10Gtek10Gb PCI-E NIC Network Card, Single SFP+ Port, with Intel 82599EN Controller, Ethernet LAN Adapter Support Windows Server/Linux/VMware, Compare to Intel X520-DA1(E10G42BTDA)

10GTek is now my go-to brand for high speed networking. I had previously purchased their SAS and Fibre channel cables for other projects and was always satisfied with the quality. I recently upgraded many of my security cameras to 4k, You'd be surprised how quickly several 4k cameras recording 24x7 fill a Terabyte and how slowly that data moves off-system even at 2.5gb Ethernet. In order to reach my retention goals I bought these cards and SFP+ transceivers to build a point-to-point high speed link to dump footage from my NAS to a second system which uses OpenCV to take a frame from the video stream of each camera every hour to create an index so I can quickly narrow down a block of time to retrieve for review should the need arise then off-loads it all to an LTO Tape Library.I Installed these cards in two Ubuntu 25.04 systems and the native drivers immediately recognized them. I established IPs and routing and the speed I could move large blocks of data is incredible. With large file transfers the card gets warm but not incredibly hot which people had indicated should be the case with optical vs copper SFP+ modules. While SAS and Fibre Channel are incredible connectivity options in their own rights there is something satisfying about moving a similar volume of data using normal protocols like tar and rsync. I briefly brought one of these card connected to my NAS up under Windows 11 and although it is completely unnecessary the speed is addicting, now I'm looking for a good inexpensive 10gbe switch so I can put a couple more hosts on my 10gb subnet.

Easy to install out of the box and works great with TrueNAS Scale.When I first received this I was not able to get full speed (or I thought I wasn’t). I contacted support and received a reply in 36 hours. They were very helpful and walked me through the steps to make sure everything was up and running correctly. They even checked back a few days later to make sure everything was working. Great company to work with and will definitely be using them from now on.

Great card at a fantastic price. My only qualm is there is no active cooling. I understand that most people will probably put this in a rack mount configuration, but there are no perforations on the backplane bracket to promote cooling in that configuration. A 10Gb adapter should have quite a bit of workflow, especially if you're pushing it on a regular basis (I consistently move TB of data around during weekly backup cycles and it does warm up).

Upgraded a couple machines in my home network to 10GB, this card is big, heavy, and has huge heatsinks on it. Installing the driver was tricky if you're on Windows 10, you have to download it from Intel, unzip, check one of the folders (can't remember which one) but you'll find the driver for Windows 10 and then manually install it.

This card is easy and powerful. It comes with a PC case bracket and a server-style bracket which fit my HYTE case perfectly. One hurdle is the Win11 driver install, and since I have 2 ports, I had to install the driver for both of them. Use the Device Manager "update driver" process. I assume if you are buying this level of hardware, you have some idea of what you are doing... Download the Intel Win10 family drivers, I'd go for the complete set option. After extraction, find the PROXGB>Winx64>NDI565 folder, hit enter. Yes, the NDI565 folder (completely non-intuitive, I know...). Viola NIC recognized, do this for all ports in the DM. Happy networking.

Bought this and installed it into a Dell R720 running Proxmox. It froze the system within a day, caused it to fail to boot with PCI-e errors. I pulled the card and reseated it, got it to boot. Then it was flooding dmesg with uncorrectable PCI-e errors and causing network instability even on the built-in network card.Pulled it a second time and the card was HOT to the touch with only having been in the system that time for... Maybe... 5 minutes tops. Like, I was worried it might melt the plastic package it was in within the box when I packed it back up hot.Requested a replacement, I'll update my review of the next one performs... I'd say "better" but "at all" is likely more accurate.*Update*Received the replacement with 2 day shipping (the original was overnight) and it seems to be working fine for the past week or so. The vendor did contact me to offer a refund, which was nice but I didn't take it since I have a working product now.I'm updating to 4 stars based on that. I won't give 5 though as if there was better QA, I would've had the working product overnight (as advertised) from when I ordered it, not 4-5 days later with the hassle of also having to return a bad one.

Drivers for Windows 11 took an hour to find and required downloading the entire Intel network driver set just to get it installed. Constantly disconnects/reconnects every 5 seconds, so the driver is faulty. Worst of all even when connected via 40gb fiber to a machine across the room it didn't get over 1.2gbps. I'm assuming the Windows driver is at fault, and it may work fine on *nix, but this is just unacceptable. Intel needs to work with Microsoft to get the driver situation fixed so that end users don't have to deal with this kind of crap - it's not like we can troubleshoot things like we can on Linux. We have to endlessly read forums with unpaid volunteers telling us to run chkdsk over and over and over again. Replacing with NON-intel network devices. I'm looking forward to at some point never using Windows or any other Microsoft product ever again. Others who are using this device with Windows - server os or otherwise - verify your actual network throughput using iperf3.

Adjusting my review, great company to buy from, they worked with until the issue was resolved, I would buy from them again.Original review;10Gtek Doesn’t provide support on their web site for the card, no drivers and no firmware updates, card went into protected stats and I can’t reset it.