> and while the company still sells the AQC107 silicon, it is quite expensive for motherboard integration, and add-on cards are, by definitio,n more expensive than integrated solutions.

Not sure what a 10GbE motherboard would cost today, but in 2022 I bought ASUS ProArt X570 (1x 10GbE + 1x 2.5GbE) for ~400 EUR, and just the other day I got the Asus XG-C100C (1x 10GbE) network adapter for another machine for ~80 EUR. Would the price difference between a motherboard today with the only difference being with/without a 10GbE NIC be more than say 100 EUR? I feel like they'd use the 10GbE NIC to raise the prices more when it's integrated into the motherboard, than what you can get when purchasing it as a separate addon. But maybe it's just me being overly cynical.

Aside from the cost, ACQ107 is not very reliable in my experience. I have one that randomly drops the connection every now and then, even at sub-10Gbps speeds. Switching to a different NIC makes everything rock stable.