The other day, I stopped into a local Amazon returns store on my lunch break. You probably know the type: chaotically overflowing other people's returned orders, with half-open boxes scattered about in huge bins. It's like some kind of post-apocalyptic ball pit game show, where you might find something worthwhile if you wade through enough discarded shelving kits, no-name iPhone cases, and shoe insoles. This particular store is only a few months old, and I'd visited a few times without finding much (other than a pair of insoles, which I needed because I walk 9-10 miles a day).
On this trip, the first day after a weekly restock, when everything in the bins costs $10, I managed to find a roll of Creality 3D printer PLA filament. That's not a huge discount over its typical Amazon sale price, but I happened to need a new spool for my Anycubic printer, and I was a few blocks from home, so this saved me the hassle of ordering. After a few more minutes pawing through returns, I hadn't found anything else and went up to pay. But there was a line, and I wound up waiting at the corner of one of the closest bins to the register. Killing time, I idly dug around while I waited, and soon spotted the familiar blue of an Intel CPU box. I flipped it over and saw an i7-14700 sticker!
Could I really have just found the frequency-locked version of Intel's last-generation flagship for $10? And if so, had someone returned it because of the notorious instability issues? Something else? I could see the CPU in its plastic clamshell through the cardboard window. The back looked OK, but the top was covered in thermal paste.
I was suspicious, but by this time, I was next in line, curious, and decided to gamble $10 on Intel. That’s maybe not the smartest wager I could make in 2025, but I was curious, and figured this would at least be more interesting than wasting money on a scratch-off ticket. I checked out with three items: the filament, the CPU, and another pair of shoe insoles – seriously, I wear those things out and can never have enough.
But it was a 13th Gen Core i5 – a Core i5 13500, to be specific. Not quite one of the best CPUs, and a generation older than what the box promised, but still a very usable chip, with 14 cores, 20 threads, and a Turbo Frequency of 4.8 GHz. It's not the fastest chip, but it currently sells for $264 at Newegg – not a bad pickup for $10. If it works, anyway.
So why was a 13th Gen Core i5 returned in a Core i7-14700 box? For those who haven't already connected the dots, it's likely that someone scammed Amazon by buying a new, higher-end chip than what they had, put the old one back in the box (helpfully obscured by thermal paste), and returned it for a refund. And Amazon, dealing as it does with millions of packages a day, seemingly accepted the return without checking that the returned product was actually what was returned, eventually selling it as part of a lot of liquidated returns.
I have no way to verify any of this, of course, but it seems the most likely scenario. And it's certainly unsurprising that Amazon would just accept a return without paying someone to open the box, wipe off the thermal paste, and confirm they had received the Core i7-14700 the customer had ordered. There's no way Amazon could continue to run its business if it had to do something like that with even half of its returns.
The only lingering question I had was whether my $10 13th Gen Core i5 CPU actually works. So I grabbed my trusty Hoto screwdriver, removed the AIO waterblock on the system that previously served as our external SSD storage testbed, and removed the 12th Gen Core i5 CPU that previously resided in the LGA 1700 socket. I then dropped my 13th Gen Core i5 into the motherboard, applied five small drops of thermal paste, re-attached the cooler, and plugged the system back in.
I pressed the power button and stared at the blackness of my test bench monitor for what felt like too many seconds, but eventually I saw the spinning circle and soon the familiar Windows 11 login screen. The old system booted up without an issue, and after running a few benchmarks, it looks like my $10 chip performs as expected.
Now the only question is, what should I do with it? I don't need another gaming rig – I'm writing this on an AMD Ryzen 7950X / Nvidia RTX 4090 PC I built back in 2023, and I already have a few other systems and CPUs for testing PC cases and accessories. Maybe I'll build a system for a family member or friend.
All I know is, while it didn't turn out to be a 14th Gen Core i7 promised on the box, I'm happy with the results of my $10 CPU gamble, and I wonder what I'll find at the returns store next week. I don't really need any more PC hardware, but if I could pass up enticing tech that I don't really need, I probably wouldn't have gotten into this crazy business in the first place.
