I’m looking at used i7-4790 cpus and noticed the text was different on these two and then looking closer the underneath was also different.
Is it likely to be revisions or are there fakes out there?
Yes, the picture on the left looks a bit fishy. But in essence, I don’t really think that someone would benefit from distributing faked 4th gen Intel Core i7 processors when that specific chip usually sells for $25 - $30 used. With $30 being on the high side of the pricing. ( Which I’ld personally don’t even consider to invest, as that CPU is more than 10 years old. And is fairly limited to DDR3 RAM)
That being said, check the sellers ratings. There are lots of listings for that specific CPU, prefer national listings instead of shipping from oversea.
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I wouldn’t trust anything on Ebay lots of scammers there far more then Amazon!
I’ve done just fine with eBay. No issues. I only deal with sellers of 95% or better and at least 100 items sold.
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Sure but there have been cases with scammers taking over an account or Have turned bad.
I’ve bought everything from whole systems to cpus on ebay and it’s all worked fine.
That cpu on the left just looked different to the one I had in my wishlist (the right one) which went out of stock.
There seems to be quite a big market for these old cpus so it might be worth faking them. Maybe they are fakes from back when the series was new. Going to pass on that one I think…
I’m sure that has happened. I’ve been using eBay for nearly 20 years. Nothing like that has ever happened to me following my scenario mentioned above. And eBay/PayPal refund policies are STELLAR if anything does happen.
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It’s worth it just for messing about. I’ve never had an i7 of any generation. I’m just trying to pimp this old Optiplex 3020! I love the case style. Trying to get decent play-ability in 86box with MS-Dos.
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Pure speculation.
In terms of faking them - you’ld have to remove the markings from the IHS by sanding. And then laser-engrave the supposed “better” model specificiations on to the IHS.
Which definitely some elbow grease and for laser engraving metals, you’ld something more capable than an simply C02 or diode laser. And these lasers are quite costly. That’s not worth the effort for an essentially obsolete processor.
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Yes speculation. Hence the words might and maybe… 
I wonder why the CPU looks so different though. Maybe its not faked so it works… just so people buy it. A lot of the time Ebay/paypal refund you not the seller. Maybe the seller hasn’t tested it. Speculation as you say.
My money would be on revisions. I had a i7-4790, it was a solid work horse and the printing looked like the on the right. But apparently the left printing is also valid.
Seems that also different layouts where used on the backside. Maybe one picture is an original Haswell and the other one a Haswell refresh. I would give a 80% valid.
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From my point of view:
Upgrading an working Dell Optiplex system to an top of the line processor would only make sense in case it’s an i3 dual core or worse. If it already came with an i5 CPU, the performance gain due to the i7 4790 would be marginal.
If you compare that 11 years old CPU to the entry level Intel N97 CPU which has been released in 2023, that quad core CPU without hyper-threading actually outperforms the i7 4790 in single threaded performance - and would only offer better performance in multi-threaded workloads. With the major disadvantage that the old CPU has a TDP of 84 Watt. But the Intel N97 achieves similar performance with a TDP of 12 Watt, which is much more power efficient.
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Ok dude. Well I wanted the upgrade to try and make 86box work faster but I don’t think the i7 will help much from what you are saying and I think it is mostly single threaded. I’ve opted to buy a complete PentiumIII system instead which all being well I will install windows 98 onto. Thanks for your input.