aoc-s25g-m2s (supermicro mellanox connect-x 4) made in china

[Sevriety]

Hey gang - I bought a supermicro branded connect-x 4 off eBay, and am trying to verify if it’s legitimate.

there’s a sticker on the back that says made in China, and engraving on the pcb that says the pcb is made in Taiwan and designed in the US.

the pcb does have “Super” and the model name printed on it, so I don’t really have a reason to believe it’s fake — I am surprised of the Chinese manufacturing source though.

my understanding was that these were primarily manufactured in Israel, but I’m unsure of the supermicro branded ones.

does anyone have insight they can share? Google came up fruitless I suppose because this is OEM.

 

[klui]

If you compare Supermicro's card with Mellanox's ConnectX-4 25G you will see that they are different in PCB component layout. There are two noticable components on Supermicro's card that aren't on Mellanox's: the first is a Nuvoton chip, the other is a header. The header is for NC-SI, which permits a flat ribbon cable on their motherboards that allow the BMC to pass through its signals to one of the the card's ports. I don't know what the Nuvoton's functions are, maybe it provides NC-SI functionality. You can also notice the ports' LEDs are in different areas compared to Mellanox's.

These are signs that Supermicro is not using a vendor's reference but have designed their own. All their cards with SFP cages use the same bracket. Their QSFP cards with Broadcom, Intel, and Mellanox controllers also use the same bracket. They have a common standard across different vendors.

Could it be a fake? Sure, anything is possible. For scammers it's probably not in their interest to fake a less-common card than to ride on the availability more common reference cards. Also most "fake" cards use a legitimate controller but it could have been reharvested due to damage or replaced other components with lesser quality which will affect long term reliability. It's probably more important to inspect the card for signs of rework (flux residue, hand solder of components, etc.).

 

[ano]

theese are so cheap 2nd hand now its probably more expensive to make a fake

 

[i386]

The supermicro card (probably) has additional "logic" to integrate into the bmc/superdoctor/other supermicro management stack.
The asics are sourced from mellanox/nvidia, assembled onto pcbs that come from different places in china, the (high level) design is done in the US

 

[Sevriety]

Thank you guys so much! Awesome info. Hopefully now this can live on google for the next lad to find