Mellanox CX311/312 OEM vs. stock variant

[kevindd992002]

I'm trying to buy a couple of Mellanox SFP+ NICs for the first time and I want to make sure that I'll be buying the correct one.

1. Are there fakes of these cards from eBay like the Intel ones?
2. I know these get hot quite a bit and considering that I'll be using them in a tropical country (Philippines), I want to get a variant that is known to have good cooling. Are OEM variants better than stock ones in this area? Or are they pretty much the same?
3. Any other differences between OEM and stock that I should know about?

I'll be using one CX311 in a Synology DS1817+, another one on a Windows 11 PC, and a CX312 on a pfsense box.

 

[i386]

1. didn't see one in the wild or people posting here about them
2. if it's a pcie add on card it's the same hardware as the vanilla cards from mellanox. some vendors might have another heatsink (there were 1 or 2 posts with pictures somewhere in the forum buried).
Temperatures shouldn't be a problem, but I am not sure about the humidity...
3. Oems usually have tested/verified older firmware version, but that's it. No vendor lock in or stuff like that for mellanox cards.

 

[kevindd992002]

Got it. So in general, is it worth overthinking about the difference? Or just go with the more available Mellanox vanilla cards in eBay? The humidity will be fine since it'll be inside an enclosure anyway.

 

[Sean Ho]

For Mellanox NICs, I treat all OEM variants the same as Mellanox stock.