Good day. I’m looking more PCIE lanes/slots for my home lab server and ran across this Ebay seller in China selling 1st and 2nd gen Epyc gear for really good prices. Below are a couple of listing gs that I have an eye on…
Has anyone bought from this seller? Or does anyone have concerns about these listings? Has anyone seen similar listings for similar prices or anything of the like?
They seem pretty solid of a seller with tons of similar gear at prices that seem legit.
One of these would be a huge upgrade from my 7700k that has been repurposed as my home lab server. I know the clocks will be lower, but the memory and thread upgrade would be worth it. The on board SAS/SATA would allow me to drop an HBA and possibly drop in some 2.5Gb networking. The IPMI would be great at times like this where I’m away from the house for an extended period and the power must have been off long enough to knock the server offline.
I can’t comment on these specific sellers, but I can see two potential issues:
Buying anything on eBay from sellers in another country makes returns generally difficult. If you need to return anything, the shipping cost will likely be very expensive and take a long time. Also if you need to interact with their customer support, you will likely be dealing with people in a different time zone and have a limited grasp of the language in the country that they are shipping to.
Buying packs of gear can also make returns difficult if only part of your order is faulty. Let’s say you get it and it all works except one RAM module is faulty. Now you need the seller to both cooperate and either decide what percentage of the final sale that one module represented in order to do a partial refund or send you a replacement. This could takes weeks if shipping overseas, or be so expensive to ship that it will cost you less to just eat the cost and buy another module elsewhere. If the seller chooses not to cooperate and eBay needs to get involved, you will need to send everything back.
I buy a lot of stuff on eBay and have had 95% positive experiences, but when it’s bad it can be very frustrating. If you aren’t in a major rush, are willing to gamble a bit on the potential of lower prices, and you can deal with the possibility of having money tied up in returns while you get an issue sorted out, then these could be worthwhile.
When I am logged in to Ebay the offers is designated as having buyers protection. At least that’s what it says for the country I am in. So I personally would not worry about it being a scam, if you have trouble with the product though you need to be aware that the seller will expect you to possibly return the product to China if you want your money back.
Me personally, I have ordered smaller items like SSDs from China for about that amount this bundle costs and the items were legit. It seems China produces and significant amount of excess and refurbished product and some people sell them off for a reasonable prices. So yes, the deal is probably legit, if not you can trouble Ebay for your money back, but if you have problems with the seller you’ll have to possibly return items to China.
Its potentially risky, but as long you do you due diligence with documenting the issue and communicate, ebay will not actively fuck you over.
IF I remember correctly, ebay holds the payment is escrow until your confirm delivery is okay OR 30? days after delivery without any action on your part, whichever occurs sooner.
Duties and VAT can be onerous depending on where you live, and if they apply they are your responsibility to handle. For me its guesstimate +30% on top of (item+shipping) cost.
There are ways around that, but that depends on sellers cooperation, your personal willingness to risk it and luck. Some sellers automatically under report shipment value without asking, so might not even have to ask if you were so inclined .
I can personally recommend seller tugm4470, he is solid and has proven track record on servethehome community forums as well.
unless you really plan or need dual socket operation in future, target EPYC P variants first. They should be cheaper, have larger L3, and clock slightly better. Memory bandwith is also better for some reason
H11 board is PCIE3.0 (older), if you want PCI4 you have to get H12 board
offered RAMs are amazing deal, but slower that platform supports. If they are dual rank, then you need only four modules for octa-channel operation (I didn’t know that)
3200 MHZ ECC RDIMM is optimal , you are getting 2133. Not a dealbreaker due to price
board will ship without lithium coin battery CR2032 due to firehazard regs (?), source your own
high frequency variant 7F52 is interesting and cheap, if you don’t mind double TDP, it also has fully enabled L3 cache (256MB vs 128 MB on 7302P and 64 MB on 7282)
if you are buying CPU separately, verify explicitly whether cpu hasn’t been oem lock to specific OEM boards.
If cpu has been scavenged from HP, LENOVO or DELL server, it will likely not boot anywhere else. This is irreversible, and if you put unlocked cpu into server platform that employs oem lock, it will be permanently oem locked to that platform upon boot. Supermicro,Tyan and ASrock do not do oem locking as far as I know.
i remember seeing some special dell oem epyc model, sometime like 7DE? that were both oem locked and crippled for lower costs (16C, only 4 mem channels, and god knows what else). They don’t exist officially, but they are offered on ebay and some info can be found on forums.
7V73X is example of unclocked cpu, 64C and 768 MB of L3 Maybe @wendel would be interested. They werent sold outside OEM channels, and plain variant without 3d cache was being sold fo 9000 USD+ new. So 10k at least, now sold for 1,8k. Too rich for me play with, but someone wink, wink, nudge nudge else might be interested.
IIRC that’s true for all motherboards shipped from China, and presumably also other electronics.
Also Gigabyte as far as I know. I’ve been looking at MZ32-AR0 rev 1 boards as they have (in my opinion) better PCIe options (3x PCIe4.0 x16, 1x PCIe3.0 x16 or 2x PCIe3.0 x8, 1x PCIe4.0 x8, 2x M.2 [PCIe3.0], OCP 2.0 [PCIe3.0 x16] and 4x PCIe4.0 x4 in SlimSAS connectors for U.2 drives that can be rerouted to another x16 slot) than the H11SSL-i boards (3x PCI-E 3.0 x16, 3x PCI-E 3.0 x8, 1xM.2 [PCI-E 3.0]).
In my country, AliExpress handles VAT and import duties, i.e. the listed price on Ali is always the final price I pay (nowadays, it used to be different). I’m writing this because most of the Chinese (re)sellers are also active there, so you can cross-check.
Also, I’ve seen more RAM options on Ali and you’re usually not locked into a specific CPU+Mobo+RAM combo.
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