China laptop vendor eats humble pie, apology says ‘production error’ was behind chip mix-up — full refunds offered to those affected by the fake Ryzen 5 7430U ‘scam’

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Were the firmware-level tweaks cloaking the true CPU-ID also an accident?

Chuwi CoreBook X
(Image credit: Chuwi)

Budget portable PCs specialist Chuwi has released an official apology to customers who received devices that didn’t match up to expected specifications. Despite offering a full refund to any affected parties, some will think the apology doesn’t go far enough given the waste of time/effort in receiving a wrongly specced (downgraded) device. Moreover, Chuwi maintains that the issue was due to a “production error,” which stretches credulity because of the firmware-level adjustments that cloaked the processor swap ‘scam.’

Chuwi CoreBook X

AMD has made it clear that it had no knowledge of fake Ryzen 5 7430U CPUs in Chuwi laptops. (Image credit: Chuwi)

A casual user could see the Zen 2 Lucienne chip described as a Zen 3 Barcelo-R chip inside system status tools in Windows controls, as well as in popular apps like CPU-Z and HWiNFO64. Subtle differences in reported cache quotas and clock speeds first raised suspicions, though. News and reviews site NotebookCheck lived up to its name by tearing down a CoreBook X sample, revealing the engraved processor OPN on the Ryzen, and thereby confirming the actual downgrade.

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What you wanted vs what you got

Processor

Codename

Architecture

Cores / Threads

Base / Boost Clock (GHz)

L2 Cache (MB)

L3 Cache (MB)

TDP (W)

OPN

Ryzen 5 7430U

Barcelo-R

Zen 3

6 / 12

2.3 / 4.3

3

16

15

100-000000943

Ryzen 5 5500U

Lucienne

Zen 2

6 / 12

2.1 / 4.0

3

8

15

100-000000375

At the time, Chuwi vaguely blamed different production batches and leftover stock. Its latest announcement on the matter isn’t much better in that respect, but at least we see an apology and a seemingly simple process to get a full refund is offered.

(Image credit: Future)

With the typical performance delta between Ryzen 5 5500U and Ryzen 5 7430U at around 10%, but up to 20% on this laptop, a part-refund/compensation scheme may have been a more fitting response to affected customers.

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Mark Tyson
Mark Tyson
News Editor
2 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Notton
    All Chuwi had to say was "Our ODM sold us counterfeits", but "production error" would indicate conspiring with the ODM to change the part number in BIOS before it ever arrived at Chuwi warehouses.

    Chuwi trying to brush it under the rug with their lawyers is just further proof they fully knew what was happening.

    AMD should sue them.
    Reply
  • thesyndrome
    Notton said:
    All Chuwi had to say was "Our ODM sold us counterfeits", but "production error" would indicate conspiring with the ODM to change the part number in BIOS before it ever arrived at Chuwi warehouses.

    Chuwi trying to brush it under the rug with their lawyers is just further proof they fully knew what was happening.

    AMD should sue them.
    If Chuwi did that, then the ODM could potentially throw them under the bus if they have evidence that Chuwi intentionally requested for the forgery. As much as their statement rings false, from a legal perspective it's their best way to try and claim innocence without blaming anyone else who might make things worse for them, even despite the modified firmware making this seem intentional.

    To me, this is a very clear cut case of intentional forgery that was planned, and now they are scrambling to try and hide it and absolve themselves of intentional wrongdoing without stepping on another company's toes.
    Reply