Asian writing on processor box (Intel)?

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I bought a processor from Amazon, and it came with Asian writing all over the box. Almost no Roman characters. Should I be worried that this might not be a legit Intel processor, or do they come that way if meant for an Asian market?

It could just be what used to be known as "grey market", or packaged for a market other than the USA (or whatever your country may be). I've bought plenty of OEM (ie not in retail packaging) and other-market packaged components over the years. The only time I ran into trouble with counterfeits was some years back when *everyone* without direct agreements from (I think it was) Intel was occasionally getting bad chips and the bogus memory & PL2303 trouble a few years ago. If it were me I wouldn't worry about it, but I would verify the stampings on the heat spreader or substrate (ie the stuff you can read when you look at the topor underside of the chip), put it in a system, throw something like CPU-Z at it to read the chip ID and then run a stress tests or benchmarks at it.

Thanks. This is my first build, so I'm not quite up to the fancier things that people who are more "with it" can do. (Still not even sure which Corsair power supply I'm getting, tho' 500w seems safe.)

I'm figuring once the parts are assembled and I get the OS loaded, if the thing runs, I'll play with it for a few weeks and if it hasn't gone up in flames and still does everything I'm used to doing, I'll call it a win.

You'll likely know pretty quickly if it's a bogus chip, but I don't think that's likely. I think your plan is perfectly sound.

Actual counterfeit CPU's are pretty rare currently. The closest I've seen recently was copper slugs disguised as Atmega microcontrollers maybe five years ago, but they are far less complex than a PC CPU. It's far more likely if a CPU is sketchy for it to be a discard that didn't pass testing for some obscure minor function. So again, when you get your system up and running do some thorough burn-in testing that hits any functionality you think you'd ever use. If no problems are found, you are probably fine. That the writing on the box isn't English, however, is not something I'd take as a warning sign that a chip is necessarily sketchy.

I generally stay away from it not out of some Nationalistic principal but because reputable dealers who stand behind what they sell usually don't sell it. Unless I'm just working on hobby stuff, if a CPU is bad I want a no-hassle RMA. So, yes it's cheaper but because of the distribution channel you often have little recourse if something is wrong & that seems to encourage things to go wrong, you know? Besides, white box may or may not be grey market; same for much of what you buy online from small vendors or eBay.