Actively cooled SmartNIC in a HP T740

[nutsnax]

So I'm looking at a T740 to replace my router. The case is obviously extremely cramped and I was looking for a NIC that has an active cooler on it instead of coming up with a Frankenstein cooling solution.

Then I found some 25 gig Broadcom Smart NIC's that have active cooling and was wondering if using a Smart NIC in a HP T740 would be a problem due to compatibility or whatever?

Also, as a secondary consideration, could the Smart NIC in this case be used to take load off of the CPU for certain things that a Home router would actually be doing?

I don't know a lot about Smart NIC's, DPU's etc - those were all waaaaaay too expensive for me so I never bothered until I came across this Broadcom because of price and active cooling for this situation so I'm starting to learn.

 

[WANg]

So I'm looking at a T740 to replace my router. The case is obviously extremely cramped and I was looking for a NIC that has an active cooler on it instead of coming up with a Frankenstein cooling solution.

Then I found some 25 gig Broadcom Smart NIC's that have active cooling and was wondering if using a Smart NIC in a HP T740 would be a problem due to compatibility or whatever?

Also, as a secondary consideration, could the Smart NIC in this case be used to take load off of the CPU for certain things that a Home router would actually be doing?

I don't know a lot about Smart NIC's, DPU's etc - those were all waaaaaay too expensive for me so I never bothered until I came across this Broadcom because of price and active cooling for this situation so I'm starting to learn.

As long as it has a fan that pushes airflow through and stays below 40w in terms of power consumption, it should be fine. Most issues with 3rd party NICs and GPUs on the t740 has to do with airflow and/or the device pulling too much power from the slot and destabilizing the entire system.