It will support PCIe Gen 4 x1 and PCIe Gen 3 x2, and offer both SFP+ and Ethernet options. Rumors suggest that consumer prices for a card will be under $50.
With the first affordable Realtek 10 Gbps switches hitting the market, could 2026 be the year 10 Gbps finally comes to home networks?
Check Mikrotik. SFP+ can be dirt cheap these days. It’s 10Gbase-T with RJ45 that is hot, high power and freaking expensive on a per port basis.
I obviously welcome PCIe4 x1 NICs…especially because you usually have some x1 slot left in your consumer board. And even if chipset lanes, bandwidth on a single lane is nothing like putting an NVMe on the chipset.
Problem isn’t 10Gbit NIC availability, there are a lot of boards with single/dual 10Gbit ports that don’t use CPU lanes for it. But SFP/SFP+/SFP28 on-board has been basically non-existent until very recently.
And with old 10/25Gbit NICs sold in the thousands on ebay,etc., you really have to be in the “I just have an x1 slot” camp, because power savings of ~2W compared to an e.g. ConnectX-3 won’t ever break even, no matter what you pay per kWh.
And then…it’s Realtek. Not the best track record all things considered.
I’m not so much. 10GbE has been around for a while now…and with NVMe and higher bandwidth needs in general, the goal post has certainly shifted. Server board vendors previously having optional 10Gbit NIC are now offering optional 25Gbit.
That’s why I’m ditching my 10GBase-T networking for SFP28. No one can argue against SFP+ power efficiency and low prices, especially compared to 10GBase-T. Low power, cheap used NICs, cheap switches. But we certainly don’t need Realtek for this, the stuff has been here for years.
Without 10Gbit you will bottleneck on network bandwidth even with a single HDD. So any NAS will greatly benefit from it. And the point of a NAS is that it is accessible by multiple devices at the same time. Storage needs proper bandwidth.
WAN connections…there are a lot of people with faster WAN than LAN nowadays New WiFi certainly breaks the Gigabit barrier too…and we’re at L1T; People running a lot of wierd and unconventional stuff on their homeservers.
And 10G via SFP also has advantage on latency…I don’t think it is that much and not that important for most people. But folks pay +150 bucks for RAM that makes stuff go 1% faster, so who am I to judge?
I predict that this NIC will replace the 5Gbit Realtek and 10Gbit Marvell (nee Aquantia) NICs that get slapped on higher-end consumer motherboards.
But 10Gbit switching, while becoming more available in the consumer (unmanaged, small port count) space, really isn’t likely to pick up much primarily due to one factor:
I think there are probably better ebay pcie cards now, than these will be, but it’s still good if there will be more options (and the g4x1 especially), though you wouldn’t need to wait if you do want to explore the space. But switching is still going to be relatively expensive (I like mikrotik, and have one; 10gtek modules). Maybe it’ll help drive it.
Don’t think it will be more of a thing then before. The people who had faster home network will still have it and the normies are going to upload in the cloud. No one even bothers with a NAS anymore when you have iCloud and Onedrive.
I think the distinction between wired and wireless is important here. For those that don’t care wireless is usually enough. If you do care enough to have wired, you probably are thinking about the higher speed options.
The real PITA is the cost of the switches and the lack of good options and support for Windows.
Do I think 2026 will be the year of 10Gbps? Absolutely not, 99% of people just want a cheap WiFi router, or are using whatever is provided to them by their service provider.
It won’t happen that fast. My gut feeling is it’ll be 5 - 10 years as multi gb filters into more and more hardware and older hardware gets replaced.
Haven’t seen home internet speeds that fast. only been 2 - 3 years here that we’ve gotten fiber internet to the home and up to 7gb up and down.
Then there are services and use cases that don’t require more than 1gb at home for normal use. When they demand more and more you’ll see more and more push / march towards the faster connection speeds.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me 2014 was the year of 10gig home networking. That’s when I first picked up some decommed Brocade BR1020 adapters and used them for a direct link to my NAS.
(Just to be clear, while this was awesome for 2014, but I’d recommend against anyone buying old Brocade adapters today. Those drivers sucked.)
By 2019 I got a decommed 48 gigabit port Aruba switch with 4x10gig uplinks, so now it was switched.
By 2023 I picked up some decommed 40gig adapters and a compatible switch.
If I thought I’d actually benefit from it, 2026 could be the year of 100gig home networking
My home network has been stuck at 1gbps since…I’m not sure, >15 years?
True, it’s fine. But in that time my Internet line speed has gone from 128bkps to 1gbps. I expect in the coming years >1gbps will become available and I’ll be bottlenecked on the LAN side.
What do I use all that bandwidth for? Steam games. They are giant. As are their updates and DLCs. And my humble 2TB SSD is not. So at the moment I have to juggle space a bit, which leads to often redownloading stuff a bit.
Updating to 2.5gbps or 5gbps seem rather meh given how long ago home 1gbps LANs became affordable.
I have a 10G network in my home even though my internet connection is 1G. The purpose is for bandwidth, transfers to and from the NAS, to make sure that things happening on the network simultaneously don’t disrupt each other, examples being a large transfer to or from a NAS using up bandwidth on the LAN while someone is having a work zoom meeting, for example. The Covid lockdowns are what made me do this.
I’m on 10G since 2017 for daily backups on my NAS with a Netgear switch XS708E.
Since last year, I upgraded to 1.5G internet and the ISP modem/router comes with a 10G port.
