So at the time of my purchase, this card was a little over a bill. There were other options from Asus, ALFA, TP-Link & Rosewill just to name a few, all cheaper than the TrendNet card (Rosewill being the cheapest) and some of these may even be using the same Marvell AQTion controller, but for me, I just trust TREDNet a little better and this is the 3rd revision of the NIC so I'm hoping these guys worked out some bugs.
Won't really try to go into too much technical details here, I just needed a nic that would get me a 10gbe.
Cabling: I am using my existing Cat6. The runs are much shorter than the 50meter limitation of cat6's 10gbe spec. (Cat6a or higher can get you runs of 100Meters, though when using the SFP+ port, the run is limited to only 30Meters regardless of cable used).
Switch: Zyxel XGS1250-12, Firmware v1.00. (B08TC3VJ61) This is a new switch that was released, I am still working on my review, in short, it rocks! I have tested using this NIC into one of the existing copper ports on the switch as well as using a Copper SFP+ transceiver (B075WMGBHX). I have had no issues establishing and maintaining a 10gbe connection.
Installation: This is my only concerning point of this review, when I installed the NIC, I downloaded the "Latest" drivers from Trendnet's website, which is listed as version v1.00 with a date of 8/31/2020. However shortly after installing said driver and running Windows 10 updates (oh yeah, I'm running Windows 10 20H2), the driver was updated to version 2.2.2.0 with a date of 04/30/2020... If you go to Marvell's website, you can download their "latest" driver, version 2.1.21 with a date of 04/26/21 (The day I am writing this review is 04/25/21)
I am unable to tell at this time if there is a higher version than 2.2.2.0. Regardless, its working
Final Thoughts: So I have 2 machines, both running Windows 10 x64, where I installed these cards. (GA-z87x-ud7 TH & x99 Taichi). I had plenty of room in each system and I made sure there was good air flow. I see lots of concerns regarding anything 10gbe with how hot things can get. I'm attaching a screenshot from a simulated test I did between both machines. I found out shortly after upgrading my nics, my new bottle neck is the hdd array in my data server. I went from maxing out at 112MB/s (1gbe) to around 377MB/s (10gbe), though triple what I was getting, it wasn't quite 10x faster ;) So I enabled a RAM disk on both devices thus eliminating the drives array specs (ram disk gets around 23,552MB/s) and I would start seeing me hit the 10gbe max (around 900MB/s). My main work flow is photography, I'm now able to start moving my data to my storage server (which has multiple forms of data protection) but work on these files as if they were stored on one of my local drives on my main editing rig.
Just verify that your system meets the min specs for this card, I am sure you will be satisfied.
| Wireless Type | 802.11b |
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