LR-Link Launches Intel X550-Based 10 GbE NICs: Starting at $155

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• GreenReaper - Tuesday, September 18, 2018 - link

  Double your price, double your pleasure? :-)
  Intel's own suggested price for the controller itself is $79.61, so that is part of it.
  
  Surely the cost of 10GbE will fall in time (although perhaps tariffs will add to that).
  But I imagine business users who truly *need* two ports right now will not be put off.

• sor - Tuesday, September 18, 2018 - link

  Great. Now we just need devices that will let us connect these NICs together for a reasonable price. I’m not talking about that one or two low port count switches someone can name.

• CheapSushi - Tuesday, September 18, 2018 - link

  Well, you could just connect two computers together without a switch; say your NAS and your main rig.

• dgingeri - Tuesday, September 18, 2018 - link

  I got my single port x520 card for $89 and the dual port for $169. 10Gbase-T is just too expensive.

• bcronce - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

  Too expensive? My single port 1Gb i210 was $70 and dual port 1Gb i350-T2 was $130. The 10Gb cards are barely more expensive.

• mooninite - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

  The i3xx cards are a rip-off. Mine is collecting dust after it is incompatible with a Supermicro mobo of mine and RMAs didn't resolve it. Intel NICs are over-hyped, average devices with just as many problems as other NIC brands.

• bcronce - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

  Depends on what you mean by "overhyped". The interrupt rate, driver support, and packet processing is top notch. My firewall can process line rate 64bytes packets below 20% CPU usage on a quad core, while doing traffic shaping.
  
  114MiB/s transfer over SMB through the firewall is about 1% cpu and 150 interrupts per second, while maintaining microsecond latency.
  
  Not sure if I found the issue you were having, but I only got two hits when looking on the subject. I saw a Supermicro issue where the integrated NIC had a flaw, not i350's fault, and fake i350s having compatibility issues.

• CheapSushi - Tuesday, September 18, 2018 - link

  The single port 10G NIC's by Aquantia start at $99.98 on Amazon and can often be found a bit cheaper. And these are brand new controllers. When they first launched they had a deal for about $65 I believe. So, no, this is not a good, competitive price.

• abufrejoval - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

  Low cost 10Gbase-T switches (actually NBase-T) are there now, but they make a racket.
  
  Buffalo BS-MP2008/2012 offer 8x or 12x NBase-T at around €50/port.
  
  But the variable speed fans are designed to cool 31/40 Watts for 8/12 ports with far too little regard for noise.
  
  I fixed that, which is the long story.
  
  tl;dr
  
  1st generation 10GBase-T is around 10Watts/port, which is the main reason it rarely found its way to the desktop: People wanted it in the same form factor and “the same cool” as 1GBase-T which is less than 1Watt/port.
  
  Aquantia and NBase-T is all about pushing that down towards 3Watts or so (hard figures seem impossible to get), both using Energy Efficient Ethernet and the slower 2.5 and 5Gbit signal rates. That figures nicely with the 40Watt power consumption of the 12-port Buffalo part, which I believe uses three AQR407 chips (three big heat sinks).
  
  But the two fans that come with the unit produce way too much noise, even in idle. After a couple of hours in the same room, it was I or ‘it’. So I opened it and had a look and touch at the fans and heat-sinks to gauge heat and noise sources. One fan was even noisier than the other but mechanically there seemed nothing wrong in terms of balance or obstruction with either.
  
  The problem seems to be that the rotor is pulsed to produce the variable speeds and varies the frequency not the strength of the pulse. That may be required for reliability at variable speeds, but it’s terrible for noise.
  
  The obvious solution would be large slow-moving fans or even bigger heat sinks, but you can’t fit those in the chassis and I don’t have a metal workshop. So I took an option I cannot recommend to anyone, because you are losing insurance and risk the life of your kids apart from any warranty!
  
  I replaced the fans with Noctuas of equal size and have those run off the 12Volt power rail at constant speeds using the stronger resistor they supply it. With that resistor in place, the sound no longer stands out from background noise. Running off the original fan connectors (careful, pinout is different!) the Noctua fans stop spinning in idle mode (around 3 of 12Volts), which is why I went with the constant speed variant.
  
  It has half the rated air-flow of the original fans, so in all likelihood it’s insufficient, especially if one should fail. But I configured both the switch and all NICs to “green” Ethernet and then stress tested it running iperf3 at 10Gbit for an hour on the four hosts I have. The chassis never went more than hand warm, so I hope it’s going to be ok.
  
  Unfortunately, there is no temperature sensor that can be read with the switches GUI, nor will it report any data on the fans, even if the fault indicator LED turns on as soon as you disconnect one of the original fans.
  
  I hope one of these days a manufacturer simply does the obvious and produces a double height variant with low-noise cooling: No switch needs to be noisier than the computers it serves!

• mooninite - Wednesday, September 19, 2018 - link

  The problem I've seen with new switches is that they are poorly designed. If you open up a brand new 2.5/5/10G switch the actual PCB board is about 1/3rd of the size of the case that has a stupid, high-noise fan, blowing into a very empty case. The entire 10G market needs an overhaul with better designed and better priced parts. I'm not sure why this market segment is so lack luster.