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Comment by hamandcheese | Hacker News Reader

The only NICs I see in that price range are old Mellanox cards.

Intel NICs are 5-10x that price. I'm not sure why, but my suspicion is that it has to do with driver support and/or interoperability.

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I run mellanox connectx3 cards, they work immediately with no extra drivers on windows 10/11 and every linux I've tried

mellanox is/was quite good at getting code upstreamed

maybe I need to do my own blog post about my pile of computers...

> maybe I need to do my own blog post about my pile of computers...

Yes, several of us love to read about that! I haven't switched to 10 Gbit/s yet...

> I run mellanox connectx3 cards, they work immediately with no extra drivers on windows 10/11 and every linux I've tried

Own three, can confirm for Windows and Linux.

would love to read this!

Mellanox works fine.

Gotcha. Why the price discrepancy then?

Are you comparing new Intel cards to old mellanox cards on ebay? If not idk why, I have not compared them myself, some feature maybe? Cost doesn't always make sense either.

Im just comparing the prices I see when I search ebay for "40gbe nic" vs "40gbe nic intel", making no effort to compare features.

I can't answer definitively, but I was looking for SFP cards recently and the older cards don't really support ASPM. The cards themselves aren't power hogs, but they keep the CPU from going into lower states during idle.

The cheapest one I found that others related had ASPM actually working was the Intel X710, and those are much more expensive than the ConnectX-3.

I avoiding older 10gbe NICs due to power consumption. Maybe that's why?

And with Mellanox you get working RMDA/ROCE.

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