Selling Review Units

[geokilla]

A long time ago, Hardware Canucks used to sell review units and donate the money to charity. Any possibility of LTT doing something similar?

[Avocado Diaboli]

Review units are typically still the property of whoever sent them. They often don't demand them back and many content creators are happy to keep them around for comparative purposes. But selling them would be illegal.

[8tg]

They did that with permission from the providing companies, on an agreement that they were the last in the scheduled reviewer cycle for whatever specific item it was. I think they explained that in one of their videos once.

You can’t just sell the review unit unless it’s approved for the reviewer to do that. Which puts LTT into a predicament, as they’re usually the first to see a review unit being the largest channel, if the unit isn’t just for them and they have to pass it off to the next reviewer, they couldn’t be the one to auction it off.

Further it has to be a retail condition unit, in the past ages ago when gpus were less of a massively expensive and complicated item, it wasn’t uncommon at all for system AIBs to dump test units as B stock on their websites. Companies now don’t want those units on the market because they’re not always the final product and may involve different specced components than the final product.

 

One I own personally as an example is a 1gb gddr3 Radeon x1650 pro. It was a pre production variant sample given to powercolor.

Why it’s special and out of spec is that the agp x1650 pro is supposed to be either 256mb of ddr3 or 512mb of ddr2. For the time this would be compared to say, a 16gb HBM2 rtx 3050, a midrange card with an obscene type of video memory. That variant never made it to market and nobody was ever supposed to own it, but it ended up being sold by powercolor at some point and changed hands between gpu collectors and now I have it.

 

This happens now on a less aggressive scale with modern gpus, there’s probably a 6950XT out there somewhere with a different vram configuration, different clock speeds, different power delivery, etc. Thats not representative of the actual product and the AIB or manufacturer wouldn’t want that out there in the hands of the general public.

 

Sorta the same deal with intel engineering sample cpus, they’re not meant to leave the review or vendor test cycles.

[Arika]

They do. Just to their own staff. 

[Middcore]

Linus mentioned when they built Luke's new PC a few months ago, when they were picking a new GPU, that there are some parts they literally only get one of, and they need to keep them for future comparisons. It's not like LTT gets cases of new parts for "reviews."

[LogicalDrm]

12 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

But selling them would be illegal.

This isn't all/whole truth (as stated by others too). It depends on what kind of contract/agreement is made for sending review units. If it's loaner, then it would be illegal to sell it. If it was given without need to return, then it's like business gift. Receiver can use it like if they paid for it. Kinda. If its pre-release unit, it may not receive same treatment from brand as retail unit would. Mainly about warranty. Since reviewer doesn't have proof of purchase which is generally used to state length and beginning of warranty.

[Bryan-10EC]

On 5/19/2022 at 6:30 PM, 8tg said:

.

 

Sorta the same deal with intel engineering sample cpus, they’re not meant to leave the review or vendor test cycles.

And yet whenever you look for older higher spec I7s, many sites are loaded with those es chips.

Man, why do some old Intel cpus have such high resale values?

[Middcore]

20 minutes ago, Bryan-10EC said:

Man, why do some old Intel cpus have such high resale values?

 

Partially stupidity of people who only know "i7 = da bestest" and partially demand from (also arguably stupid) people who want to upgrade existing systems without changing platforms. 

[Bryan-10EC]

2 hours ago, Middcore said:

 

Partially stupidity of people who only know "i7 = da bestest" and partially demand from (also arguably stupid) people who want to upgrade existing systems without changing platforms. 

 

I was looking at option to upgrade my i5-6402p quad core non-hyperthreaded cpu (trying to wait til later this year before a full new pc build). But a used i7-7700 goes for 40+ bucks more than a 12th gen i3! wtf. I just don't understand.