I was looking to upgrade my DIY home router with 25Gbit-Ethernet and was looking for an affordable NIC. I discovered the HPE 631SFP28 which comes both in a FlexibleLOM and “standup” version. In a local online shop I was able to find it for around $200 which is quite a bit cheaper than the Mellanox and Intel variants that are more in the $350 range.
Since I am planning to install the NIC into a consumer board not made by HPE, I realized that the FlexibleLOM version is definitely not going to fit as it seems to require certain hardware on the motherboard. But I was wondering if the standup version would or if I need to look at a completely different one instead.
For clarification, I was looking at the SKU # 817718-B21 which is the standup version of HPE’s NIC with the BCM57414 chip.
Does anyone have experience with this NIC or knows whether or not it would fit into a “normal PC”? If not, what would be your recommendation for an affordable 2-port SFP28 NIC? Maybe the QNAP QXG-25G2SF-CX6 (which has a Mellanox ConnectX-6 Lx chip, available for around $250)?
25G is probably not going to be cheap for a while. Probably be 3 to 5 more years until you can get cheapo stuff on ebay I’d say. Mainly since it’s the new hot thing right now plus a lot of servers deploy it via a LOM so it will be hard to find a normal pci-e card version.
Might actually be able to get 40G for cheaper than 25G since it’s been out longer and people on 40G are either going to 25G (smaller formfactor so denser switches) or 100G (2x+ faster) depending on how much they are pushing on the link.
You can - look at a Mellanox ConnectX-3 model that can do 56Gb/s IB + 40GbE, or consider one of the cheaper models that do 40Gb/s IB + 10GbE and run IPoIB (although this one means you need the rest of the IB infrastructure).
I forget the exact model number on the dual-QSFP 56/40 model, will check when I get back from the office.
The main reason for my upgrade is less the pure bandwidth and more the 25GbE fiber connection that comes with a SFP28 transceiver that I like to use.
The $200-$300 range is fine for me. My main concern was whether or not those cards are compatible with “standard PC parts”, unlike LOM cards for example.
The machine I would install them into would be a simple workstation PC running something like VyOS (or maybe pfSense), that acts as a router.
Just getting back to this one - the ConnectX-3 VPI cards are the ones I was referring to. If you’re looking for something with SFP28 then maybe these aren’t an option, but they’re cheap enough that a couple QSFP transceivers used or new from FS should still be doable.
Part numbers are at the bottom of that doc, the cards I use are MCX354A-FCBT.
I was able to find a used lenovo card that is basically a connectx 4 LX CX4121A-ACAT with a lenovo OEM firmware on it. It got detected successfully on my Asus Sage Threadripper Pro board with the lenovo firmware. But I reflashed the firmware to a normal Mellanox firmware so that I can update firmware via mlxfwmanager. Luckily it didn’t had any “secure firmware” stuff enabled, and the card seems to work well with the normal / recent Mellanox firmware.