10g Network cards with sfp+ PCIe4/5
- Thread starter sadamahan
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I don't believe any of the SFP+ cards use PCIe 4, 3 has more than enough bandwidth for SFP+ cards.
Even SFP28 can get by on PCIe 3 with room to spare. The Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx cards are SFP28, and will max out a 25gb connection on PCIe 3. I plugged mine into 2 boxes that do NOT support PCIe 4 and they'll give max performance. See the following screen shot.
Intel X710 cards which are SFP+ only use PCIe3, while their 800 series do use 4 (but they really don't need it).
Even SFP28 can get by on PCIe 3 with room to spare. The Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx cards are SFP28, and will max out a 25gb connection on PCIe 3. I plugged mine into 2 boxes that do NOT support PCIe 4 and they'll give max performance. See the following screen shot.
Intel X710 cards which are SFP+ only use PCIe3, while their 800 series do use 4 (but they really don't need it).
SFP28 ports are backward compatible with SFP+
You're looking at E810 for Intel and ConnectX-5 Ex for Mellanox.
The big boys (Intel/Mellanox/Chelsio) isn't going to put PCIe4/5 on a 10Gig card because they don't need it.
Ya, but those aren't PCIe gen 4.
I presume PCIe gen 4/5 is OP's hard requirement.
No they are x8. The E810-XXVDA2 is dual port. However technically it is possible to run them on a 4x Slot, if you have an open ended one, or there are mainboard which have a physical x8 slot, with x4 connection.
The only Gen4 card I've found when looking at 10GE is this one - https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1709735-REG/owc_owcpcie10gb_10g_ethernet_pcie_network.html for ~$100 you get a single copper port
NICs in general tend to lag behind in terms of Gen / slots. The main use doesn't need a higher bandwidth slot. For higher speeds though I suspect there might be some Gen4 cards for 25./40/100/200GE or you just use G3 x16.
@sadamahan if it's not a long distance you could save time and money with Thunderbolt @ $60/card and a $40 cable to get 20gbps between two machines. USB4 / Gen4 cards are slowly trickling out though that can hit a bit higher but, I haven't seen any networking numbers just data / enclosure speeds so far but, going from 3.1GB/s to 3.8GB/s is a decent speed jump tough not enough going from G3 > G4 slots.
NICs in general tend to lag behind in terms of Gen / slots. The main use doesn't need a higher bandwidth slot. For higher speeds though I suspect there might be some Gen4 cards for 25./40/100/200GE or you just use G3 x16.
@sadamahan if it's not a long distance you could save time and money with Thunderbolt @ $60/card and a $40 cable to get 20gbps between two machines. USB4 / Gen4 cards are slowly trickling out though that can hit a bit higher but, I haven't seen any networking numbers just data / enclosure speeds so far but, going from 3.1GB/s to 3.8GB/s is a decent speed jump tough not enough going from G3 > G4 slots.
NICs also tend to increase lane count requirements instead of jumping up a PCIe generation. Going from x4 to x8 isn't a big deal in the server market, but moving to the next gen PCIe means that you lose a lot of potential customers.
or they just keep using he older model.... not a huge deal but, providing the option and expanding their customer base would make for more sales.
This is going to be a problem for a while with PCIe 5.0 motherboards. Because PCIe negotiates to the slowest of the speeds between the card and the host, you have PCIe 5.0 slots with the same number of lanes as 4.0 or 3.0 version of the motherboard, so that the devices that exist now will be able to run at full lanes.
Many of us building servers would rather have PCIe 5.0 only for a couple of slots and the M.2 devices, and have a lot of slots with PCIe 4.0 (or even 3.0). Until I can get a PCIe 5.0 x8 card with support for eight NVMe drives at PCIe 3.0 speeds (if all drives are active), I'd rather have four PCI 3.0 x8 (or two x16) slots.
Yeah thanks to Broadcom, PCIe PLX switches are now so expensive that it doesn't make sense