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Comment by hamandcheese

3 years ago

The only NICs I see in that price range are old Mellanox cards.

Intel NICs are 5-10x that price. I'm not sure why, but my suspicion is that it has to do with driver support and/or interoperability.

11 comments

hamandcheese

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Palomides  3 years ago

I run mellanox connectx3 cards, they work immediately with no extra drivers on windows 10/11 and every linux I've tried

mellanox is/was quite good at getting code upstreamed

maybe I need to do my own blog post about my pile of computers...

  • TacticalCoder  3 years ago

    > maybe I need to do my own blog post about my pile of computers...

    Yes, several of us love to read about that! I haven't switched to 10 Gbit/s yet...

  • thefz  3 years ago

    > I run mellanox connectx3 cards, they work immediately with no extra drivers on windows 10/11 and every linux I've tried

    Own three, can confirm for Windows and Linux.

Hikikomori  3 years ago

Mellanox works fine.

  • hamandcheese  3 years ago

    Gotcha. Why the price discrepancy then?

    • petronio  3 years ago

      I can't answer definitively, but I was looking for SFP cards recently and the older cards don't really support ASPM. The cards themselves aren't power hogs, but they keep the CPU from going into lower states during idle.

      The cheapest one I found that others related had ASPM actually working was the Intel X710, and those are much more expensive than the ConnectX-3.

    • Hikikomori  3 years ago

      Are you comparing new Intel cards to old mellanox cards on ebay? If not idk why, I have not compared them myself, some feature maybe? Cost doesn't always make sense either.

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