Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
My first ever eBay purchase - in 1996 - was a motherboard. It turned out to have fake L2 cache ram soldered to the board! These were hard wired chips with DIP SRAM pin-outs wired to simply always report a cache miss. (ironically increasing memory latency even more than not having a cache at all; but the manufacturer sure made a killing off these given memory prices at the time)
The seller in my case was some fly by night would be computer shop owner in Texas who didn't last long. I'm not sure if he was aware of the scam or also a victim, but his behavior at the time made it clear he wasn't happy with the results... ;)
Someone appears to have documented these boards: https://www.redhill.net.au/b/b-bad.html
Counterfeits in hardware... a regularly recurring theme. So much value in a tiny package it is bound to happen. A fake CPU that can't even pretend to work though? That is just odd!
Aug 19, 2020, 3:07:28 AM
Posted to Inside a counterfeit 8086 processor