Tuesday, October 18th 2016
ASUS Bets on Domestic 10 Gbps Ethernet with Two New Consumer-Grade Products
With 802.11ac and WLAN standards getting faster by the day, wired Ethernet is going the way of the dinosaur, at least in case of home (domestic) markets. ASUS is betting against this trend, and believes that if marketed properly, there's scope for 10 Gbps Ethernet (802.3ae-2002) to dominate domestic markets such as high-end gaming networks and home-studios. To this effect, the company launched two new products styled for the home - the XG-U2008 switch, and the ROG-10G add-on 10 Gbps Ethernet card included with certain ROG motherboards, which could probably also be sold separately.
The XG-U2008 is an unmanaged or plug-n-play 10-port switch with two 10 GbE ports, and eight 1 GbE ports. In full-duplex mode, this works out to 20 Gbps per 10 GbE port; and 2 Gbps per 1 GbE port. This should let you plug-in NAS servers with 10 GbE to one of the ports, your desktop to the other, and a WLAN router or other desktops to the 1 GbE ports. The ROG-10G card, on the other hand, sits across a PCI-Express gen 2.0 x4 host interface, and features a Tehuti Networks TN9710-class single-port 10 GbE controller. It comes included with the Maximus VIII Extreme/Assembly motherboard for now, although one can't discount the possibility of ASUS selling it separately.
The XG-U2008 is an unmanaged or plug-n-play 10-port switch with two 10 GbE ports, and eight 1 GbE ports. In full-duplex mode, this works out to 20 Gbps per 10 GbE port; and 2 Gbps per 1 GbE port. This should let you plug-in NAS servers with 10 GbE to one of the ports, your desktop to the other, and a WLAN router or other desktops to the 1 GbE ports. The ROG-10G card, on the other hand, sits across a PCI-Express gen 2.0 x4 host interface, and features a Tehuti Networks TN9710-class single-port 10 GbE controller. It comes included with the Maximus VIII Extreme/Assembly motherboard for now, although one can't discount the possibility of ASUS selling it separately.
17 Comments on ASUS Bets on Domestic 10 Gbps Ethernet with Two New Consumer-Grade Products
For those with a CAT5e wired home or wouldn't see value from a 10Gb setup, we should be seeing 2.5Gb and 5Gb options next year. Some situations may benefit when everyone is at 2.5Gb instead of mixed speeds.
CAT 6A or better would be needed for greater lengths
Cat5: 10/100
Cat5e: 10/100/1000
Cat6: 10/100/1000
Cat6a: 10/100/1000/10000
However all those certifications are at a 100m cable length, which is ridiculous in consumer (home) grade installations, in reality there is crossover, Cat5 will happily do 1GB just not over the full 100m, Cat6 will happily do 10GB just not over the full 100m, etc. You can even get 10GB running fine over Cat5e if you're having a LAN party in a single room with patch cables or something.
I wouldn't mind playing with it but rather then spend the ~$250 on the Asus XG-U2008 I would simply use SFP+ 10GbE direct connect between two servers and connect the clients with 1GbE. Such a configuration should yield similar performance. It would be nice to have 10GbE for all connected devices but I only really benefit from it when transferring a large amount of data and that would be from server to server (RAID arrays / possibly SSD cache).
A set of Mollanox Connectx PCIe 10GbE cards would probably be about ~$40 USD. Add a SFP+ to SFP+ DAC (2 meters) and it could be as low as about ~$60 USD.
It could get messy if you wanted to add more then the two 10GbE connection (and harder to troubleshoot as you are approaching antiquated token ring networks with such a setup) but at least its an option to do so and it would still be cheaper then the Asus XG-U2008.
I have yet to see the Asus ROG-10G NIC anywhere though and who knows what price they will demand. Two Asus ROG-10G NIC's could cost as much or more then the Asus XG-U2008 switch itself. If money is no object (or less of an issue) then something like the Netgear ProSAFE XS708E 8-Port 10G Ethernet Switch or 24 port version would be preferable to this. However, if cost is a concern then the SFP+ to SFP+ DAC solution suggested earlier would likely be a lot more cost effective and have similar performance.