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kridsdale3 9 days ago

I'm building out a 10G LAN in my house (8k VR video files are ludicrously enormous) and while it's mostly Mac, where I use Thunderbolt to SFP fiber adapters, for my Windows PC I'm looking around at what PCI options to get, and haven't pulled the trigger.

If you make a decision on a 10G card (SFP or ethernet) I'd like to hear what you picked.

murderfs 9 days ago | parent | next [-]

You can get pretty cheap 10GBASE-T NICs on ebay. I've had pretty good success with this abomination, a server-pull NIC with an HP proprietary physical interface plugged into an adapter to PCI-E: https://www.ebay.com/itm/144151881516

toast0 7 days ago | parent [-]

That's a pretty weird contraption. If you want weird, I'd suggest one of these https://www.ebay.com/itm/166884585625

Silicom PEG210 Silicom PE210G2BPI40-T-SD-BC7 Intel x540 based bypass NIC. In case you want to have the two ports connect together when the computer is off or something. Setup time is a bit more, but you can also configure them to act like normal NICs.

Usually show up around $15-25 like other x540 dual rj45 cards, but sometimes a bit less, cause they're weird.

timc3 8 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If its SFP then intel, they have seem to have good ability to go into power saving states. My mellanox cards don’t.

10gbase-t ethernet is harder to pick, a lot of those cards run incredibly hot particularly the ones that expect server style cooling. Heard bad things about all of them.

Also heard that Windows has a hard time reaching 10G anyway.

toast0 7 days ago | parent [-]

> Also heard that Windows has a hard time reaching 10G anyway.

It really shouldn't. Microsoft invented or popularized Receive Side Scaling [1], which helps get things lined up for high throughput; but applications probably need to do a bit of work too.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/n...