What motherboard?
Whatās OWC? Never heard of them.
OWC is mostly known among the mac crowd, but they do make stuff for non-macs as well.
Theyāre typically pretty high quality, Iād compare them to a qnap (I know weird comparison but qnap started producing a bunch of decent networking equipment recently; qnap software sucks though, atleast from a security standpoint) or old-school OCZ
1 Like
Mellanox Connect-X3 single port
/thread
Isnāt this PCIe 3.0? Iām looking for PCIe 4.0 if possible.
I can settle for 3.0 if I really have to.
And how do I know if this seller is legitimate?
That is PCIE 3 and also doesnt really have driver support much anymore as it is long EOL and Nvidia has completely discontinued support for it.
A modern ACQ113C chipset NIC (like this one: 10G Base-T PCI-e Network Card, Marvell AQtion AQC113C Controller, NICGIGA 10G... | eBay) would be a much better choice today than an old used CX-3 one where driver support is iffy. You can technically install the WinOF drivers still, but officially Nvidia has stopped supporting even the newer Windows 10 builds and dont support any Win 11 stuff, but they do still work for now even with the unsupported drivers. We just dont know when Microsoft might change something that breaks them and then you would be SOL since Nvidia isnt doing new drivers for those cards.
ConnectX-4 is the lowest gen card Mellanox/Nvidia sells that has official driver support still.
Thankfully CX-4 are down between $100-130 now which is really good, and although they are 25gb NICs they also support dropping down to 10gb speeds. Though I dont believe the OP want fiber ports, his NAS most likely uses RJ45.
1 Like
Where you finding the CX-4 for $100-130? And is it PCIe 4.0?
Just Ebay still, but I looked up the product brochure and even the CX-4 line is still PCIE 3 though 
In a PCIE 3 1x slot you would probably max out around 7.5gbps after overhead.
ConnectX-5 has the option of a PCIE 4 card, but only in the MCX512A-ADAT model which is rare and more expensive:
In that price range, Intel also has a 25/10g fiber option for a bit less in the E810-XXVAM2 model:
1 Like
Just be aware the X540-T2 does not support multi-gig speeds. It only links at 100M, 1G, or 10G.
2 Likes
Thatās a great bit of information!
Those are great links. Iāll look through them. Everythingās sub-par because Iām slot-limited right now.
Iām thinking of waiting for the Samsung 8K-width super ultrawide monitor to come out before doing anything.
What does a monitor have to do with network cards? I have a second GPU used for outputting to 2 extra monitors. I wonāt need those displays if I buy that monitor which frees up the 16x slot at the bottom of my board (PCIe 4.0 x4). I think having that second GPU is the issue right now.
Another option is moving my GPU to the middle 16x slot and using the higher 16x slot for the NIC. Then Iād have 8x lanes and could easily go for 25Gb.
I have a titan ridge pcie add in card on one PC connected to another computer with onboard thunderbolt using two QNAP ANA-T310G1S. On windows to windows transfers its ~900MB/s. Linux is a diff story and requires some tinkering. Just make sure your equipment has TB headers.
1 Like
Just wanted to post for anyone that was looking at that OWC 10g PCIE 4.0 x4 NIC (but x1 open slot compatible) talked about earlier in the thread and was going to get one, it seems you cant find drivers for the AQC113C on Marvelās website. They only have a datasheet available, and the web store link selling that card links to old AQC107 drivers. I did find from someone on another forum that this MSI X670E Godlike board uses built in AQC113C chipset for its LAN and so you can grab drivers for NICs that use that chipset from MSI:
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MEG-X670E-GODLIKE/support#driver
1 Like
The driver packages Marvell has for the Aquantia NICs are common among them all the AQC (and Iām pretty sure AQN) NICs thus far for Windows, there arenāt separate drivers youād get for the AQC107 vs the AQC113.
The Aquantia drivers on Marvellās site and the ASUS site are both version 3.1.6 (although Marvellās site for some reason is only 32-bit). 3.1.7 is available on Intelās driver site:
Some of the OEMs seem to be better than Marvel at keeping the most up to date drivers on their sites.
1 Like
I took a look at the aqnic650.inf from the intel driver package.
Regarding OWC, I found the following:
; *** OWC
%OWC.TB3-10G.DeviceDesc% = Atlantic10G, PCI\VEN_1D6A&DEV_87B1&SUBSYS_000F1C7A&REV_02
%OWC.TB3Dock-10G.DeviceDesc% = Atlantic10G, PCI\VEN_1D6A&DEV_87B1&SUBSYS_DE2B1C7A&REV_02
; *** OWC
OWC.TB3-10G.DeviceDesc = "Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE Adapter"
OWC.TB3Dock-10G.DeviceDesc = "OWC 10Gbit Network Adapter"
either the " OWC 10G Ethernet" / " 10G Ethernet PCIe Network Adapter" is not listed yet, or it is the item āOWC 10Gbit Network Adapterā, in which case it does not use a Marvell AQC113CS, but a Marvell AQC107S controller:
; DisplayName Section DeviceID
; -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
%AQtion-10G.DeviceDesc% = Antigua10G, PCI\VEN_1D6A&DEV_94C0 ; AQC113CS
[...]
%AQtion-10G.DeviceDesc% = Atlantic10G, PCI\VEN_1D6A&DEV_87B1&SUBSYS_00011D6A&REV_02 ;AQC107S
Does anyone have the hardware at hand in order the check the PCIe Device ID?
are you āthinkfirstthenactā on reddit? If yes, can you check the PCIe ID?
Thatās not me. I donāt have the card.
Donāt know how good they are, but the AQC113 card has dropped from $100 to $50 in just a couple of months. Donāt know if this is because people are having problem with them or of thereās some new chip coming.