$99 10Gb NIC from Asus

[techtoys]

@techtoys what are the RSS settings set to?

and how many process and core counts are you using?
Chris

RSS is enabled and set to 4 queues.

command used was ntttcp -s -m 8,* [...], iperf3 was default and may not make sense in windows.
This is 8 threads allocated across cores if I remember.

bedroom machine is Asus Z270-WS running i5-7600K with Windows 10
Garage server with 10G Mellanox card is dual socket E5-2670 v1 (Natex CPU) on an SM board I got from Tminus .. would need to look it up. Server is running Windows 2016.

 

[techtoys]

I was thinking of installing 10GBe in my other servers in the rack but I am short on PCIe slots.
The server with the Ethernet card is acting as a router and switching traffic to the other servers over 40G IB fabric.

All the servers are connected through a Voltaire 4036 IB switch.
I am getting the same speeds to all the servers in the garage from the bedroom with Aquantia card.

Just transferred a 20G VM of musicbrainz from workstation to server in seconds at about 800 GB/s
This is a nice bump from 1G bottleneck speeds.

 

[Jon Massey]

Just transferred a 20G VM of musicbrainz from workstation to server in seconds at about 800 GB/s
This is a nice bump from 1G bottleneck speeds.

Holy moly, what's your storage setup that can support those kind of speeds?

 

[techtoys]

typo sorry. 800 MB/s.
M to G ... big difference.

the single SSD reads are over 1000 MB or 1 GB.
i do have target disk arrays that should be able to handle a burst like that for write.

 

[stormschool]

Hello Guys,
I want to buy this 10gb nic card,but i don't know is it working if i am using in ESXi Server 6.5,Can someone tell me this nic support esxi or not?
i can not find any information in google or asus web page.
thanks a lot!

 

[KC@Gadgetblues]

See my review of the ASUS:

In the review I note significant performance drops talking AQC107 to Intel. I've seen people report that they don't see similar performance problems between AQC107 & AQC107, but clearly interoperability with Intel 10G NICs is quite important since plenty of people have servers with X540/X550 (and NAS vendors haven't certified or provided drivers for Aquantia yet).

Since the review, I've been in touch with Aquantia and they promise new Windows drivers and firmware next week.

I've also run into another issue with the card. On at least one system it fails when resuming from S3 standby and is banged out in Device Manager ("failed power transition"). This is actually a bigger issue than the performance problems. We'll see if any of this is fixed by the new drivers. Aquantia is being very responsive.

 

[realtomatoes]

Hello Guys,
I want to buy this 10gb nic card,but i don't know is it working if i am using in ESXi Server 6.5,Can someone tell me this nic support esxi or not?
i can not find any information in google or asus web page.
thanks a lot!

if you really need that rj45 instead of sfp+ go with the intel x540 instead. they are close to that $99 price point on ebay. here's one with 2 ports at $99.
if you go with sfp+, you can get mellanox connectx-2 around $17-25.
both intel and mellanox have drivers for esxi.

 

[stormschool]

if you really need that rj45 instead of sfp+ go with the intel x540 instead. they are close to that $99 price point on ebay. here's one with 2 ports at $99.
if you go with sfp+, you can get mellanox connectx-2 around $17-25.
both intel and mellanox have drivers for esxi.

Thank you for reply,
Another NIC Card isn't in my choice,It is because my server mainboard GA-7PSXL1 only 1 pci-e x16 slot,it's already used by raid card,in this mainboard only pcie x16,pcie x4 and pcie x1,so looks like this ASUS nic is best choice for me

 

[gzorn]

@realtomatoes - Do you trust the cards coming from China? I've heard about rampant crappy knockoffs. I think I ended up grabbing an x550 for too much $$, but got a USA card secondhand on ebay.

@techtoys - Just curious - Did you see ethernet errors pushing 10gbase-T over cat-5e? How long do you estimate your cat5e run to be? Just curious for comparison with my testing.

 

[realtomatoes]

@realtomatoes - Do you trust the cards coming from China? I've heard about rampant crappy knockoffs. I think I ended up grabbing an x550 for too much $$, but got a USA card secondhand on ebay.

that doesn't mean all cards from China are knockoffs or that there are no knockoff cards on ebay even in the US.

 

[RamGuy]

This card works horribly for me in my Windows Server.. Tempted to try one of the Intel X550-T2 Chinese knock-offs from Ebay instead..

I did upgrade my home network to have 10Gbe uplink's and got myself the Asus XG-C100C Ethernet Adapter for my server and my desktop and the network card is not behaving well at all.

My server is next to useless with this card. As soon as it has any throughput going it will get packet loss with no end. Having μTorrent running with 25 MB/s and the connection to the server will start lagging like crazy. Running a ping -t to my server and I will have 20-40% packet loss. Stop μTorrent and there is 0% packet loss.

Switching back to the Intel i211-AT and there are no such issues. This is a Windows Server 2019 installation, with Hyper-V services enabled and I noticed how CharlieH was mentioning Hyper-V. But these issues are present no matter if the XG-C100C is being used or a Hyper-V Virtual Switch or not.


It does seem to behave much better on my Windows 10 v1909 desktop. But even on my desktop there are some awkward packet loss at around 1-2% which are not there when using my Intel i219-V. There are no real benefits for me having the XG-C100C/AQC107 in my desktop if my server is not running the XG-C100C/AQC107. The 10GBe uplink's are nice to avoid congestion and bottleneck's, but I had really hoped for my server to have 10GBe as the 1GBe is a bottleneck at times and it would really improve on my backup routines to have both my server and desktop running 10GBe.


These AQC107 NIC's like the Asus XG-C100C are some rather cheap 10GBe cards, but one would expect them to perform and behave much better than this. I have tried to disable various offload settings in the NIC's hardware settings but nothing seems to really improve on it's instability.

 

[BoredSysadmin]

@RamGuy out of curiosity I took a peek at the drivers for this card and Linux driver release notes seem to indicate the chipset for this card (previously unknown to me) Rockteck from UAE. Why just not buy a used intel, Mellanox, or Broadcom based nic from eBay.

 

[acquacow]

I haven't had any issues with my aquantia/asus 10Gig nic in my win10 box. No packet loss/etc. You may just have a bum card.

I am running the drivers directly from aquantia and not Asus or MS though.