Asus Releases XG-C100C 10GBASE-T NIC For $99

[Guest]

Asus rounded out the 10GbE ecosystem today with a desktop add-in network interface card to go with the previously released xg-U2008 switch. For less than $100 you get massive bandwidth with priority queuing for enhanced gaming support.

Asus Releases XG-C100C 10GBASE-T NIC For $99 : Read more

 

[hannibal]

Good that these Are finally coming and Also having reasonable prices!

 

[extremepenguin]

I will be happier when I start seeing 10GB ports on laptops and more importantly WAP's. Any machine that I have needed 10GB on I already have SFP+, don't get me wrong this is a step in the right direction but after you factor in the cost of a switch that has 10 GBE ports on it I am pretty sure fiber come in ahead on price.

 

[Snipergod87]

That is actually pretty expensive, you can get older used server 10Gbit SFP+ NICS for less than $20

 

[artk2219]

That is actually pretty expensive, you can get older used server 10Gbit SFP+ NICS for less than $20

True, but then you still need an SFP+ switch or transceiver which is another cost, unless you already have the infrastructure in place. Also you have to make sure that they are not SFP+ direct attach only cards if you are looking to use a transceiver.

 

[Guest]

How much watts does this require? I've seen one 10G nic that used 12.5W, another that needed 100W. These things seem to be all over the place in terms of power requirement. Meanwhile, if an EPYC CPU can have 128 PCIe lanes and be under 150W, then why are these nics so power hungry? Is there some sort of PoE requirement in the standard? Can this card do PoE? It's not listed.

 

[bit_user]

That is actually pretty expensive, you can get older used server 10Gbit SFP+ NICS for less than $20

The ones I see are PCIe x8, and most enthusiasts don't have spare x8 slots to burn on this, unless they drop their GPU down to x8. That seems like an unnecessary compromise, even if it's not a big performance hit.

Then, as has been pointed out, you need to add the cost of the transceivers, unless you're going to be limited to the < 5m supported by SFP+ copper cables.

Common sense should tell you that $20 for 10 Gig is too good to be true. It's only that cheap due to caveats.

 

[bit_user]

I will be happier when I start seeing 10GB ports on laptops

No.

Mobile workstations, perhaps. Maybe a couple of the chunkier gaming laptops.

after you factor in the cost of a switch that has 10 GBE ports on it I am pretty sure fiber come in ahead on price.

I'm pretty sure it won't.

 

[bit_user]

I've seen one 10G nic that used 12.5W, another that needed 100W.

Source? That's got to be a typo - should be 10 W.

 

[Guest]

I've seen one 10G nic that used 12.5W, another that needed 100W.

Source? That's got to be a typo - should be 10 W.

Not a typo. Don't have a source. Might have been a dual nic, but I remember it being over 100 Watts, and in the $1500 range. Enterprise stuff, not consumer. I'm not imagining it either, because I remember thinking how insane that was, but can't find it now. It "might" have had PoE.

 

[bit_user]

I've seen one 10G nic that used 12.5W, another that needed 100W.

Source? That's got to be a typo - should be 10 W.

Not a typo. Don't have a source. Might have been a dual nic, but I remember it being over 100 Watts, and in the $1500 range. Enterprise stuff, not consumer. I'm not imagining it either, because I remember thinking how insane that was, but can't find it now. It "might" have had PoE.

Well, we need more specifics to draw any kind of insight from it.

 

[CRamseyer]

I would say this uses less than 10 watts based on the heat sink. I wasn't able to find power consumption from Asus or the chipsets' website. Remember, the new Intel 40GbE chip only consumes something like 7 watts.

Yes, there are older enterprise parts that costs less. I have some 10GBASE-T cards that cost $40 but they are used server pulls. I also have SFP+ cards that cost $20 that came with Twinax cables. If I was a regular computer user I wouldn't want those parts in my system.

This is a nice step forward that we can use to get the ball rolling. 10GbE onboard and "low cost" 10GbE add-in cards. Asus has a fairly low cost 10GbE switch with two high-speed ports and a few gigabit ports.

I suspect at CES we will see the first home routers with 10GbE ports. Most likely the early units will come with 4-5 ports.

 

[HideOut]

So I've ran gigabit in my home for about 15 years. Even today with streaming 4K it don't even come close to using the full bandwidth of gigabit. Maybe if several people were pulling off of a NAS at the same time, sure. But individual appliances dont even come close. Your acting like to stream 4K you need 10GbE. Thats horseshit...

 

[bit_user]

Do we really need to keep revisiting the need for 10 Gig?

This. Happens. Every. Single. Time.

So I've ran gigabit in my home for about 15 years.

Maybe you haven't noticed this, but a lot's changed in the past 15 years! About 5 years ago, SSDs capable of over 500 MB/sec became fairly commonplace. More recently, NVMe has enabled SSDs to reach blistering speeds of over 2 GB/sec!

Not to be left out, ever-denser HDDs' media transfer rates stretched to 200 MB/sec, and beyond.

Even today with streaming 4K it don't even come close to using the full bandwidth of gigabit. Maybe if several people were pulling off of a NAS at the same time, sure.

Yeah, so I'd agree that streaming 4k video is a bad example. However, editing 4k video hosted on a network drive, or copying 4k video files are fine examples of reasons you'd want something faster than gigabit.

But individual appliances dont even come close.

Maybe not your typical 10-year-old NAS, but it's not even hard to hit the 1 Gbps ceiling with more recent models. Why do you think the higher-end units started featuring 10 Gig ports, even a few years back? If costs were lower and the switches more commonplace, I guarantee even more NAS' would have them.

About 6 years ago, I built a home fileserver with an AMD Phenom II x2 (dual core) that can sustain about 325 MB/sec reads and 275 MB/sec writes, IIRC. That was with 5x 1 TB HDDs in a software RAID-6, yielding 3 TB of usable capacity. Assuming the recording technology and rotational speed is held constant, media transfer rates should increase proportional to the sqrt() of the platter density.

In summary, a single user, copying single files between SSD-equipped computers can easily benefit from > 1 Gigabit. That's probably the most common use case. The need is probably more compelling for users of NAS and fileservers, since they're copying much more data, even if the actual storage is a bit slower. The world is very much ready to go beyond the limits of gigabit Ethernet!

 

[bit_user]

The question many will ask is: What the hell do you do with 1,000MBps of network bandwidth? If you have to ask, then this might not be the upgrade for you. More products will support the 10GbE and Multi-Gigabit standards in time. Wouldn't it be nice to watch a high-definition movie from across the network without stuttering?

IMO, you're partly to blame for that horse**** comment.
; )

What about simply stating something like:

If you've ever used Ethernet to copy large files between two SSD-equipped PCs, you've probably noticed the speed is nowhere near what their storage can handle. You just might be a good candidate for such an upgrade!

That makes it clear that this is not about internet access, nor is it about streaming. It puts one of the main use cases right out there. If people don't do many LAN file transfers, they know they're not the target market and can hopefully go on about their merry way, without feeling the need to proclaim this to be a worthless development.

 

[Xajel]

Good, now we need a $99~$109 with single 10gb port and 8x 1gb... another $149~159 one with 2x 10gb ports and 16x 1gb ports

 

[CRamseyer]

For each of my SSD reviews I have to clone two images to the drives for MobileMark and SYSmark. Both are over 20GB and 10GbE takes a lot of time off of the restore process. It's also nice to have the bandwidth for other tasks too.

My kids get virus on their desktops once a year. Their Steam libraries are massive so we keep them on the NAS over iSCSI. The NAS has anti-virus running to keep them clean. There is just so much more you can do when you have the bandwidth. It opens quite a bit up. The NAS also have SSD cache using a large SSD so it's like the entire Steam library comes from a local SSD.

 

[PancakePuppy]

Unfortunately, 10GBase-T switches still cost a small fortune, so who knows how many of these they'll be able to move on the consumer market.

 

[derekullo]

Do we really need to keep revisiting the need for 10 Gig?

This. Happens. Every. Single. Time.

So I've ran gigabit in my home for about 15 years.

Maybe you haven't noticed this, but a lot's changed in the past 15 years! About 5 years ago, SSDs capable of over 500 MB/sec became fairly commonplace. More recently, NVMe has enabled SSDs to reach blistering speeds of over 2 GB/sec!

Not to be left out, ever-denser HDDs' media transfer rates stretched to 200 MB/sec, and beyond.

Even today with streaming 4K it don't even come close to using the full bandwidth of gigabit. Maybe if several people were pulling off of a NAS at the same time, sure.

Yeah, so I'd agree that streaming 4k video is a bad example. However, editing 4k video hosted on a network drive, or copying 4k video files are fine examples of reasons you'd want something faster than gigabit.

But individual appliances dont even come close.

Maybe not your typical 10-year-old NAS, but it's not even hard to hit the 1 Gbps ceiling with more recent models. Why do you think the higher-end units started featuring 10 Gig ports, even a few years back? If costs were lower and the switches more commonplace, I guarantee even more NAS' would have them.

About 6 years ago, I built a home fileserver with an AMD Phenom II x2 (dual core) that can sustain about 325 MB/sec reads and 275 MB/sec writes, IIRC. That was with 5x 1 TB HDDs in a software RAID-6, yielding 3 TB of usable capacity. Assuming the recording technology and rotational speed is held constant, media transfer rates should increase proportional to the sqrt() of the platter density.

In summary, a single user, copying single files between SSD-equipped computers can easily benefit from > 1 Gigabit. That's probably the most common use case. The need is probably more compelling for users of NAS and fileservers, since they're copying much more data, even if the actual storage is a bit slower. The world is very much ready to go beyond the limits of gigabit Ethernet!

The question many will ask is: What the hell do you do with 1,000MBps of network bandwidth? If you have to ask, then this might not be the upgrade for you. More products will support the 10GbE and Multi-Gigabit standards in time. Wouldn't it be nice to watch a high-definition movie from across the network without stuttering?

IMO, you're partly to blame for that horse**** comment.
; )

What about simply stating something like:

If you've ever used Ethernet to copy large files between two SSD-equipped PCs, you've probably noticed the speed is nowhere near what their storage can handle. You just might be a good candidate for such an upgrade!

That makes it clear that this is not about internet access, nor is it about streaming. It puts one of the main use cases right out there. If people don't do many LAN file transfers, they know they're not the target market and can hopefully go on about their merry way, without feeling the need to proclaim this to be a worthless development.

He's either trolling you or is so far behind in technology that he falls into the group the article previously mentioned:

The question many will ask is: What the hell do you do with 1,000MBps of network bandwidth? If you have to ask, then this might not be the upgrade for you.

How does one complain about an optional 10 times increase in speed without being a troll?

 

[d_kuhn]

I've also had gigabit ethernet at home for years... and I for one have been ready for 10gbe to get affordable for years too (a couple anyway). Since SSD's landed I've been very unhappy with sub 100MB/s throughput to my storage systems. I don't like the network being the bottleneck.

 

[DerekA_C]

yea more 10GBe please and love to see some 40GBe and soon 100GBe I hate waiting and don't like to share my bandwidth with the 7 devices in my house as is should would reduce lag or latency issues from using all the 1gb connection what is funny that guy that is saying we dont need 10gbe when he doesn't realise you only get roughly 10% of that so called 1gb in real world throughput so when it is actually limited to 100mbs sharing that between 7 devices even CELL phones can use a lot of data if all were to divide that equally it only works out to 14.2mbs actual throughput barely making it to the 4k streaming standard of 15mbs for standard 4k then you have HDR 60fps 4k To stream in 4K Ultra HD with HDR, Netflix recommends you have a consistent minimum download speed of at least 25 megabits per second. .

 

[darth_adversor]

You guys misunderstood what Hideout was saying. He wasn't saying 10GbE isn't needed, he was saying it's not needed to stream HD content stutter-free. Which bit_user (who has apparently decided that he runs these forums) agreed with in a separate post.

Also, you should check your math, Dereka_C. One gigabit per second (1 Gbps) equals one hundred twenty five megabytes per second (125 MB/s). I can't speak for your network, but I see around 100-110 MB/s when I move files across the LAN, which is way more than your alleged 10% throughput.

 

[bit_user]

Which bit_user (who has apparently decided that he runs these forums) agreed with in a separate post.

Eh, just because I'm a post-whore doesn't mean I think my opinion carries more weight than anyone else's. I try to make sound arguments and back up my posts with data, when it matters. Sometimes I'm wrong, but that's one way I learn things. And trading knowledge is the main reason I'm here.

If I agree with you, I try to give up-votes. I prefer the reply button over down-votes, but sometimes I'll do both, if it's warranted.

Anyway, there are people on this site with 10x as many posts and they haven't been on here that much longer.

 

[darth_adversor]

Which bit_user (who has apparently decided that he runs these forums) agreed with in a separate post.

Eh, just because I'm a post-whore doesn't mean I think my opinion carries more weight than anyone else's. I try to make sound arguments and back up my posts with data, when it matters. Sometimes I'm wrong, but that's one way I learn things. And trading knowledge is the main reason I'm here.

If I agree with you, I try to give up-votes. I prefer the reply button over down-votes, but sometimes I'll do both, if it's warranted.

Anyway, there are people on this site with 10x as many posts and they haven't been on here that much longer.

Absolutely, I agree.

I'm merely commenting on the fact that you jumped all over this guy for what he said, but then in your next comment, you basically agreed with him. You even provided the author with an example of what he should have said.

Also, why don't you think 10GbE will ever come to the majority of laptops? Gigabit did, and I think 10GbE will, too.

 

[d_kuhn]

I've already got 10GBe on my laptops... sortof. On the MBP it's TB2 to Atto 10gbe (had that for a while, pretty bulky). On the Dell 5510 it's usb-c to 10gbe (Also Atto... they make good stuff... more compact but still bigger than a basic dongle).

Sucks to not have it on the machine... but both those systems are too thin for ethernet so there'd be a dongle in any case.