A user who bought an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU from Amazon has discovered that he only got a CPU heatsink lid & is missing the whole CPU underneath.
This User Thought He Secured A Great Deal On An AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU From Amazon, But Didn't Turn Out To Be So Lucky
We have covered several Amazon-related scams in the past, about how buyers who thought they got fantastic deals, turned out to be the complete opposite. From missing GPUs to bricks and sands in boxes.
The latest user who seems to have been affected has a different story to tell. On the PCBuildHelp sub-reddit, Bigmancal420 bought an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D 3D V-Cache CPU from his local Amazon Returns Warehouse. He paid $180 US, which is a fantastic price since the retail chip sells for over $600 US. But as per Amazon's policy, he wasn't allowed to open the box to view the item before buying it, so he had to get back to his home to find out what he really paid for.
Upon opening the box, the user found out that there was an unusual plastic wrapper below the CPU's heatsink lid. When taking it out of the plastic clamshell, the user found out that his purchase was missing the main component of the chip itself, the CPU. The entire PCB, which houses the two Zen 5 CCDs and a large IO die, was missing.
The thing is that AMD's Ryzen boxed CPUs come in a package that has a small cut-out that shows if the CPU is in the box, and is the same model as the one intended. You can only see the heatsink lid & the naming of the CPU through this box. So the user must have thought that the CPU was in there, and since Amazon didn't let him open the box before purchase, he was only able to check it out after buying.
Furthermore, it looks like Amazon's return warehouses played themselves. Since the warehouse only dealt in returns, it is possible that someone delidded his Ryzen 9 9950X3D CPU, put the heatsink lid back in the box, and tried his luck with the return policy. So this is possibly what happened, and the previous owner of this chip actually managed to get away with it.
Unfortunately, the new buyer is affected, which gives us a nice lesson: always make sure what you are getting, and don't try your luck with returned hardware components, or you might end up like the unlucky redditor. We hope Amazon does offer him a full refund.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
