Realtek's $10 tiny 10GbE NIC will hit motherboards soon | Hacker News Reader

Realtek's $10 tiny 10GbE NIC will hit motherboards soon

tomshardware.com

53 pointsTuldok45 comments

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The word is these new modules will use less power and be less scortchy than existing 10GbE choices.

ref: https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/05/22/realtek-rtl8127-rtl8...

That link is a 404, but I found what I believe you intended to share (subtracted the extra wwwww's in "low"):

https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/05/22/realtek-rtl8127-rtl8...

Appreciate the correction. That'd be the moment I first noticed issues with this keyboard. Fixed url.

Yeah I was wondering about heat production. What makes them more chilly?

Less power draw, mostly.

> and while the company still sells the AQC107 silicon, it is quite expensive for motherboard integration, and add-on cards are, by definitio,n more expensive than integrated solutions.

Not sure what a 10GbE motherboard would cost today, but in 2022 I bought ASUS ProArt X570 (1x 10GbE + 1x 2.5GbE) for ~400 EUR, and just the other day I got the Asus XG-C100C (1x 10GbE) network adapter for another machine for ~80 EUR. Would the price difference between a motherboard today with the only difference being with/without a 10GbE NIC be more than say 100 EUR? I feel like they'd use the 10GbE NIC to raise the prices more when it's integrated into the motherboard, than what you can get when purchasing it as a separate addon. But maybe it's just me being overly cynical.

Aside from the cost, ACQ107 is not very reliable in my experience. I have one that randomly drops the connection every now and then, even at sub-10Gbps speeds. Switching to a different NIC makes everything rock stable.

In my experience (Im running several of these) thats down to heat.

I redid the thermal paste on my cards and haven't had any issues since.

I've got several, they've been fine for me. That said modern NIC variants in general seem to be a crapshoot, regardless of speed/price.

If you want to add 10G to existing systems, cards with the old Niantic 82599EN chipset are cheap and widely available (now branded Intel). They use the IXGBE driver in Linux, and work out of the box on Windows as well. SFP 10G fiber transceivers are much cheaper than 10G copper: I saved money by using OM3 instead of cat6, but YMMV.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LZRSQM9

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DCZCA3O

An old PC I built in 2013 is able to saturate one of those with room to spare.

This is really helpful information, thank you!

$30/card out the door isn't bad, although I wonder what the power draw is like. I've noticed my SFP+ 10gbit cards and transceivers get quite warm (different models from what you linked).

I'm not sure about power. The only way running these old machines is economical for me is because I have solar... that 2013 haswell machine draws about the same power as a znver4 machine I built last year, but it takes several days to build a Yocto image the znver4 builds in two hours.

I get my 10g stuff off ebay. x520 dual sfp+ cards are about $10, x540-T2 dual 10g-base-T cards are about $20.

For me, using sfp+ means paying for a transceiver or a DAC, vs using my existing stash of rj45 terminated cables. Some of the ebay cards come with fiber transceivers at no extra cost though. So from that perspective, total cost is about the same either way. And I can use the cabling that's already in my walls.

However, switch pricing is still way in favor of sfp+, and my two 'core' switches have only 2x sfp+ and 2x 10g-base-T, so I use the ports I have.

Buyers of x540 chipsets will want to know they are 1Gb/10Gb. They don't do 2.5Gb or 5Gb.

I have an x540-T2 in my firewall and it's performant if hot. I keep a fan on it.

I run one 10G to one of these for places where I have machines with 2.5G NICs: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJMTT9DF

I wouldn't mind a 2nd SFP+ port.

I have a year of heavy use on this switch: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKP5648P 10Gb from the firewall. 4x 2.5Gb to NAS rest to VMs.

I bought a 10/5/2.5/1 gbps MikroTik CRS304-4XG-IN switch relative cheap recently, quite happy with it.

Is it really saturated if there's room to spare?

Maybe the capacity is ever expanding, like the universe, so it always has room to spare.

I meant CPU cycles to spare

We could really do with a compact fibre connection on boards for the consumer space that isn't sfp+, be ausd that will not fit on a typical motherboard. We can get away with copper at 10Gb but the move to glass fibre is inevitable and lower power and the enterprise solution isn't a good fit for the domestic market and motherboards.

I'm not really sure will consumers need modules in the fiber solution. Just give them a fixed connector when the time comes.

I don’t understand this article! PC motherboards with 10GbE ports have existed for years in premium offerings? Is this notably cheaper than the current chip they use?

pcpartpicker shows ~89 such boards, with mid-high level pricing: https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#c0=2x10000-2x...

With such a low price point, it will creep into regular, non-prosumer hardware.

But $10 is not a cheap price point - if it's a component on a motherboard, it really needs to be sub 25 cents in 10k volume orders before motherboard manufacturers start shoving it into mid level boards just to have one more bullet point on the spec sheet of a motherboard which sells for $50.

The current 1G components are already 4x-8x that cost in volume. Much like 100M never seemed to quite go away for decades (and still hasn't in certain areas), this doesn't need to hit the bottom barrel to still hit cheap motherboards. Especially for people buying by components, many "entry level" A620 motherboards launched 2 years ago already had 2.5G NICs.

It may be a bit longer before random PCs at Walmart have 10G more often than not but it won't be long at all for "mid range" motherboards you're talking about.

The article shows an add-in board and says it's $10.

If that's retail price, it's not much more than a 1G add-in nic. That gives it potential for mass adoption.

Realtek also makes some low cost 10g and 2.5g/10g switch chips that are reasonable cost if you shop on aliexpress.

Having another vendor should help drive down retail pricing as well.

The article contradicts itself. The text says that the chip will be sold for $10. The headline says the board will be sold for $10.

Generally editors write headlines while the journalist writes the text, so when they conflict, the headline is usually wrong.

A $10 retail price for a board would be a big deal.

A $10 wholesale price for a chip is not news.

Oh my god can you please just use normal SFP+ already.

What would be the benefit of using SFP+ on mainstream consumer motherboards? It would further increase the effective price to consumers as they'd have to purchase a separate transceiver, which are bulkier and might overly crowd an already compact I/O shield layout.

Hopefully a cheap transceiver chip will change this, too, but all-copper 10GbE switches are stupid expensive.

They also show a SFP+ variant

https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/05/22/realtek-rtl8127-rtl8...

SFP+ is not a good choice for a consumer device.

From a physical pov it’s not rated for anywhere near as many mating cycles and requires user care to protect against environmental damage.

From a connectivity pov you’re limited to short runs for DAC or extra cost to add a transceiver on each side.

Consumers don't need to detach/attach the actual modules. They can just plug in their ethernet cables like normal, except they'd also have the option to switch to something better in the long run.

It's more expensive but hardly an impossible fit. My router comes with an SFP+ port on the fiber side, it's just not labeled as such.

Combining SFP+ with fiber in consumer spaces is going to be more of a challenge (although I'll gladly accept it if it somehow makes it to market somehow).

> They can just plug in their ethernet cables like normal, except they'd also have the option to switch to something better in the long run.

I don't think many will exercise that option, and it adds complexity and costs that most people won't need. It would be useful for some, so it would make sense to make some boards with sfp+ rather than an integrated transceiver, but not as the default.

If you want 10G sfp+, Intel x520 cards are cheap on ebay.

The cards might be cheap but they tend to be very hot and wasteful in terms of power. Only the newer more expensive modules finally support PCIe ASPM properly. Lack of it might actually also increase overall system power consumption due to certain sleep states becoming inaccessible.

On an ATX motherboard, SFP cages would impede into the space normally taken up by VRMs, their heatsinks, and the CPU socket. For a built in NIC, on consumer boards, an RJ45 port takes up way less space, no more than the USB ports and WiFi card does at the back of the board.

Few people these days use any wired networking. And an even smaller percentage of those people would migrate to fiber. 10gbe is still easily done over copper.

I tried last year but was a bit scared on how many switchs/NICs/cables are vendor-specific.

I'm as particular as I need to be with my NIC choices. Mostly it was Intel, especially in firewalls.

But Intel I225 (2.5GbE) chipsets were causing a lot of grief, 2022-2024. Realtek was same as ever and that made them a potentially better choice.

I think the 225/226 are better now. I have a 4 port arriving today and we'll see.

What kind of cables do you need to connect to your 10Gb switch/router? Do you need glassfiber?

You can run 10GbE over twister pair copper.

I run 10g-base-t over cat5e. I think the standard says cat6, but the nics can't read the markings on the cable :p

It depends on the length of the cable and the general level of EMF in the environment. Cat5 can be plenty fine, or not, depending on those factors.

what embedded arm platform could use this?

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