IO Crest 10 Gigabit M.2 M Key Ethernet Network Expansion Card

M.2 10GB NIC, this is exactly what I needed in my homelab. I have a Mini-PC that acts as my Proxmox host, and my NAS holds all my virtual machines. over a standard 1GB connection, the response time on the VM's was pretty awful. The solution: I pulled the NVMe Drive, installed this in its place, and re-loaded the OS on a SATA SSD. Now all my VM's are much more responsive. If the pictures make you think the braded cable is fragile, then you would be right. Handle with care! Only reason this is 4 stars and not 5 is the braded cable makes me nervous and for the price they could have engineered something more robust in my opinion. Otherwise, perfect product.

I have the 10gbe M.2 form factor card, disregard all of this if you're considering one of the 2.5gbe cards. This card uses a Marvell/Aquantia ACQ107 chip. Don't expect Windows to have a driver for this. Setting up: Grab the newest driver from Marvell's "Public Driver Downloads" page. (You can just google your way there.) Your search category on the download page is "Marvell Public Drivers" - select your OS of choice and your part number is ACQ107. On Windows, you'll need to unzip the driver into a folder and point Device Manager's driver installer toward that folder manually. After setup, I've been getting intermittent disconnections that I can't seem to resolve. The card hits 10g speed while it's actually working, but it will lose connection for four or five seconds at a time, seemingly at random. [Update: Chip is overheating and shutting down. The short M.2 heatsink isn't enough to keep this thing happy without quite a bit more airflow than my machine has.]