Generally speaking, I get the feeling I should stick to something that isn't worth enough for felony theft charges to apply, so no RTX 4090 or 4080. The 4070 Ti isn't at all a bad deal for $0.00, so I suppose that's the one.
I've heard conflicting reports on how likely Amazon is to refund you if you simply claim the box showed up with a brick in it. I've also seen conflicting reports on whether or not they'll actually check if a return has the same serial number on it. What say you, Hexbear?
usually they don't check at all
there is always the remote possibility that you will be the unlucky fucker that some jobsworth does decide to check though
What I've heard previously is they are much more likely to check with electronics worth several hundred dollars, something about how such returns automatically get flagged to be inspected separately.
That said, I'm wondering if maybe the GPU isn't the component I should be doing this with. Perhaps it'd be more foolproof to just swap the IHS of an i9 and Celeron of the same socket and return the Celeron wearing the i9's serial number. I've never heard any stories about Amazon literally testing parts in a test bench before.