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Comment by jcalvinowens | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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