INTRODUCTION

   10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE/10GbE) connectivity may have yet to hit the mainstream market but thanks to the somewhat recent appearance of many low-cost 10GbE cards and switches and the availability of some 10GbE ready mainboards things are now looking better than ever before for people out to upgrade their local office and/or home networks. Still even though prices for 10GbE peripherals/equipment have taken a dive the most important issue is what to pick and there are many options in the market for potential buyers with cards using the first generation X540 and second generation X550 single-chip ethernet controllers by Intel in the lead. Such cards are not the lowest cost ones in the market but thanks to their features and performance (also driver support by Intel) they are the number one choice of professionals and since some of you asked we decided to get a couple of 10GbE cards based on the X550 controller to check out and compare to our very own X540 based models. 10Gtek may not be among the most popular network peripherals/equipment manufacturers in the world but they have a very large product catalogue and today we'll be taking a look at their X550-T1 card.

   10Gtek Transceivers Co., Ltd is a leading high speed cable and transceiver supplier in China, who designs, manufactures and sells direct attach copper cables and optical transceivers (10G/40G/100G). We focus on the development of high reliability and cost efficient interconnect solution, providing the best-of-breed copper or optical modules for customers in areas such as cloud computing, data centers, data communication, long-distance transmission, wireless access, etc. Our valued proposition is our leading-edge optical component and packaging technology, high speed cable design know-how and unique low-cost testing capability.10Gtek is an ISO14001 & ISO9001 certified manufacturer founded in 2008, the headquarter is located in Shenzhen, China. We offer total solution of high speed interconnect link, supplying compatible 10G SFP+, 10G XFP 40~56G QSFP+, 100G QSFP28 Copper & AOC cables and Optical Modules. Our customers can benefit from the real value-added portfolio of products and service. We keep expanding the product line, redefining new features of the products or market new discovery while entering a new market for each product. All 10Gtek’s products comply with RoHS, CE and FCC certificates.

   Both the X540 and the X550 are 10GBASE-T controllers (backwards compatible with 1000BASE-T) that allow for use of regular CAT6/6e RJ45 cables to achieve 10G performance (up to 100 meters in length for CAT6e and 55 meters in length for CAT6) thus reducing deployment costs. They are both also available in single (T1) and dual (T2) RJ45 port models the latter of which can achieve up to 20G speeds (theoretically anyways - in theory you should also be able to use two dual-port 10G cards to achieve 40G speeds) via network bonding/link aggregation (as long as it's supported by your switch and/or OS). However, these controllers are also quite different so whereas the X540 is an x8 lane PCIe V2.1 controller with a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 5.0GT/s the X550 is a x4 lane PCIe V3.0 solution that has a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 8.0GT/s. To be completely honest with all of you this somewhat large difference in bandwidth was also an incentive for us to do this comparison since we were looking of ways to further upgrade our local 10GbE area network (although even 5GT/s is more than enough for 10/20G speeds).