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Realtek's $10 tiny 10GbE network adapter is coming to motherboards later this year
(www.tomshardware.com)
Can we finally get some affordable 10GbE switches too?
this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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Right?! Most affordable 10G switches are SFP+ which requires a lot more research to make sure you get the right modules and cabling.
Just use DACs within the rack. Single mode fiber patches and SFP+ optics are also cheap and easy to find.
DACs are great, agreed. However try telling that to the guy next door. The reason ethernet got to be so popular was because of how familiar it was and similar it us to telephone wire. There were several other competing standards befofe ethernet won.
10GbE cards and switches help regular folk upgrade without needing to learn about DACs.
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A lot of those modules would work fine if the companies didn't fuck with their drivers.
The Linux ixgbe driver (for Intel 82598 and 82599 chipsets) was submitted with a whitelist for Intel SFP+ adapters. Linux devs added a module option to shut off the whitelist, and tons of stuff is perfectly compatible.
Cisco c3850-12x48u is about $150 on eBay.
- 802.3bt (60watt) PoE on all ports
- 36x 1gig rj45 ports
- 12x 1/2.5/5/10gig rj45 ports
- Has a module slot that you can add 4x or 8x (8x is rare so expensive) 10gig sfp+
The main problem is the idle power consumption. About 150w with nothing plugged in.
Not to mention the fans volume.
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what is "affordable" to you? there are $100-$300 10GbE switches out there.
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It's impressive that they got the power consumption down to less than 2 watts. I think this is the first 10GBASE-T NIC I've seen that doesn't have a heatsink on it.
And they did it on Cat5e! I have a Cat5e “trunk” that I really don’t want to try to restring, but it’s a choke point that I’d like to upgrade from 1Ge. If only someone will build SOHO switches with it
Cat 5e has 8 wires just like any later standard. There's nothing stopping you from trying a faster speed on it.
It is being pushed beyond its ratings, so there's no guarantees that it will work. There's no harm in trying Cat5e at higher speeds if it's already installed, but don't install it with the intention of using it at more than 2.5G.
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About damn time. We got a boost every few years from 10 to 100 to 1000. Then we just... Stopped. Stagnated. It's understandable why, for a good long time one gigabit was all anybody needed, 100 MByte/sec is pretty good even for a NAS.
Of course then fiber ISPs got in the game, now in a lot of places you can buy 7-8gbps as a consumer product. And even multi-gig, which was supposed to 'fix' this, really ended up being insufficient. You could make a salad argument that multi gig was a waste of time and we should have just started moving to 10 gig.
Unfortunately, 10 gig switches still carry a significant premium. But this will start to shake that up. Sooner the better.
Ahhh. First world problems are always a great read
My 25 mbps isp speeds make me sad.
Australian too?
i mourn the loss of full fibre NBN
every
damn
day
… fuck the liberals
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100MB/s are frustrating for a NAS. SSDs have been common for a decade, and the old spinning rust storage in my NAS is still faster than the network can handle?
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Great to (maybe) see 10GbE coming and the initial price sounds reasonable compared to currently avaipable 2.5G and 5G Realtek adapters.
Apparently Linux 6.16 will have the driver included.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-Realtek-RTL8127A
Realtek itself has demonstrated its RTL8127 NIC working with an unknown switch using cheap CAT5E cables, and the company’s representatives at the booth emphasised this fact. However, we do not know which switch or router the company used. Yet, most 10GbE routers and switches are designed for CAT6 cabling.
Funny update about the cabling they used during the demo. There's really no reason Cat 5e couldn't work for short enough distances with little interference. It's more about the guaranteed minimum distance you can get, 55m with Cat 6 and the full 100m for any rating beyond that.
Wasn't it Realtek who made 1GbE popular as well by making the cheap 8111 IC over two decades ago?
And fucked it up by releasing the 8169 with a stepping change that added power management.
The kernel driver didn't know this, so links would silently not come up, and you wouldn't know why till you googled and learned you had to rebuild your kernel for your new motherboard.
Realtek are monsters of semiconductor creation.
Destroyed
- sound card industry
- network card industry
What's next?
Literally anyone else could have done this. They all chose not to. So fuck them.
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Excellent!
Now if we can only teach realtek how pci device id's work, so they don't use revision id's to control power management, and links silently don't come up if your kernel driver doesn't support it properly.
I know this was a decade ago, but yeah, I'm still pretty damn pissed.
At least it's not Marvell. But, man, can we pay another 17c and get .... I guess not Broadcom as they're waxing seriously dinkish, but who else?
Intel is probably still the gold standard. I'd pay a few bucks more to have something much more reliable.
Ever since the BE200 debacle I don't know if I can trust Intel to deliver. Sure, the stuff that's already out there works but who knows if any of their future stuff will?
They're apparently in talks to sell off their network division. Future there is really up in the air.
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but home Internet is still stuck at Gigabit speeds.... and only in some cases are they maybe letting you go to 2 Gb. Wasn't there that post floating around lemmy a while ago about how China can potentially give everyone like 5Gb for home or something? Can't find it now but swore it was here....
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Serious question: What do you use a 10GbE adapter for? Are there ISPs which offer 10gigabit bandwidth? I suppose it would be useful on a LAN
edit:
E.g., NAS on my LAN, especially for streaming high res video to devices in my house.
you're streaming over a Gb worth of video? even a full 4k blu ray rip is less than 1/10 of that.
Well, no I'm not. You're right. I miscalculated how much data was needed for video streaming. Even multiple simultaneous hi-res streams should stream fine with 1GbE.
But as an abstracted idea, you might want high throughput within your LAN for some reaosn, even if an ISP doesn't offer 10Gbps to your house.
I want it cause number is higher…
File transfers between devices is one reason. With NVME R/W speeds you can easily saturate 1Gb networking equipment. I think 10Gb is more than most people need most of the time but it would still be nice to have if it weren't so expensive. I just bought a small 2.5Gb switch to connect my server and PC together since both have 2.5Gb NICs and that seems to be a happy medium.
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LAN for sure.
There are multiple ISPs that offer 10Gbps Internet service in Japan and South Korea, I imagine other densely populated cities might have them also. There is also the Swiss ISP that offers 25Gbps Internet service since 2021.
Though I agree it is probably more used for LANs.
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I am just wondering if it would be better to go straight to fiber instead of ethernet as most have fiber to the home anyway. That should help with future speed upgrades beyond 10Gbit as well.
Fiber is also more power efficient? Why not?
I don't think "most" have fiber to the home, first of all. Cable companies in the US do multigig speeds via fiber to a relay and coax cable to the home. Fiber is great when it's underground or in a data center and safe, but it is delicate and easy to break the cables so not a great home solution. Fiber terminations are difficult and more expensive. The power efficiency payoff on a 1m cable from your router to your pc is probably going to be measured decades, more if you factor in the higher cost of the cable.
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An SFP+ single mode module alone costs ~20€ at least. Add to that a PCIe extension card and you're way over the cost of copper.
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To make use of a 10Gb network, wouldn't I also need all of my equipment in between things to support 10Gb? Where am I supposed to get a 10Gb modem for residential use?
modem
You don't need 10GbE WAN to make use of it on your LAN. If you have a lot of internal traffic (self hosting, for example), you really just need an internal router and some switches to support it. It's more convenient to have your modem be your main router, but that'd not necessary.
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3~5Gbps fiber is readily available in a lot of places. And some of us have internal networks with network attached storage and various servers running locally.
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