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Flint Ironstag

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Dec 1, 2013
1,334
744
Houston, TX USA
You folks who use these websites to order peripherals and funky PCIe adapters for your Mac Pros - which one do you use, and what's the difference? Any pitfalls to avoid?

Thanks in advance.
 
So I use Aliexpress quite a lot, but decided not to order my NVME adapter for my 5.1.

Please keep in mind why the price is so low for the majority of there products. There is simply a differrence in build quality that is just less. Ofcourse there are exceptions were the quality is actually pretty good. But than the pricing is also more in line with western prices.

Yes there are a lot of NVME adapters for sale on Ali but also a lot are untested. I just used a KryoM.2 (from Amazon) adapter which has “chinese” pricing but has a proven good build quality. Probably also made in China :)
 
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I’ve ordered a few small things from Aliexpress (cabling, heatsink compound, etc...) without problems, but I personally wouldn’t rely on them for critical items. They may be fine, I don’t know, just feels like a risk to me.
 
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You cut out the middle man resulting in lower prices. But sometimes those middle men you cut out do check the products they resell to make sure they meet a certain quality standard.

If you're very well informed you can save a lot of money. If not, you can lose a lot of money by receiving shabby products you don't want to use.
 
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Small things (cables, adapters, Android TV boxes, headphone amplifiers, DAC's, laptops) are fine, expecially from known brands like CHUWI, JEYI, QGeeM, Ugreen, XiangSheng.

Avoid any sort of SD-Cards, USB Sticks, flash memory. Most of them are counterfeits lacking in quality. Especially SD-Cards.

By the way, this PCI-E-Adapter works fine: www.aliexpress.com/item/32888030841.html

 
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I placed an order with Aliexpress two days ago. Got a " Your order shipped " email today.
Don't get too excited. Depending on where you live, Aliexpress orders arrive quite slowly. For me, Southern Europe, they arrive in a month or two in the worst case.
 
Often not slow.

I ordered an adapter with AliExpress Standard Shipping (indicating 15 - 22 days) on Dec.19. 2019.

AliExpre.png

China - Europe
 
Alibaba seems to be the slower one, I waited two months for a set of identical CPUs from them in 2017 .. .and one of them was a Core i7 the other was a Xeon.
 
I've had a very poor success rate with Aliexpress, with about 4 of 8 orders having some kind of problem. The place is filled with counterfeits, and also shoddy items that don't work at all. Just like with Ebay, you need to be careful about who you are buying from on Aliexpress. It's a den of scum and villainy, but there are legitimate sellers too.

On Aliexpress I had one order never ship. If you don't register a claim to get your money back in time, then you paid for nothing even though the seller never shipped. The problem here is that the shipping is so slow you don't really expect it to arrive for weeks--so it's not really on your mind for a long time that there might be an issue that you need to look into. Thankfully I caught it in time because I checked that order while making a new order for something else.

As for Alibaba, I think that is more geared toward resellers and businesses who are buying in bulk. Yes there are many things you can buy in a quantity of one, but for anything I specifically want there has always been a large minimum quantity for an order.
 
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If you order something expensive from taobao or alibaba ( mainland China , Taiwan , etc . ) , make certain you pay extra for express delivery or it'll arrive in a month or two here in North America . Understand the dispute resolution process as well . There are users here on the forum that are buying $5,000 processors on these marketplaces , but maybe understanding Mandarin would make things easier :D .
 
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