Most of the Chinese 'cheap' LEDs are either Epistar or Bridgelux, or a knock-off of either. I've used a lot for various projects, and there are some thngs to watch out for. First, color tends to suck with Chinese 3-watts. Unless you are just trying to throw lumens at something don't trust kelvin ratings or CRI ratings. Next, don't even try to run a 3watt Chinese LED over 700mA. Last, the mounting of the emitter to the star tends to always be flaky with the real cheap stars. While I've encountered my share of 'basement reflow' jobs that fall apart by and large the higher end emitters tend to have higher quality mounting.
In short, if you can get them real cheap, they're worth 'beater projects'. At 700mA they'll run fine and I have hundreds running over 20k hours.