So you spent good money on a used Ryzen 7 5800X3D — and it came with a free bonus: a lifetime Valorant ban. Not yours. The previous owner's. Riot's anti-cheat had flagged that chip's hardware ID, and now the ban travels with the silicon.
The new owner's crime? Installing the game. Riot hardware-bans a chip's ID when it catches a cheater — and that ban sticks to the silicon, not the person.
His CPU runs every benchmark flawlessly. Valorant just refuses to launch. And there's basically no appeal — the ban keys off hardware, not your account, so support sees a banned machine and shrugs.
Every "great deal" on the used market is now a dice roll. The chip works. The paperwork — the invisible, hardware-level kind — doesn't.
▶ The full 60-second breakdown is in the video above — or stream it directly here.
Buying used PC parts just became Russian roulette. Source: PCWorld
