As the title implies, I am looking for recommendations on a card with 2x 2.5Gbps NICs with Intel Controllers. Either x1 or x4 should be fine.
I cannot find anything at a decent price, or that doesn’t look like a scam. I mostly looked for Intel i225 cards and all I could find decent was a QNAP 2 port card… for $100! That is crazy to me. A single port i225 is about $30, so the price sure is jacked up for having the privilege to have 2 ports. Not even Amazon had anything like this. Newegg didn’t have anything, MicroCenter did not even have a search option for PCI-E network cards, only for junk like serial and USB controllers.
Looking at other stuff online, I can only find Intel x540 and x550 controllers, which are 10-BaseT, meaning they do not support NBase-T, so no2.5 Gbps and 5Gbps modes. Technically they can lower their throughput if they detect something is wrong, but it’s not in the protocol.
And x710 chipsets dual-ports are $500. For 2x 10GbE NBase-T. That is insane. If Dell thinks I am going to buy that, they must be crazy. Well, they are 10GbE, so I can somewhat understand charging about $300 for them, but that much… I do not need 10G anyway, I want to use the SFP+ ports on my switch as a trunk with another switch when I get one.
Anyone has any recommendations for what I am looking for?