Comment by RachelF
18 hours ago
Every PCIe 10G ethernet card I've seen has a heatsink on it, sometimes covering the entire card or even have little fans on the heatsink.
Expecting it to work full time in a laptop is a bit of a stretch of the heat dissipation budget.
Also, the laptop he is working has the AMD FP8 chipset - depending on how the ports are setup, he might only get 10G USB, if the ports are allocated to video instead.
New chips from Realtek burn < 2W for the chip and < 3-4W for the board: https://www.servethehome.com/cheap-10gbe-realtek-rtl8127-nic...
4W is TDP for some of Pi-style mini computers. Lots of them have fans.
Pi 4 and 5 both idle around 3W. But a Pi 5 can pull up to 16W with a USB peripheral, full CPU load, and decoding 4k video. The Pi 4 / 5 will run OKish without a heatsink at idle wattages, but thermal throttle quickly if you attempt to do something intensive.
These realtek 10gbe chips are more in the range of the Pi Zero class machines (0.5W idle, 2W loaded) which don't often come with heatsinks though they might benefit from them. If it has a good thermal connection to a good thick ground plane on the PCB, that's worth almost as much as a passive heatsink on the top of the chip.
usb-c < card edge < motherboard integrated in terms of how much heat can be transfered through the connection. Where the motherboard would have the largest ground plane to soak up heat from such an IC and dissipate it passively. The usb-c module is worst case by being a small enclosed box with very little thermal connection through the plastic insulating housing. An aluminum enclosure might dissipate enough heat passively to make it pleasant to use.
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Raspberry Pi 4 doesn't need a fan. People just like to put them on because because micromanaging CPU temperature is part of the hobby for some. Yes it might throttle its CPU speed when going full tilt for some time, but lets be real how many workloads require poor Raspberry Pi to be loaded 100% for prolonged periods of time?
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Does it go beyond 30 Metres?
Certified Cat6 cable gets you 10GbE up to 55m (and even 5e is workable), while Cat 6A goes to 100m.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_twisted_pair#Var...
...and yet they're still covered by a huge heatsink.
To add perspective, an old-school 7805 voltage regulator dissipating just 1 watt is already impossibly hot to hold with bare hand (as me how I know). So 3-4 watts on a small module will make it noticeably hot.
They aren't huge at all, the new RTL cards are tiny. I wish 2-port versions were available for a home server upgrade.
I was doing a comparison of 10G ethernet NICs just yesterday and ChatGPT was insistent that they are scorching regardless of actual throughput. Unless you manually downshift and upshift the communication rate.
I'm having second thoughts about having one of those dongles on my desk all day for the same reason wireless charging seems wasteful.
Yeah, 10Gb ethernet runs hot. I just rewired the house with 10Gb (we have 8Gb FTTP) and it's kind of upsetting how hot my Thunderbolt dock gets.
I looked in to it and it seemed like 10gbit was much better over fiber. Ended up deciding that 2.5gbit is plenty. The 2.5 gear is significantly cheaper and runs cool.
Yeah, I use DAC for the desktop and fibre between floors. It's just the Mac's desktop that uses RJ45 copper.
> I looked in to it and it seemed like 10gbit was much better over fiber.
Yes, except that most devices use Ethernet. So, at the end of the day, you still need Ethernet cables unless you want to deal with an additional switch or converter in every room.
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I redid everything that matters in my house/homelab with DAC cables for exactly that reason. Order of magnitude difference in watts and heat
Hopefully short-run 10GIGE-T might get cooler with better DSP, but for long runs I think it will remain fibre.
Which dock (brand/model) did you get?
The CalDigit TS5+. It's really nice!
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> it's kind of upsetting how hot my Thunderbolt dock gets.
I have seen the same with just usb-c multi-port dongles for macbooks (the ones they give you at work along with the macbooks).
in fairness to the docs/dongles though, they have an incredible amount of features that would have been science-fiction twenty years ago.
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So the entire Framework card's casing should have been copper?
If the whole thing were metal, the outer casing would transfer heat to skin too quickly, probably, for safety.