AMD has notified its distributors that there are some remarked AMD Athlon XP processors on the market. We suppose that there may be remarked chips in Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia, however, you may find such microprocessors in other countries as well.

Reportedly, some smart guys learnt how to make “faster” Athlon XP CPUs from Thoroughbred B0 chips that are known for their overclocking capabilities and started to remark lower-end processors to higher-end devices. Such CPUs may be unstable and will probably lack any overclocking potential.

Below you can find how to distinguish between genuine AMD Athlon XP products and remarked chips with higher speed.

Here is AMD Athlon XP 2200+ processor. Areas marked with red are those which are remarked or re-soldered by not really faithful resellers.

There are some bridges, namely L11 and L12/L5 that are changed in order to increase Vcore and multiplier.

Furthermore, even clever guys cannot reproduce exactly the same product label as made by AMD; take a look, above is AMD’s original label on Athlon XP processors, below is a fake. You can notice that fonts as well as quality of printing are totally different on the fake.

Beware of remarked CPUs since they may not only be non-overclockable, but may even work unstably on their “designated” speed.