Popular budget-friendly Chinese brand exposed for shocking CPU scam in its laptops — advertised CPU secretly swapped for an outdated chip

Chuwi, a popular Chinese brand known for its affordable and accessible products, uses some of the best CPUs in its devices, but the vendor is currently at the center of a major scandal. According to a recent exposé by Notebookcheck, Chuwi has allegedly been deceiving customers by shipping an outdated Ryzen processor in its CoreBook X laptop, despite advertising a newer and far superior model. The report follows feedback from a plethora of CoreBook X users who have voiced their discontent on Reddit.

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A hand holding the Ryzen 7 9850X3D. — (Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

There were many unsettling details about this case. What really stood out was that Chuwi seemed to use firmware-level modification to fake the processor’s identity. The chip was showing as the Ryzen 5 7430U inside the CoreBook X’s firmware, in Windows, and even trusted diagnostic tools, such as CPU-Z and HWiNFO64. However, the silicon never lies. The team at Notebookcheck tore the laptop down and discovered a Ryzen chip labeled with the 100-000000375 OPN code, which corresponds to the older Ryzen 5 5500U.

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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

The Ryzen 5 7430U (codenamed Barcelo-R) is a six-core, 12-thread processor with Zen 3 execution cores. While the Ryzen 5 5500U (codenamed Lucienne) shares the same core configuration, the chip leverages the previous Zen 2 execution cores. More importantly, the Ryzen 5 7430U also has twice the L3 cache and a higher clock speed.

One reason the deception was so effective is that the Ryzen 5 7430U and Ryzen 5 5500U share similar specifications, so close that most people, even tech-savvy users, may be easily fooled. The smaller L3 cache and lower clock speeds in the Notebookcheck screenshots showed that the Ryzen 5 7430U wasn’t what it claimed to be. However, these details are so subtle that you can easily overlook them unless you’re specifically searching for inconsistencies.

On average, the Ryzen 5 5500U is approximately 7% slower than the Ryzen 5 7430U. In the CoreBook X’s case, the performance gap is 10% because the laptop’s single-channel memory is holding it back. You could argue that 10% isn’t a big deal, and the average consumer would unlikely notice the difference in normal usage. However, a customer should always receive what they paid for, and manufacturers who use the old switcheroo should be called out for doing so.

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Chuwi CoreBook X — (Image credit: Chuwi)

If Chuwi wanted to do damage control, there are better ways than just blaming different production batches and leftover stock. The alleged fraud is seemingly too complex for it to be an oversight on Chuwi’s part: You don’t spoof processor strings at the firmware level by accident. Trying to cover up the discrepancies makes things even worse.

archived CoreBook X product page, Chuwi previously marketed the laptop as the “CoreBook X 7430U” with mentions of the Ryzen 5 7430U plastered all over the marketing. The company now advertises it as the “CoreBook X Ryzen 5,” but the URL still has the original model name. Furthermore, the company changed the chip’s specifications to a Ryzen 5 processor with six cores and 12 threads, up to 4.3 GHz, without mentioning the Ryzen 5 7430U specifically but still citing its boost clock speed.

Understandably, manufacturers sometimes have to swap out original components because of supply shortages. It happens more than you think, especially with SSDs. These situations are never ideal, but you should notify the customer of the changes. It’s wrong on all levels to go out of the way to blatantly deceive customers. The fiasco will cast a shadow over the entire brand and make customers wonder whether the same practice is occurring with its other products.