Friday, September 28th 2018
ASRock Teases Phantom Gaming Motherboards with Integrated 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet LAN
When ASRock teased something new from their new Phantom Gaming brand on social media with a photo that said 2.5x fast, people were quick to speculate this was referring to an AMD Radeon GPU. After all, the Phantom Gaming brand came about very recently with ASRock's debut as an AMD AIB (add-in board) partners for Radeon GPUs, with TechPowerUp giving a review treatment to one that you can read here. Was Vega holding back with some sandbags? Or was it perhaps the rumored Polaris GPU?
As it turned out today, ASRock was instead teasing about motherboards joining the Phantom Gaming brand and the "2.5x fast" instead was referring to these board having an integrated 2.5 Gigabit onboard LAN port, as opposed to the 1 GigE ports on most enthusiast motherboards today. Suffice to say that led to disappointment for many owing to this misunderstanding, but this is still news in that ASRock has deemed the importance of having a higher-tier brand that can be marketed as a competitor to the ASUS ROG, Gigabyte Aorus and more. This motherboard may end up not being AMD-exclusive either, as we do not expect a prosumer socket from AMD until next year, and the timing suggests it may well be an Intel z390 socket board instead. The teaser video is embedded below, although there is not much else to glean from it at this point.
As it turned out today, ASRock was instead teasing about motherboards joining the Phantom Gaming brand and the "2.5x fast" instead was referring to these board having an integrated 2.5 Gigabit onboard LAN port, as opposed to the 1 GigE ports on most enthusiast motherboards today. Suffice to say that led to disappointment for many owing to this misunderstanding, but this is still news in that ASRock has deemed the importance of having a higher-tier brand that can be marketed as a competitor to the ASUS ROG, Gigabyte Aorus and more. This motherboard may end up not being AMD-exclusive either, as we do not expect a prosumer socket from AMD until next year, and the timing suggests it may well be an Intel z390 socket board instead. The teaser video is embedded below, although there is not much else to glean from it at this point.
27 Comments on ASRock Teases Phantom Gaming Motherboards with Integrated 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet LAN
Both were ratified in 2016 and are only supported by multi-speed switches that supports the speeds.
As such, older 10Gbps switches won't work with 2.5 and 5Gbps.
I'm guessing we're looking at Realtek's new 2.5Gbps PHY here, which should be a lot cheaper than Aquantia, although Aquantia's "entry level" option is 5/2.5/1/100 so far, if you don't count their recently announced USB 3.0 solutions.
Why this would have any affect on latency, I don't know though, since going from 1Gbps to 10Gbps has no real affect on latency either.
There's already at least one commercially available 2.5Gbps switch, but it's too close in price to 10Gbps switches to be interesting. Hopefully we'll see a lot more affordable 2.5/5/10Gbps options coming out soon.
It's still very expensive to make 10Gbps hardware (compared to 1Gbps) and you need Cat6A cabling if you want to be able to use it at any distance.
2.5Gbps runs on exactly the same infrastructure as 1Gbps and it shouldn't be any more costly to make, especially as Realtek now has joined the game.
The cheapest 10Gbps retail NIC you can get today is directly from Aquantia and it's just under $80 from Amazon, with their 5Gbps card being $10 less.
I'm also guessing 2.5Gbps switches will be a lot cheaper than 10Gbps, although some new-ish devices support 2.5/5/10Gbps on some ports, 2.5/5Gbps on some and 2.5Gbps on some and finally a few 1Gbps ports as well. I think this is what we can expect to see in a lot of consumer level switches coming out in the next year or so.
5Gbps makes less sense from a cost stand point at least, as the only real benefit is that it works with Cat5e up to 50m, but it might be possible to use it up to 100m depending on the cables, but Cat6 is recommended and then you have little to no benefit over 10Gbps, apart from a slightly lower cost per NIC.
For sure, it is a pretty rare need... people still spend on 20€ potato routers and don't even care to understand why they should need more. I have to say, in most cases they are right as long they are happy.
I'm glad it's happening but this roll out should have started years ago. It's going to take a very long time to get off 1 Gb, except in cases where over 1 Gb is absolutely necessary.
5Gbps works on 100m Cat6, so again, there's no maybe about it.
Maybe you should've read the link to Wikipedia I posted instead of spreading FUD?
I was just throwing numbers out there. Want specifics?
web.archive.org/web/20160525052443/http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/catalyst-4900-series-switches/white_paper_c11-609513.htmlVery important caveat:The shielded CAT6 cable I ran is only tested up to 400 MHz. 10 Gb may not work at all.
Out of the box, that heatsink was getting warm to the touch, even when not connected, so disabled 5G in bios. :)
Where is the Apex 11 Z390 by the way? What's going on? Hope they didn't cancel it.
They already cancelled the PCIe cover shroud on the Maximus 11 Extreme, silly ROG, the Formula looks better than the Extreme. :shadedshu:
Alright, I admit, I bummed and I CAN'T get over it. :cry::cry::cry:
2.5Gbps has been tested to work on the same cabling at the same distances as 1Gbps.
5Gbps has been tested to work with Cat5e up to 50m on a good day, but it's not guaranteed. However, it's tested to up to 100m on Cat6. You pulled some random number of 66m here, for no good reason.
Sure, I agree that 10Gbps is difficult over long runs of copper, but this news post is about 2.5Gbps, so I'm not sure why you're showing 10Gbps numbers. This is also why we're getting 2.5 and 5Gbps, no?
CAT6 = 5 GbE
CAT5e = 2.5 GbE, 5 GbE conditional
10GBASE-T (and derivatives) are 6.25 bits per cycle where 1000BASE-T is 4 bits per cycle.
Like a competent VRM design?
or useful ports?
or special OC features?
Anything else please.
Though honestly I cant imagine a market for this that isnt for gamers that think they need it.
high throughput speeds on these levels are used for incredibly high throughput data connections that can seldom be used by some companies. More frequently however they are used for high datarate appliances like servers or SANs.
And more to the point most are using fiber for these runs. Businesses seldom use cat6a unless its a very short run, or you are stacking switches. Even then fiber is very cheap (its the hardware thats expensive) and they would just as quickly use a 1, 5, 15, 25m run of SMF before someone pulls out a spool of cat6a (this stuff is hard to work with).
Unfortunately, I think this will be a case of mobo adaptation before actual network gear for consumers adopts. I also think there is going to be alot of incorrect info. The market (gamers) this is geared for and even the majority of some tech communities dont have alot of network depth and experience in their user base. I feel bad for the people that see the higher number and bite without actually knowing what it is does or does for them. You already know they are going to plaster it with "low latency" "extreme gaming" "ping killer" type slogans.
Except it wont even matter on their internal or WAN networks.
Aquantia released their first chipsets based on this new standard, the first -cheaper- chipset supported 1Gbps, 2.5Gbps & 5Gbps, while the more expensive one adds also 10Gbps to the mix.
While Aquantia had their chipsets for a long time, both were expensive, the stand-alone NIC's where priced at $80 & $100 respectively IIRC. thought they're now a little bit cheaper, but still expensive. There's no competition; yet.
Realtek at least is joining the team here promising a noticeably cheaper alternative to Aquantia, maybe they will start with 2.5GBASE-T which will be a good entry into 1G+ speeds, if true we might soon see cheaper switches also.
Really digging the Asrock brand and this new is fantastic.
Of course I cannot take advantage of it and unless I bring it to work the LAN port won't ever get saturated.
I would love to have higher than 1Gbit speed available within the house though. Maybe in five+ years or never... What's tha adoption rate of such new technology?
Sure, Realtek is going to beat them at price, but they can't go faster than 2.5Gbps, so it's not exactly a competitive solution in that sense. Still a big improvement over 1Gbps though.