Comment by hombre_fatal
1 day ago
Made me think of this:
I got a 10G ethernet network card for my NAS only to realize it has to overlap with my modem's supported bandwidths (IIRC 2.5G, 5G).
Knowing nothing about the space, I had assumed it would use max(node1, node2), but instead it negotiated a 1G link. So it was faster to use the mobo's built-in 2.5G port.
The 2.5g/5g 'multigig' standard came out a million years after 10g-baseT. Cheap ex-enterprise 10g cards don't know how to do the middle speeds.
Several of them you can reclock the PLLs to hit 2.5 and 5, but it's a very manual process.