Would you buy your video card from AliExpress?

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vjhawk

Limp Gawd
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I'm just wondering because I see video cards selling for significantly less on AliExpress.

But the caveat is that these video cards are sold from China which increases delivery time to 2 weeks+ and let's be honest you're half wondering if the video card is some kind of knock off imitation.

And if the video card arrives and it's not what you expected/wanted, how hard is it to get a return or refund of your money?

Anybody have experience buying from AliExpress. Would you go with them to buy a high end item like a video card?

For example do you believe that any of these listings are real?

Example A:

1706479806364.png


Example B:

1706479935216.png
 
Last edited:
not no....

not hiel no....

but F*CK no.......

'nuff said, unless of course, you just enjoy gettin ripped off and/or wasting your time & money :D
 
Might as well pay for a mystery box!
I have bought from there before, small ticket items like phone cases and camera parts and that's been fine.
But a GPU? That's really risky. JHMO of course.
 
I bought a keycap set and a couple of big mousepads from AE. Total was about $26 shipped so I wasn't concerned. Received everything about 3 weeks later.

Not a chance in Hell would I buy a GPU from AE.
 
I'll buy fittings and lube there (explains the itch), but never a component. No CPU, GPU, PSU, RAM, anything of that nature. I don't care if it's legit or not, just not worth the chance. Could be a gold mine of value, but it's like tapping a hooker on her "first time"... Probably a load of bullshit to get your money. Very attractive, but you're not gonna have a good time later.
 
I mean, I bought CPUs from AliExpress, but that's cause they were OEM only, so my choice was wait an unknown amount of time for AMD to come to their senses, get real lucky with an OEM in UK that put it for general orders, grey market chinese export on Amazon, or grey market direct from Aliexpress. Also got the low profile heatsinks from Aliexpress cause the manufacturer wasn't selling them in the US, but I bought those from their official Aliexpress store.

I could see maybe if NVidia or AMD put together a CN only low end card that was a good value.

But when I order from Aliexpress, I have to call my bank and have them disable fraud controls or the charges get blocked so early they don't even show up in the Customer Service tools. That kind of says hey, be careful.
 
Even if you dont get scammed, the packing is usually so awful your wonderful deal will get squashed anyway.
 
I bought an Nvidia GPU from an AliExpress seller last year.

I literally could not find this GPU anywhere else online.

So, I decided to take the chance.

Took 21 days to arrive. Most of that time it was traveling around from LA Customs to Montana and Kansas then back to CA then NV and finally to me. It took a two week road trip of the western US.

It was brand new in the box.



1706585625085.png


GT 1010 brand new. Works great. No issues.

Would I buy a $400 GPU from a random seller on AE? Maybe - depends on the guarantee I can get. Use the right payment method and you reduce your risk. It's like amazon with more random sellers and longer ship times. yes, there are scammers there, too.

You should see the intel 9900K Amazon sent me a few years ago.
 
I've bought wcing gear there. GPU blocks, fittings and tubing. Always came sooner than expected and is well packaged. I'd have no problem buying more from those stores.

A GPU? Nah, that's a hard pass. It's one thing to drop a couple bills on simple fittings or a block. It's something altogether different if you're spending $500 on a GPU that may have been mined into the ground. Altho a dude over at TPU just posted 3 cards he bought there, a 5700xt, 2060 and 710 iirc. They all came in what looked like new boxes and he said they worked. But the listings OP posted are obviously bs.
 
I wouldn't. I wouldn't recommend that anyone do so.

There are as many youtube videos as you could possibly want covering parts from these sites. Generally it goes like this: price is too good to be true but you order anyway, something does ship, it takes a while to get to you, you get what looks like a normal GPU box but you have never heard of the brand, there is a GPU in the box, for some reason only the drivers on the disc that came with the GPU will seem to work, once the shady drivers are installed the GPU actually seems to work, performance isn't quite what you would expect, something seems off, you download some hardware utilities, they sort of identify it as the GPU that you ordered but some of the specs are off, you do more digging, the specs actually tie to some old ass used GPU, you got scammed, they took an old used GPU and slapped a fancy cooler on it and screwed with its firmware so that it would report that it is a current gen GPU.
 
Thanks for the feedback guys. Hmm, looks like I will have to pass on Ali Express for GPUs. Feels super risky gambling $500 or more and getting a knockoff instead. The value is tempting but chance of rip off feels too high!
 
vjhawk said:
Thanks for the feedback guys. Hmm, looks like I will have to pass on Ali Express for GPUs. Feels super risky gambling $500 or more and getting a knockoff instead. The value is tempting but chance of rip off feels too high!
Click to expand...
You can't possibly have thought someone was selling an RTX 4090 for $400...
 
wareyore said:
I bought an Nvidia GPU from an AliExpress seller last year.

I literally could not find this GPU anywhere else online.

So, I decided to take the chance.

Took 21 days to arrive. Most of that time it was traveling around from LA Customs to Montana and Kansas then back to CA then NV and finally to me. It took a two week road trip of the western US.

It was brand new in the box.



View attachment 631346

GT 1010 brand new. Works great. No issues.

Would I buy a $400 GPU from a random seller on AE? Maybe - depends on the guarantee I can get. Use the right payment method and you reduce your risk. It's like amazon with more random sellers and longer ship times. yes, there are scammers there, too.

You should see the intel 9900K Amazon sent me a few years ago.
Click to expand...
I would never buy PC parts off Amazon, either. Almost everything in my 7800X3D upgrade was purchased from Best Buy with store pickup. I purchased the memory from Newegg since I have never had an issue with them and no other reliable retailer was selling it.
 
I would. I have bought over a dozen items from AliExpress for my 1/6 RC Suzuki Samurai without any issues. The only drawback is that it takes like 4 weeks for you to receive your item. AliExpress is like the Chinese Ebay. If they were scamming people they would have gone out of business years ago.
 
vjhawk said:
For example do you believe that any of these listings are real?

Example A:
Click to expand...

Nope. For one thing, you're not getting a 4090 for $425. For another, the photo doesn't match the listing. It's a 10GB 3080 box, which is probably what you should expect for $425.
 
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Chinese eBay? Chinese anything no thanks. I'm not racist but f*** that country.
 
4090's are going for over retail in China because of the embargo. The 4090Ds are gimped. I wouldn't mind 2 or 3 of the custom 2 slot 4090s to put in my server for ai workloads when the price goes down though. Cousin in Hong Kong has 3 of the 2 slot 4090s in his PC but he paid more then retail for them. There are no deals on 4090s on ali express. For $400 your likely to get ripped off and get a 4090 pcb thats missing the actual 4090 chip and the ram because they harvested it to make a custom 2 slot 4090 for use for AI in servers.
 
Armenius said:
For some reason Asuka isn't on the box for the 4090, but she is on the one for the case and motherboard.

View attachment 631196

You only get about a third of Asuka on the 4090 itself.

View attachment 631197
Click to expand...
That looks cool but my workstation case doesn't even have a window prefer good airflow. Why doesn't Asus make a ROG Strix Scar Asuka edition with a 7945 HX 3d and a 4090 or Asuka Rog Phone 8 with the 24 gb of ram and 1 tb storage. Those I would consider getting since people see me using it.
 
All those are scams. In fact even MSRP on Aliexpress is a scam. They have been selling overpriced video cards for years now.
Especially now that you can't buy 4090 in China, only the gimped version so 4090 price is skyrocketing.
 
If it sounds to good to be true, then it is. A 7900 XTX for $581 or 4090 for $424 are clearly scams from ANY e-tailer.

Video cards in general are typically not great buys on AliExpress. However, CPUs can usually be had under MSRP and even ones not available in retail (like the Ryzen 7500f) can be had for good prices.

I've bought two mini PC barebones from AliExpress (Topton and YANLING) and had great experiences with the sellers (they were sold directly from the manufacturer stores.) As long as the seller has good feedback and the price doesn't seem like an absolute scam I have no qualms with buying on AliExpress.
 
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