Recommended 10GbE (RJ45) NIC?

Pictured is an Intel X540-T2 I bought off ebay a while ago. The fan isn’t super loud but it has a distinct sound, and it spins if the motherboard has power, not necessarily if the PC is on. The card you linked would be an easy replacement by comparison :slight_smile:

There are these brackets you can mount above the PCIe Slots. I have a 120mm above my SAS card.

That might be interesting. The fins are not exactly the right direction but I think it should be close enough.

I’m quite happy with my Asus XG-C100C 10G card, uses an Aqantia chipset, and was quite cheap. Drivers are decent, no nonsense applications installed, just the drivers.

I use an Intel X520 based card with SFP+ in my server, which works fine too.

Both are fitted in the bottom slot of the board, close to the PSU. The PSU gives enough airflow past the heatsink on the NICs to keep them cool.

Just make sure you have plenty of air going to that card if you are going to load it down for any length of time… I have the same card and ended up swapping it for the retired workstation adapter mentioned above after the Asus adapter started giving me issues (resetting or connecting at 1Gb on a 10Gb network). From what I have been able to decipher, it seems to be heat related.

…and you clearly didn’t read the last paragraph of my post…

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Nope I did read it. That is why I said “plenty of air”. Even with some airflow that my case has including a fan right below the card slot it was in, it wasn’t enough. Maybe I have a defective card. Difficult to tell with a sample size of one.

Perhaps. Mine doesn’t run at massively high temps even without a breeze wafting past.

Some folks have reported poor contact between the heatsink and chip on those Asus cards. Early cards had different thermal pads, which squished down and became useless. Mine is only a few months old, so seems to work fine.

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Well that is good to know. Would definitely be worth pulling it apart and replacing the thermal pad. Thanks for the info :+1: