Recent motherboards function a complete host of M.2 slots, with some mainstream fashions providing as much as 5. Very typically, most of those slots stay unoccupied, as most customers not often have a couple of SSD on this format. Let’s check out take advantage of considered one of these slots by including a ten GbE community card.
A ten GbE community card in an M.2 slot!
Via AliExpress, you’ll be able to come throughout a brand new oddity: an M.2 card with a community chip . Naturally, the answer comes “in package type”, with the community module on one aspect and the Ethernet socket on the opposite. As you’ll be able to see, two varieties of PCIe brackets are equipped, one full-height, the opposite half-height, relying on the kind of case you may have. Finally, the connection between the 2 components is ensured by a versatile, flat ribbon cable.
Hidden beneath a big heatsink is the community chip, an AQtion AQC107. In phrases of throughput, it could possibly ship 10 GbE, however can be backward-compatible with 5 GbE, 2.5 GbE and 1 GbE. As for compatibility, it is going to run on M.2 PCIe x4 in Gen 2.0 at the least. And as for supported working techniques, we’ve received Windows 7, Windows Server 2012, Linux and even VMware.
As for the worth of this answer, count on to pay round 100 euros on AliExpress. With the M.2_VGA, it is a second oddity accessible on the M.2 slot.
