A Reddit user says Walmart sold them a fake Ryzen 7 9800X3D inside what looked like a sealed retail box. Posting on r/pcmasterrace as u/quadbow, they explain that they wanted a replacement for their existing 9800X3D, which had memory controller issues. A clerk pulled the sealed box from a display case, and they paid almost $500 for it. At home, the PC wouldn't power on with the new chip. Putting the old 9800X3D back in got it running again right away.
Walmart then refused a refund because the serial number printed on the chip didn't match the one on the box. They compared it with other 9800X3D chips in the display case, and it looked very different. Apparently, the PCB was "more blue," and the text on the lid sat in a different place. They also ran the chip's serial number through AMD's lookup page, which returned no match.
Popular Now: Shuhei Yoshida and Adam Boyes recreate PlayStation's famous disc-sharing meme, this time with no physical gameEven though the Redditor says they're pretty sure it's a fake, that's still unconfirmed as of the time of writing. It's one account backed by photos, and neither Walmart nor AMD seems to have commented so far. The post doesn't say what's under the heat spreader either.
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Fake 9800X3Ds aren't new, of course. GamersNexus delidded one and found no CCDs or I/O die under the IHS, and its serial number didn't match the box either. Another buyer found an i9-10900K in a sealed 9800X3D box. Both of those were Amazon purchases, though, while this one supposedly came off a Walmart shelf. The buyer's advice is to compare the serial number on the chip with the box, and how the chip looks, before leaving the store.
