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’

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.’

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

Putting the Chuwi apology in context, earlier this month, we reported on the emerging scandal of CoreBook X laptops being discovered packing older Ryzen 5 5500U (Zen 2) processors, instead of the advertised Ryzen 5 7430U (Zen 3). We highlighted that this couldn’t just be a simple parts mix-up, as Chuwi also seemed to use firmware-level modifications to fake the processor's identity to mirror the newer part.

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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Swipe to scroll horizontally 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.

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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