the remarked CPU's I've seen even had correct codes on the CPU core. It was almost impossible to tell the difference just by looking at them. Is there some kind of CPUID program that shows the original speed?

--BrianC

[David]

u could try cutting the L1s?

I dont think AMD have the codes in the CPU that Intel one s do. The Intel Pentium IIIs have embedded codes I think that can be checked.

[asmodean]

Nelly is right on that one. AMD has no such codes, but intel chips do. Hopefully Athlon-4 will sport such a thing, but without Intels offending serialnumbers.