Recommended PCI-E Network cards/routers beyond 1gbit ports

[AssaTM]

Hi all, as we are approaching a world where internet speeds/internal network transfer speeds are surpassing our 1gbit ports, I was wondering if there are any recommendations on what setup I should be looking towards in the future to fully utilise the faster speeds? I see 2.5gbit ports are available as are 10gbit.

My router currently offers Dual WAN, however if the ethernet ports are only 1gbit, what purpose does this serve? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you

 

[ChrisD.]

Why do you feel you need more than 1 Gbps? If you don't know, you probably don't need it.

It can get expensive and complicated quite quickly; switches aren't cheap and can be loud, there's copper vs DAC/fibre to consider, type of NICs, speed etc.

Internet speeds beyond 1 Gbps aren't really designed to be saturated by one single consumer device. Sure, it's cool and all that however it's designed to be able to feed higher speeds to multiple clients. So if you have 2 Gbps internet, two devices can enjoy full 1 Gbps speeds as an example.

 

[AssaTM]

It was the Virgin Gig1 with the Super Hub 5 2.5Gbit port that got me thinking mainly. Currently in Modem mode you cannot utilise it's full potential due to the 1Gbit Ethernet ports, however with the new Hub supporting a 2.5Gbit port, plus my Router supporting it as well it seems like a quick win to buy a NIC for the PC ready for that future proofing.

For example I had my eye on this:

▷ ASUS XG-C100C 10GBase-T PCIe Network Adapter | OcUK (overclockers.co.uk)

Which seems decently priced for what it is, unless theres any drawbacks i'm unaware of?

 

[sandys]

My router currently offers Dual WAN, however if the ethernet ports are only 1gbit, what purpose does this serve? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you

For dual Wan you can use this for failover, so when VM goes down you switch over to 5G for example or use both via load balancing perhaps, you may be able to Lag two 1Gb ports off your current VM hub to get the remainder of Gib1 to your network.

For example I had my eye on this:

▷ ASUS XG-C100C 10GBase-T PCIe Network Adapter | OcUK (overclockers.co.uk)

Which seems decently priced for what it is, unless there's any drawbacks I'm unaware of?

That'd do the job, 2.5G cards can be had for less than 30quid though and are on most new mobos if you wanted to keep costs measured.

There were some issues with the ac107 chipset and some NAS distros in the past so I went for Intel x550 as it is dual 10G and only uses 4 lanes, those past issues have probably been resolved now and was specific to Unraid I think but it might have have been freenas, my memory is not serving me well.

For 10Gb you need decent ethernet cabling and the cost of other supporting hardware hubs/switches etc ramps up, you still need to have some reason to use it, I use it for fast remote storage to a NAS. My gear is 10 and 2.5G desktop switches/hubs all fanless and rj45, not cheap as mentioned but are silent, if a little toasty.

Why do you feel you need more than 1 Gbps? If you don't know, you probably don't need it.

I get the impression he must have gig1 as he says get full if the VM had a 2.5G port you could actually get the full bandwidth of gig1 fibre which is something like 1150Mb.

Internet speeds beyond 1 Gbps aren't really designed to be saturated by one single consumer device. Sure, it's cool and all that however it's designed to be able to feed higher speeds to multiple clients. So if you have 2 Gbps internet, two devices can enjoy full 1 Gbps speeds as an example.

If you use third party infrastructure your internet with VM is fed from that 1Gb port which is not up to the job of supporting gig1, ideally you'd want to deliver full bandwidth from port to your internal network to handle how you would like.

 

[deuse]

It was the Virgin Gig1 with the Super Hub 5 2.5Gbit port that got me thinking mainly. Currently in Modem mode you cannot utilise it's full potential due to the 1Gbit Ethernet ports, however with the new Hub supporting a 2.5Gbit port, plus my Router supporting it as well it seems like a quick win to buy a NIC for the PC ready for that future proofing.

For example I had my eye on this:

▷ ASUS XG-C100C 10GBase-T PCIe Network Adapter | OcUK (overclockers.co.uk)

Which seems decently priced for what it is, unless theres any drawbacks i'm unaware of?

Unless you buy super fast speed SSD.
You won't even reach 1gb network speed.

I have a 10GB SFP+ Nas connected to my PC via a 10GB SFP+ card.
The top speed I've ever had is 750-800 MB both ways.

 

[ChrisD.]

It was the Virgin Gig1 with the Super Hub 5 2.5Gbit port that got me thinking mainly. Currently in Modem mode you cannot utilise it's full potential due to the 1Gbit Ethernet ports, however with the new Hub supporting a 2.5Gbit port, plus my Router supporting it as well it seems like a quick win to buy a NIC for the PC ready for that future proofing.

For example I had my eye on this:

▷ ASUS XG-C100C 10GBase-T PCIe Network Adapter | OcUK (overclockers.co.uk)


Which seems decently priced for what it is, unless theres any drawbacks i'm unaware of?

Personally I wouldn't touch any Asus networking equipment with a barge pole. Look for Intel and look on eBay, older server cards will be much, much better with more mature drivers.

Unless you buy super fast speed SSD.
You won't even reach 1gb network speed.

Most mechanical HDDs these days will do 1 Gbps for sustained transfers of large files.

 

[sandys]

Personally I wouldn't touch any Asus networking equipment with a barge pole. Look for Intel and look on eBay, older server cards will be much, much better with more mature drivers.

Its just an Aquantia 107 chip on that card, it has been in the wild a while now, features on many highend boards, it should be fine at this stage.

Most mechanical HDDs these days will do 1 Gbps for sustained transfers of large files.

Yup what he said, my NAS mech drives are fairly low end Toshibas and they do 250Mb+ so will load a 2.5Gbps port nicely, 1Gbps has had its time.

 

[Avalon]

Personally I wouldn't touch any Asus networking equipment with a barge pole. Look for Intel and look on eBay, older server cards will be much, much better with more mature drivers.

Most mechanical HDDs these days will do 1 Gbps for sustained transfers of large files.

While I absolutely agree ASUS are a POS, the old idea of buying Intel because it's reliable and worse is flawed and has been for years. Look at the i2xx driver fiasco's for linux, the workaround was to disable buffering and take a speed hit, then look at the i225... three chipset revisions, the first one is unusable, the second they claim can be fixed by an NVM flash but the real world disagrees, the third still has widespread issues with running at 2.5Gb as they have all been supposedly certified and tested to, they all still suffer basic detection/fallback issues, then we get to the - admittedly inherited - TI Puma chipset issues which from memory Intel has decided to give up on. Unfortunately while Intel used to be the default for reliability in networking chipsets in the consumer and low end SMB markets, it has a really poor track record in the last few years. The only credible Intel 10Gbe adapters are the x540 which lacks NBASE-T, or the x7 series that support NABSE-T. It would be nice if Intel could eventually sort out a non garbage i225, but after 3 hardware attempts and a slew of firmware/driver fixes I wouldn't hold my breath.

 

[AssaTM]

I appreciate all of the help in the thread so far, thank you However, the one thing I'm now stuck on is which PCI-E NIC do I buy that supports 2.5Gig and is actually well recommended? As I was eyeing up the Intel chip mentioned but I did read about the issues it has faced, and then people don't recommend the ASUS either?

 

[Caged]

The QNAP QXG-2G1T-I225 looks like a decent card. Cursory glance at reviews suggest it has a good Intel chip in rather than the bad one.

 

[Avalon]

The QNAP QXG-2G1T-I225 looks like a decent card. Cursory glance at reviews suggest it has a good Intel chip in rather than the bad one.

B3 still has issues, while the NVM flash is supposed to fix them according to Intel (who to be blunt have said all of this multiple times about multiple hardware steppings at this stage), real world feedback seems to disagree.

 

[Caged]

Well in that case, lol. Glad I don't have to deal with any of this stuff anymore. I remember getting some trash Intel 10Gb NICs on some VM hosts and eventually Dell swapped the mezzanine cards out because of it. I don't really touch hardware now.

 

[sandys]

The Asus 10G NiC will be fine, I can't say for sure but I would image the all the I225s will be fine to, my machine with those have been fine, I don't even know what version because it works I have had no reason to look, I also use a USB3 2.5G for my laptop when I want to do some quick transfer these have a Realtek chip and have had no problem maxing bandwidth on those once latest drivers from realtek were installed, it was a but CPU intensive and slow on Windows drivers though.

USB3 is a nice option if like me you don't have any USB3 devices but a stack load of ports that don't have any use on the back of the mobo, interestingly I was able to use the USB 2.5 and the onboard 2.5 to make a smb multichannel link to my NAS for 5G which was a nice surprise, I always assumed you had to have the same hardware like SLI.

I did discover than on one of my x570 board the USB would not come back out of sleep though so perhaps not as reliable as a PCI-E NIC, the USB3 NIC was only £15 though so might not be the best designed thing.

 

[Avalon]

Well in that case, lol. Glad I don't have to deal with any of this stuff anymore. I remember getting some trash Intel 10Gb NICs on some VM hosts and eventually Dell swapped the mezzanine cards out because of it. I don't really touch hardware now.

Irony: I do this for fun

The Asus 10G NiC will be fine, I can't say for sure but I would image the all the I225s will be fine to, my machine with those have been fine, I don't even know what version because it works I have had no reason to look, I also use a USB3 2.5G for my laptop when I want to do some quick transfer these have a Realtek chip and have had no problem maxing bandwidth on those once latest drivers from realtek were installed, it was a but CPU intensive and slow on Windows drivers though.

USB3 is a nice option if like me you don't have any USB3 devices but a stack load of ports that don't have any use on the back of the mobo, interestingly I was able to use the USB 2.5 and the onboard 2.5 to make a smb multichannel link to my NAS for 5G which was a nice surprise, I always assumed you had to have the same hardware like SLI.

I did discover than on one of my x570 board the USB would not come back out of sleep though so perhaps not as reliable as a PCI-E NIC, the USB3 NIC was only £15 though so might not be the best designed thing.

The Aquantia may be fine (support dependant on OS, but it's a good 3+ years old now), it's arguably a better shot than an i225 at present, heck even Realtek is a better shot than intel as for once the driver isn't an abomination (yet). As far as you imagining all the i225's will be fine, that really isn't the case, but if you have to buy an i225 now, the best chance of you getting the performance you should be is with a B3, even then a lot of people still have issues and resort to having to roll back drivers/flash the NVM or give up and disable auto negotiation and manually set it to 100 or 1000Mbit. Perhaps you got lucky, but I really wouldn't call that fine.

 

[ChrisD.]

To be honest the only devices I run 10 Gbps cards in is my QNAP NAS and two ESXi hosts. Both of these use Intel X520 of some form and they've been absolutely fine. However the lack of easily configurable PXE options is frustrating.

 

[sandys]

I appreciate all of the help in the thread so far, thank you However, the one thing I'm now stuck on is which PCI-E NIC do I buy that supports 2.5Gig and is actually well recommended? As I was eyeing up the Intel chip mentioned but I did read about the issues it has faced, and then people don't recommend the ASUS either?

BTW it should probably be noted that the 4x4 Wifi 6 of Hub 5 would provide all the bandwidth you need, My Ax200/AX201 wifi connects to my AP at 2.4Gbps though in a act of pure genius my Wifi 6 AP only has Gb LAN ports..... so can't do transfers to my LAN at more than 1/Gb, just highlighting that Wifi can get you there too if you have the proximity.

 

[Rainmaker]

@Avalon Aren't SolarFlare and Mellanox the go-to 10Gb NIC for 'our sort' of hobbyist these days? Decent driver support and cheap 2nd hand, certainly for SolarFlares. The HotLava cards look phenomenal as well, but definitely on the pricier side with no eBay bargains to be had.

 

[deuse]

Personally I wouldn't touch any Asus networking equipment with a barge pole. Look for Intel and look on eBay, older server cards will be much, much better with more mature drivers.



Most mechanical HDDs these days will do 1 Gbps for sustained transfers of large files.

From my 10GB Qnap(Raid 5) to my PC with an Intel 10GB card(Normal ssd).
I've never hit the 1GB transfer speed.

Got any tips?

 

[Armageus]

Internet speeds beyond 1 Gbps aren't really designed to be saturated by one single consumer device. Sure, it's cool and all that however it's designed to be able to feed higher speeds to multiple clients. So if you have 2 Gbps internet, two devices can enjoy full 1 Gbps speeds as an example.

Exactly this - even if your 1150Mb? connection is being "limited" by a gig port, are you really missing out on that ~150Mbps? Surely it's better to have some bandwidth "spare" for other devices (e.g. those on wifi or other cabled devices), rather than saturating the whole of your connection with a single download

 

[Snapshot]

I appreciate all of the help in the thread so far, thank you However, the one thing I'm now stuck on is which PCI-E NIC do I buy that supports 2.5Gig and is actually well recommended? As I was eyeing up the Intel chip mentioned but I did read about the issues it has faced, and then people don't recommend the ASUS either?

I've had an Asus XG-C100C in my main PC for almost three years without any problems. It's on a 10GbE port as is my NAS and I see over 4Gb/s when transferring large files between them.