Broadcom BCM957508-P2100G NICs are available on ebay for about 150$, a comparable Mellanox CX5 costs at least twice as much.
Are Boradcom NICs just unpopular or are there objective disadvantages compared to Mellanox?
The cards are intended for my homelab and good Linux, ESXi and Windows driver support should be given.
How useful are the offload capabilities, e.g. Mellanox has virtIO offload in hardware?
I say buy one!
the first thumbs up 
Any personal anecdotes, or just gut feeling?
At that price I would take two, then I don’t have to test the compatibility with Mellanox.
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Offloads take some homework and planning. The idea is to leverage the SRVIO PCIe feature to provision virtual cards by provisioning out dedicated PCIe lanes per vlan channel.
Thus you could effectively split a card into multiple 2.5GbE links each on their own vlan. You definitely would use this with a switch where you would manage vlan trunks.
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