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10G nic recommendation
My X540-T2 died and I need a decent replacement. Not surprising considering the thing was hotter than the sun even under moderate forced (4u server not 1u) airflow.
Does anyone have any recommendation for a decent second hand10G NIC thats available on the second hand market in volume?
Server grade series only (must support 8+ RX queues, flow director, DPDK, etc). I was thinking the Intel X710-DA2. Does anyone have any experience with these?
Comments
I usually just buy the 10GTek SFP+ cards off Amazon. I don't see a reason to pay 3x+ more for the x710 ones really.
My PCs running an RTL8127 based 10G so I certainly understand the inclination (even if the saving here is ~10-20% at most). I mostly run that because its pretty power efficient for an infrequent transmitter. But its not exactly a high performance card, ~4M PPS max throughput.
For reference my local recycler has X710-DA2 for AUD$70 inc GST (with replacement warranty from them), so pretty inexpesive compared to new intel cards (~AUD$500 ea). More on par with what I paid for my RTL8127 (new) a year ago (AUD$50) than new intel cards.
X710 series is awesome for use with DPDK.
Mellanox ConnectX-4 are great, I love these NICs.
Never had a bad X520-DA2. I have not checked if it meets all your requirements outside of 2x10G. Mellanox is good as well but can have driver compatibility issues.
Unless you using windows.... then it be picky and thats even using an Intel Transceiver.
If you want 10G. Just buy a FS Intel coded 10G transceiver.
I think the problem is it just requires a higher amount of forced airflow than that server provides. Either that or the X540 I got is a dud. Hard to know since I only ordered one at the time.
The server used to have 16x80mm delta's + 3x40mm before it was adapted to be able to be run in a home office. The chassis is a retired GPU / AI server (retired by the company in favour of a HGX server) so the fans were designed to force airflow through those GPUs.
You could hear it through 3 layers of double brick while it booted. Now it has 6x92mm fans at full speed, nearly silent after one layer of double brick.
I ordered 2 X710's to evaluate since they are available locally. I couldnt find a reasonably priced Mellanox locally even on ebay.
Fingers crossed.
Personally I'm a huge fan of the Mellanox cards for my own equipment.
For colo customers I've deployed a ton of those cheap 10Gtek cards, but I generally treat that as "just deliver 10G to my device as cheap as possible" rather than a high performance option which is what @SplitIce is wanting.
The 10Gtek (and other variants) stuff will have an Intel controller like 82599, but it won't beat the performance of a genuine OEM X520-DA2, mainly because those cheaper cards (generally) won't let you configure as many parameters. You'll often see offloading, buffers, and interrupt coalescing settings listed fixed, unsupported, or with narrower ranges compared to OEMs.