I recently purchased a USB3-to-SATA adapter that, according to the vendor, contains an ASMedia ASM1053E chip. When I looked inside, I saw what appears to be a counterfeit chip painted to resemble a 1053E... the font wasn't crisp and the font color wasn't white, unlike online images of the genuine chip. When I used AIDA64 Extreme to display information about the adapter, AIDA64 displayed "1053," not "1053E."
The manufacturer sent me a new adapter direct from China, freshly manufactured. With the new adapter, AIDA64 displayed "1053e."
Does AIDA64 read the value from the ASMedia chip itself, or does AIDA64 rely on some other supporting chip in the device (perhaps firmware programmed by the device manufacturer) to report honest information about the identity of the chip? In other words, would it be easy for a device's manufacturer to fool AIDA64 into reporting false information, so that AIDA64 could be fooled into displaying "1053e" when the chip isn't really a 1053E? (To make it harder for users to detect cheap fakes.)