I recently purchased an 8-core Ryzen 7700 CPU from AliExpress - paying just £117 + sales taxes, while the actual UK RRP is over £280.

That’s a big difference - so did I get ripped off? Or did I somehow receive a genuine CPU, but simply at a much reduced price?

In this video I answer that exact question, by looking at the CPU, then installing it in a system and running a LOT of different tests.

(Link to direct YouTube video)

If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.

Video Transcript And Guide

Hey everyone! I have here in my hand a Ryzen 7700 CPU… maybe. The reason I say maybe is I’m a cheap bastard and instead of paying £280 for it from an official UK source, I bought it from AliExpress for £110 plus sales taxes. And so there’s every chance that this is actually like an AMD Athlon with a Ryzen sticker stuck on it. I’m hoping that’s not the case. Obviously it is from a sort of reputable seller, even if it is AliExpress. And so I’m hoping that it’s simply so cheap because, you know, it doesn’t come with a cooler, doesn’t come with a box, doesn’t come with a warranty, and you know, even though it says it’s new, it’s probably been ripped out of somebody’s system, given a little bit of a polish, and then shoved on an airplane to come to the UK where I live. Hopefully it’s that and not fake. But actually, let’s test it out! I’m visually going to look at it, then I’m going to put in a motherboard and actually try it out properly.

All righty then! So, from AliExpress, let’s actually open it up and see whether it’s a real CPU or not, or at least visually whether it looks like a real CPU. So it’s well packaged in this plastic thing as well. So that is pretty good. Oh, that’s going to be a pain to get off, isn’t it?

[A few moments later]

Right, very, very well packaged, but I guess it has to be really. It’s going to be thrown around and stuff. So actually that’s a good thing. And I haven’t had any box. So yeah, so there we have it. The Ryzen 7700 Athlon variant. So that is pretty good. No, I’m joking! Hopefully that is the official thing. Certainly at first glance it looks like a real CPU, and it doesn’t have any pins on it, which is great ‘cuz obviously it’s AM5. You know, the actual LGA as well looks quite good. I can’t see any major issues with it. So actually that’s quite promising. I’ll just take it out with a little blister pack.

But actually, in itself, from a visual perspective, I think that is looking okay. So that’s what I’m seeing—the AMD Ryzen 7700. I mean, it looks very similar to my 7600. So fingers crossed. And actually on the back, make sure I don’t drop it, but actually, you know, you can see there’s no obvious issues there. And it’s not like, you know, anything smudged. And actually, I figured it wasn’t brand new, but I mean it might be brand new. It does look pretty good. I can’t see any signs that it’s actually been installed in another system.

So yeah, the next thing to do is actually put in a motherboard and actually see whether it works or not. And this CPU I’m actually going to be using in an all-white Mini-ITX build. So I bought an X870 Mini-ITX Aorus Pro Ice motherboard, which we’ll look at in a minute, and then some white RAM from Corsair, 6000 MHz CL30. And finally a small white CPU cooler. I’m not going to show the entire build steps, but here’s a quick version of the build.

So how do I jump start? I’m a h@x0r cr@x0r Pro [l33t]. Look at that! Good, brilliant! That is jump starting it. Okay, so that’s quite a good sign. But next I want to actually, you know, see output on my screen. So I’m going to try a HDMI cable and just with my keyboard, and hopefully I’ll get into the BIOS and actually see that it says Ryzen 7700, which will then be the next hurdle. And once it does that, I can then actually install Windows and, you know, go beyond that. So I got my LEDs.

Not yet… Oh yeah! It’s moved on. VGA. Obviously it’s going to have integrated graphics, unless they have sold me… a really dodgy… YES! ‘Press N to keep previous record and continue system boot.’ If you have that… yeah, reset. It’s fine. I took my NVMe drive from my other computer, into here. I did format it again, but yeah, let’s just do that. And I know I’m waving this around like a mad man.

Okay, so that’s kind of good. I’ve just gone into a BIOS. ‘Please reconfigure…’ Yeah, that’s fine. Ryzen 7700 8-core CPU! It’s not an AMD Athlon! Brilliant! Thank God for that! That’s great!

So next I’m going to actually put in a case, install Windows, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that is actually two good things. It actually looks like a real CPU. It doesn’t misspell the word AMD or anything. And it actually does say the Ryzen 7700 8-core CPU there. So that is a very good start.

So then I wrapped up the build by actually putting things inside the case. I went for a small form factor case from Corsair, an all-white one again to meet the actual theme. You can see everything there as well. I did also whack in my RTX 5080 Founders Edition, which isn’t white. That’s the only thing that’s not white, but overall quite a cool build. And then I boot it into Windows.

And the first thing you should always do is run something like CPU-Z. Yes, I know it’s going to sort of report what’s in the BIOS, but at the end of the day, it’s still a good little level of reassurance. And you can see there, you know, the core speed is doing what it should do in terms of hitting the turbo and things like that. It’s reporting as a Ryzen 7700, which is obviously an 8-core CPU, and it lists, you know, 16 threads. It’s got the L1, L2, and L3 cache data and all that.

Also, then I tend to go into task manager. And if you don’t see the individual graphs, it might be you’ve got ‘overall’ turned on. So right-click and change graphs to logical processes. And then you can see the individual threads, which I always prefer when actually testing out a CPU. You can see there the base speed is 3.8 GHz. You can match that up to the actual spec for the CPU on AMD.com. And obviously it’s turbo-ing as well above 3.8 as you’d expect. So that’s all good and healthy and promising.

But next is worth actually stress testing things. And I tend to like using Prime 95, even though it’s a little bit old school. But I’m just going to torture, as they say, ‘torture’ all eight cores. And obviously, you know, you just keep an eye on things. If it’s a fake CPU, it’s probably not going to pass this test. And ideally, you should run this test for quite some time. I actually run it for 1 hour just ‘cuz I bought this from AliExpress. So I just wanted to, you know, really make sure.

And as you can see there, for an entire hour the CPU is fully loaded up, you know, all 16 threads, with no issue, with no crashes. And Prime 95 will tell you if one or more of the cores actually fails. So I’m not seeing any issues here. It all looks fairly good.

But next I wanted to run some more dedicated tests. So in this case I went to 3D Mark CPU profile. I have paid for this. I can’t remember if you can get this for free as well with the actual demo. It’s quite a good tool. I like using it for actually stress testing my CPUs. So you just download it and then actually run it. As you can see there, it tests out 16 threads and just one thread and everything in between as well.

And then it builds up a really good picture, as we’ll see in a minute, of how your CPU is working. So again, if you had like a fake CPU, you know, you’re going to see some issues. And, you know, you can keep an eye on things here. And again, things are turbo-ing and going above the base speed, which is good. And then we actually get the results, which at first glance looks fairly reassuring. You got the top figures, which I’ll explain a bit more later on, but essentially you want to be closer to the right, which I am, so that’s good.

You then got a lot of other system information under the monitoring section as well. What’s quite nice is it gives you the CPU frequencies for all the different tests. So if, for example, you’re seeing, you know, the frequencies drop down in certain tests, that could be a sign of a fake CPU or something like that. Next, you’ve then got the scores at the top here, and if I just zoom in and look at the actual explanation, what it actually explains is that essentially, you know, your score is the black bar, and then the gray is extra potential, probably from overclocking and stuff, but as long as you’re sort of towards the right, that’s a good sign.

Next up, I wanted to run Steel Nomad, which is also a really good test. Obviously this is a graphics card test, but actually, you know, if you’ve got a dodgy CPU, this is probably going to highlight it because you see the average scores that other systems tend to have. So it’s effectively comparing your CPU and your GPU combo to other people. So as I said, if you’ve got then a bad CPU, you’re probably going to see that because your average score is going to be lower, and we’ll look at that in just a second. This is the test. Poor guy. We’re about to capture him. So let’s move on.

And this is the results. All fairly good actually. It is technically below the average of 8281, but that’s because people overclock a lot on Steel Nomad. This is still a good respectable score. I did overclock very slightly, literally through the AMD software, just the, you know, 0.2 GHz overclock that you get, but everything looks fairly good and is fairly stable. I’m not seeing any major issues. Yeah, my CPU temperatures and GPU temps are a little bit high, but that’s more due to the case, to be honest, than anything else.

You can see there the CPU clock frequencies are completely fine. I’m not getting crashes. I’m not getting instability in my FPS rates. So actually, overall, I’ve performed lots of different tests, and actually my CPU seems completely fine. I haven’t noticed any major issues or instability. So yeah, it’s a valid CPU.

So there we have it! I actually did get what I paid for, which is brilliant. Obviously I don’t have a warranty with the CPU, but I was aware of that when I actually bought it. And actually, I’m fairly happy with my purchase. So that’s really good! If you’ve got any questions or comments though, please drop me a comment. And I hope you enjoyed this video! If you did, please click the thumbs up button, and please subscribe to see more videos like this.