The advice you see most often after a hardware ban is to buy new parts. It is worth pricing that properly, because people usually underestimate both the money and the effort. A fingerprint is assembled from several components, so replacing one rarely helps. To change enough of it you are realistically looking at: The motherboard, which carries the board serial and system UUID. This is the expensive one, and it is the one that forces everything else — a new board often means new RAM, sometimes a new CPU, and a Windows reactivation. Every storage device, because disk serials are read per drive. Not just the boot drive. A machine with an NVMe and two SATA drives needs all three replaced. The ne
The advice you see most often after a hardware ban is to buy new parts. It is worth pricing that properly, because people usually underestimate both the money and the effort. A fingerprint is assembled from several components, so replacing one rarely helps. To change enough of it you are realistically looking at:
, which carries the board serial and system UUID. This is the expensive one, and it is the one that forces everything else — a new board often means new RAM, sometimes a new CPU, and a Windows reactivation.
, because disk serials are read per drive. Not just the boot drive. A machine with an NVMe and two SATA drives needs all three replaced.
, or at least a card to override the onboard one. Cheaper than the rest, but it counts. Then the effort: rebuilding the machine, reinstalling Windows, reactivating, reinstalling everything, and losing a weekend. If you are not comfortable doing it yourself, add labour. And the part people miss —
you can be banned again next week
. If the behaviour that caused the first ban has not changed, new hardware simply gives the anti-cheat a new fingerprint to record. You have converted a recoverable problem into an expensive one that recurs.
Let us be even-handed about this rather than just selling. Where a spoofer clearly wins. Cost, by two or three orders of magnitude. Reversibility — nothing is permanently altered, so if it does not work you have lost the price of a subscription rather than the price of a PC. Speed, in that you are playing the same evening. And repeatability: if a ban lands again, you spoof again at no additional hardware cost. Where new hardware genuinely wins. It is permanent in a way a spoofer is not. There is no session-based routine to forget, no driver to load, no Secure Boot trade-off, and no risk of a partial spoof leaving you more identifiable than before. If you are also selling the old machine, the
Let us be even-handed about this rather than just selling.
Cost, by two or three orders of magnitude. Reversibility — nothing is permanently altered, so if it does not work you have lost the price of a subscription rather than the price of a PC. Speed, in that you are playing the same evening. And repeatability: if a ban lands again, you spoof again at no additional hardware cost.
Where new hardware genuinely wins.
It is permanent in a way a spoofer is not. There is no session-based routine to forget, no driver to load, no Secure Boot trade-off, and no risk of a partial spoof leaving you more identifiable than before. If you are also selling the old machine, the effective cost drops.
Neither addresses account, email, payment or behavioural correlation. A new PC with the same payment card and the same play style gets caught the same way. This is the single most common reason expensive rebuilds fail, and it is worth internalising before spending anything. The honest recommendation: try a spoofer first, because the downside is a month's subscription and the upside is not spending several hundred pounds. If a maintained kernel-mode spoofer genuinely fails on your specific hardware — and you have verified it failed rather than assuming, using the checks in the setup guide — then hardware replacement becomes a reasonable second step rather than a first resort.
There is a third option people rarely consider, and it is the cheapest of all: buy the spoofer before you need it. The asymmetry is stark. Run from your first cheated session, a spoofer means any ban is recorded against identifiers that were never real. Your genuine hardware is never in the anti-cheat's records at all. Recovery costs you an account and nothing else. Buy it after a ban, and you are working around a fingerprint the anti-cheat already holds and has flagged. That is a harder problem, it works less reliably, and it is why some people conclude spoofers do not work — they are testing them in the difficult case having skipped the easy one. Priced over a year, preventative spoofing c
There is a third option people rarely consider, and it is the cheapest of all:
buy the spoofer before you need it
. The asymmetry is stark. Run from your first cheated session, a spoofer means any ban is recorded against identifiers that were never real. Your genuine hardware is never in the anti-cheat's records at all. Recovery costs you an account and nothing else. Buy it after a ban, and you are working around a fingerprint the anti-cheat already holds and has flagged. That is a harder problem, it works less reliably, and it is why some people conclude spoofers do not work — they are testing them in the difficult case having skipped the easy one. Priced over a year, preventative spoofing costs a fraction of one hardware rebuild. Priced against the alternative of losing an account with years of purcha
Is it cheaper to buy a new PC or use an HWID spoofer? ▾
A spoofer, by a very large margin. Changing enough of a fingerprint means a new motherboard, every storage device and the network adapter, plus a Windows reinstall and a lost weekend — against a subscription costing less than a game.
Can I just replace my hard drive to bypass an HWID ban? ▾
Usually not. Most anti-cheats hash several identifiers together, so a new drive still matches on the motherboard, system UUID and network adapters. It is an expensive change with a low chance of working on its own.