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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

> The rest of the innards are a bit of a mess. It seems obvious the guts were basically a Surface Pro X-style main board rearranged to fit inside a desktop case. And Microsoft missed out on a few golden opportunities, like adding in a 2.5 Gbps network port instead of a stodgy old 1 Gbps port. But the box does have WiFi 6E and triple display support built in (one via mini DisplayPort, two via USB-C).

Is 2.5Gbps networking at all common?

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It's common enough most mid-range and better motherboards (and many SBCs and cheap Intel/AMD/ARM desktops) include it by default. The chips for 2.5G NICs are about the same price as 1G parts now, and driver support is excellent across Windows, Linux and macOS.

It's basically a free 2.5x faster networking upgrade with the same cabling, so many are adopting it. And since it's backwards compatible with 1 Gbps networks, it's not a big issue to include it.

2.5G switches are typically a little more than 1G switches, but the prices have come down substantially in the past few years, making it a worthwhile upgrade instead of going to 10G, especially if you don't need all that speed (and heat) and the hassle of cabling/transceiver issues that inevitably crop up.

I did a casual look around and I'm not seeing much vendor support.

Like its there, but not super there.

I'd its gradually changing. For example all available AM5 mainboards and about 80% of all availabe Socket1700 have it build in. Laptops are a different story die to the physical size of the port but also get more common (of the laptop has a Ethernet port) I bought my first USB Adapters (for a direct connection between my NAS and my Desktop) in 2020 for ~30€.

> Is 2.5Gbps networking at all common?

Yes. Problem is that it isn't _that_ much faster than 1G.

It’s 2.5x as fast! That’s pretty significant, people will spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to get a CPU or GPU that’s 2.5x as fast as their old one, but when it’s a network speedup it’s not that significant?

I think they're saying that in the context of realistic workloads that would saturate the existing 1 Gbps connection, how often they would occur, what the net benefit in time would be...

2.5 Gbps would be nice to have though.

Yes, it is pretty common these days. Most decent to high-end desktop PC motherboards seem to include it these days, and it can also be added easily now via USB 3 dongle or newer USB/thunderbolt docks (e.g. on laptops, where it seems to not be that common to be built-in).

It's become the norm on desktop boards over the last couple years or so, though switches and other kit are a bit slower catching up

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