I bought my first PC part from Aliexpress

Welcome to a new post and today I will tell about a PC part that I bought from Aliexpress. It's a Wi-Fi card I needed.. I've always been holding back from buying PC parts from Aliexpress mostly because of the concern of the product being poor quality or not being shipped or something. I will talk about the Wi-Fi card itself works well and if the concerns I had before were true or not in this post.

The Wi-Fi card itself

The Wi-Fi card itself is an Intel MC-AC7265 Mini-PCIe. Why would I buy a random Wi-Fi card that's Mini-PCIe? I recently got and 3rd generation Intel laptop for free and the original Wi-Fi was a max. 300Mbps Wi-Fi 4 Atheros Mini-PCIe card. The old Atheros Wi-Fi card was enough for browsing the internet and watching YouTube but nothing more. I also wanted to be able to do some cloud gaming over my home network with moonlight and that was just not possible. When I tried watching YouTube as a test with Moonlight it kept laggy and at one point just did not do anything because of a "Low bitrate" ofcourse I know I should do cloud gaming with Ethernet, but that is not always available. So I wanted a better Wi-Fi solution, but what would be good value. On Amazon I found some Wi-Fi 5 cards for over €15,- and on Aliexpress I even found some Wi-Fi 6 cards but those were around €17,50 and I did not want to buy a Wi-Fi card for that price when not knowing if it would work well. So I bought the Wi-Fi 5 card that should get 867Mbps speeds at 5GHz.

The performance

10 days after ordering the Wi-Fi card it was there. I quickly unpacked it and installed it into the laptop and ran the speedtest.net speedtest. The speedtest showed an upload speed of xxx and download speed of xxx. I also ran the test on my phone and got nearly identical numbers. Then I tested loading in YouTube video's at 1080p60 which was a little bit faster than with the old card. With the previous results I was sure that game streaming with moonlight would be much better. And it was, kind of. While the stream was smooth and all I noticed a pretty big input latency. It was a little bit expected as it still is game streaming on Wi-Fi. In my experience the Wi-Fi speeds were enough to play non-competetive games. For testing I played minecraft creative and it was playable and the stream did not stutter much at all. So that was all smooth except the input latency. When playing MotoGP 21 the input delay is an issue though. I was able to mostly stay on the circuit and eventually completely with some rewinding but I felt the input latency so much that I know I could've done better when I did not have such latency. The game just did not feel as responsive as it should be. But I think that that will mostly be the case streaming games over WiFi and not this card in particular.

4 weeks later

After 4 weeks of using the Wi-Fi card in my laptop I have not ecperienced any issues. The speeds were good and the Wi-Fi signal was good as it should be. I only once had to reboot my laptop after I put it asleep because the Wi-Fi was suspiciously slow but I do not think that that is related to the Wi-Fi card. All with all this Wi-Fi card from Aliexpress is pretty good. For only €5,40 I got a decent Mini-PCIe Wi-Fi card that performs well. The quality of this card seems normal and so I am glad I bought this. After this I think Aliexpress might indeed be a good place for computer part deals as long as you check the reviews from the product and seller you are looking at.

Thank you for reading and I hope to see you in a next post!