To save money, a repair technician purchases 4 defective AMD Ryzen 5 5600 processors to repair. During the test he notices that 3 of the CPUs are not broken at all.
There are many offers on the Internet with computer hardware that is stated to be defective. In addition to electronic waste, for which horrendous sums are sometimes charged, there are also some items that are not broken at all. Sometimes sellers list their hardware as defective on platforms like eBay due to ignorance or lack of time
Deals like this are very popular with hobbyists because they can save a lot of money with little effort and a little luck. A repair technician is now reporting on his stroke of luck when he bought 4 broken AMD CPUs, not all of which were defective.
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Save a lot of money by buying defective hardware?
What kind of purchase was that? A user reported on Reddit that he had purchased 4 defective AMD processors. He is said to have only paid the equivalent of 64 euros for the CPUs. The new price per piece is currently around 118 euros (via geizhals.de). So he would have had to pay around 472 euros for 4 new processors.
He says he wants to test the AMD CPUs and try to fix them if they don’t work. Assuming he can repair all AMD Ryzen 5 5600, this results in a considerable saving of more than 400 euros compared to the new price.
The user claims to be a repair technician. He looks for offers with supposedly defective hardware in order to repair it and then resell it as profitably as possible.
How did his test go? The technician checked the functionality of the processors one after the other. He was lucky because his system is said to have started without any problems with 3 of the 4 AMD CPUs. According to him, only one of the Ryzen 5 5600 no longer showed any signs of life.
A second test on his main computer with a current BIOS version reportedly came to the same result. In this scenario, 3 CPUs again output an image and let the hobbyist enter the BIOS menu of his PC.
What do others say? The Reddit community doesn’t trust the positive result. Some users are convinced that the 3 processors cannot be considered fully functional without further detailed testing.
Defects that are not obvious sometimes only become apparent after longer and heavier use of the hardware. They then lead, for example, to unstable operation or a complete system crash.
For example, Shoinipantes says:
If they are OK at first, it does not mean that they are fully working. Each CPU should be fully tested and stressed to confirm that it is working.
Shoinipantes on Reddit
The repair technician is advised to test and load the CPUs much more intensively. If the processors continue to run without errors, he could actually consider himself a lucky person who has saved a lot of money. He himself sees the initially positive test as just the first step in the review and confirms that further tests will follow.
A user wanted to get a similarly good deal when buying an Nvidia RTX 4080. But a small detail unsettled him and he asked others for advice: player finds RTX 4080 cheaply on eBay, has doubts about the offer – community explains why his concerns are justified