10Gb SFP PCI-e Network Card, 82599(X520-DA1) Controller, 10Gbps Ethernet Adapter, 10Gbe SFP+ Port, 10G NIC Card, Support Windows/Windows Server/VMware

Works great just pop it in and it works!

My computer's onboard LAN was only rated for 1GB at best. I am paying for a 2.5GB speed and I need the bandwidth for large downloads and uploads. I tried several portable adapters, all were failures.With THIS card, it installed easy, drivers installed easy, and my download and uploads are now at 2.3GB during prime time, which is awesome! I had it up and going in less than 5 minutes. What took the most time was finding the driver. I uploaded a screen capture of my speed test. I am VERY HAPPY with this NIC. I recommend it.

Regardless of what this page is showing, Intel has stated that the X540 chip is NOT compatible with Windows 11 and there are no plans to make it compatible. The driver for Windows 10 can be located and installed by downloading the entire 1GB Intel NIC driver pack, unzipping it and manually installing it. However, be prepared for constant network dropouts as the network link gets dropped and re-established over and over again. If you are running Windows 11, go another way.

This 2.5Gb interface card uses the Realtek RTL8125BG chipset. Microsoft has a default driver, but on a system with Windows 10 x64, that driver was only able to reach a maximum speed of about 1.5Gb/s. Installing the newest Realtek branded driver available on the Realtek website enabled a maximum speed of a little over 2.3Gb/s. This seems to be a chipset- and driver-interaction issue, and not related to the card, as I have had the same experience with a RTL8125 card from another vendor, so it does not negatively influence my rating of this card. I don't know if that issue appears under any other operating systems, but the newest driver fixed it for me. Just something to be aware of if you're not seeing the expected performance. With that out of the way, my only complaint is the layout of the circuit board and the mounting of the heatsink. The chip is not centered underneath the heatsink. The heatsink is mounted to the PCB using spring-loaded pushpins. This combination means that the heatsink wants to tilt sideways, lifting the contact surface away from the chip. The board assembler has added a small piece of foam under the lower side to try to balance it, but that foam is either too soft or too thin, and doesn't help much. What appears to help more is the use of a thermal pad on the chip instead of paste, but it still makes me a little nervous to trust it in a continuous-load application. The heatsink does get warm, so at least there is a decent amount of heat transfer. I haven't yet observed any thermal throttling in the workloads I typically encounter, but I'll update if I do.

Using these in my PC and a Truenas box. Windows picked it up fine, but I upgraded the drivers from the Realtek site to the newest. FreeBSD works fine, but you do need to add a couple tunables to get the driver to load. Running iperf3 I get the normal ~2.36Gb you would expect. No issues transferring large files at 280MB/s between Windows and Truenas. Card looks good with the red and black and only needs a pcie 1x slot.

The lights are a little hard to see (you have to be a very specific angle) but it works great and is a great price. If you're looking for a 2.5 GbE card, this one is great.

Bought two of these NIC cards with high hopes to get my equipment running at 10gig. BUT, I couldn't get them to work. Installation was straight forward and easy. It was when I moved on to driver installation where it turned for the worse. The Intel drivers the company recommends installing DOESN'T WORK !!!! I'm not going to remember the exact wording, but the message I kept getting was "no Intel equipment recognized" or something to that effect. If you can't get the drivers to install, these cards are essentially useless (no matter how inexpensive they are). So, I returned these and just bought true Intel NIC cards (YES, they were more expensive, but at least the drivers would install!!)". I gave it two stars, because the actual card was well made, I just wish I would have gotten it to work!

First thing to note is that the card is not natively supported by Windows (tested in Win11 22H2), so make sure you have the drivers downloaded and ready when you install the card. Second thing to note is that NICGIGA's website only hosts 32-bit drivers for this card. I downloaded 64-bit drivers from Intel's website since the card uses an Intel chip, but with those drivers the card was lacking basic features such as Wake on LAN (WoL).I'm OK with needing to have the drivers prepped ahead of time, so no stars lost there. Providing only 32-bit drivers when 64-bit Windows has been the standard Windows install for over a decade was the reason for the loss of one star, and the lack of basic features such as WoL is what cost the second star.Other than that, the card seems to work fine. Keep in mind that it does generate a good bit of heat, so you'll want to ensure adequate ventilation since it has no fan.