ASRock Teases Phantom Gaming Motherboards with Integrated 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet LAN

[TheLostSwede]

When the 10Gbps BASE-T was finalized, it was with finalized with 5Gbs BASE-T and 2.5Gbps BASE-T also, but the 10Gbps standard was the most famous one.

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.

Exactly what is Aquantia expensive against? Intel? Intel has even more expensive options at every speed level.

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.

 

[Octopuss]

So where are any 2,5/5Gbit switches? I looked around, and best I could find were really expensive (for home use) 8-10 port ones that ONLY had like two of these faster ports (and rest regular 1Gbit), which is all but useless.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Yeah, that's the problem and because the 2.5/5 specifications were only adopted two years ago, it's going to be a while before we see more variety...and then the price come down.