SI-PEX24059

Have not used it for extended periods of time, but seems to work correctly when combined with a USB4 or Thunderbolt4 port. It does get HOT, so don't put anything on top of it. Windows 11 driver worked just fine out of the box, but I did tweak some settings. I do this on all my Ethernet adapters. If your USB4 port is not also Thunderbolt, this device will not show up as a network adapter. It uses the Aquantia chip. It will show up as a USB device with no function.

Edit: as of XigmaNAS 13.1.0.5.9725 this adapter is now recognized and works as-expected! Thanks to ms49434 and zoon01 for applying a kernel patch to accept the PHY that is present. Original review follows. The adapter arrived in a small, cardboard box. The heatsink is attached securely. A hardware check indicates that the chip is revision 03. Under Windows 10/11, the adapter is usable with no additional effort or configuration on the user's side. Under Linux/FreeBSD, the adapter may or may not work depending on the version of the driver used to attempt init. Under FreeBSD specifically, support for the I225 was added in 13.1 via 𝚒𝚐𝚌, however the driver performs an unnecessary PHY vendor ID check, which may fail if the adapter reports an ID that isn't listed in an internal table. The fix (recommended by Intel themselves) is to no longer perform this check and instead assume a PHY for all I225 adapters. This fix is available in FreeBSD 13.2 and/or 14, and would need to be backported if using anything earlier. Examples; TrueNAS Scale 22.12.0 supports this adapter, while XigmaNAS 13.1.0.5.9687 (latest as of this review) includes 𝚒𝚐𝚌, but fails to init with the adapter I received.

Linux plug and play. Works great on 6x kernels. 600MB/s to and from my TruNAS machine running four Hitachi 10TB platter drives in zraid. Performance is steady and stable. EDIT Nov.25 Updated to 1 star. Less if I could. I've had two of these burn out this year and had to return them. Still recognized as present but fail to connect or get an IP. Real pain too because I have to remove my 4090 bracket to remove the card. Truly happy this works because it's the only x1 card I could find. Most of my board is blocked off by my RTX4090 and brace. Only other exposed slot is x8 but it has a card with 4x m.2 nvme drives on it. EDIT 8/16/2025 The card lasted less than three weeks and died. Does not recognize that a cable is even plugged in. I bought two and the second is working in place of the failed nic. We will see how long that lasts.

Bought this to test with OPNSense. First time using it and setting up a router with my own hardware. I dropped this in an i7 4790, 16GB DDR3, 256GB NVME and this four port NIC. OPNSense detected without a problem and was up and running at 2.5gbps. I have a 2gig fiber connection and hasn’t given me any issues. I will note the card did not have a fan like the picture and does not have the option to add one. The heat sink is large enough that it shouldn’t be an issue but will tell with time. The model number received matches the pictures and one ordered so could be a different revision. I’m on the fence on returning this if heat is an issue since this is in an itx build with limited fans. Overall happy it with it.

This upgrade to 2.5gig Ethernet is easy to install into a PCIe slot and drivers are included on the supplied mini CD. Many drivers are included including Windows 11, 10, Mac and Linux. Full speed is achieved using Cat 6 wire. Both full form and small form factor hardware included - easy to change out. Ethernet socket has two LED indicators for link and speed which is good since other cards may not have these indicators or have holes to see through to an LED on the inside surface of the card. The Realtek chip and the software may be able to go to 10gig in the future since there is some references in drivers and other information of the system. Maybe a firmware update in the future for this? Overall, this is a great product and very reasonable in price and support.

[UPDATE 7-6-2020] This card does indeed work as advertised in Linux. I was able to easily get 290MB/s throughput between two Linux computers via the Zyxel XGS1210-12 managed switch that has two 2.5gb ports. One computer has this PCIe card and the other is a laptop with a USB3.0 to 2.5gb ethernet adapter (Cable Creation) based on the Realtek chips. [/UPDATE] I am waiting on a Zyxel XGS1210-12 switch to arrive which has 2.5 gigabit ports to test the max speed of this card, but until then I can confirm this card works at least up to a gigabit throughput in Linux. BUT, the trick is you have to install a driver and, while easy if you know the steps, it is not something that was easy for me to *find* a up to date tutorial on as someone who's never compiled a driver before. There are a lot of outdated driver tutorials. I found one that works and am sharing it here. Saying that, please note these steps are ONLY for Linux Mint 19.3 which is based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS which is based on Debian. So these steps may not be required in future releases. Both Ubuntu and Linux Mint are now at version 20 with kernel 5.4. I have not had a chance yet to test this card with those. But I will. I'm evaluating Linux Mint 20 in a virtual machine and will upgrade at a later date. Linux Mint says they will have an updater from 19.3 soon. If you are NOT using a Debian based Linux these specific steps will NOT work, but should be adaptable to other distros such as RedHat, Fedora, CentOS, Manjaro, OpenSuse, etc. with a little tweaking. It is my experience that a recompile of the entire kernel from source is not necessary. Only compile the driver and then add it. The Realtek script download does this. But there are some things you have to install first. (see steps below) If you are using FreeBSD you're going to have a difficult time because there are no drivers provided by Realtek for that operating system (at least from what I can see.) BUT, you may want to look into using the Windows driver in FreeBSD by using ndisgen or ndiswrapper. I know NOTHING about using those, but have read this is a workaround when no drivers are provided for a Unix-like OS such as FreeBSD. At least now you have a starting point for Google search. Steps to compile and install the driver for this card and others based on the Realtek r8125 chip: 1. Download the r8125 driver for PCIe cards (not USB) from Realtek's website and unzip it. Make note of where you unzip it. Most browsers save to the Downloads folder of your home path. 2. From a command line prompt (aka terminal) do the following: 2a. cd {path to unzipped driver download} 2b. sudo apt install linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential 2c. sudo ./autorun.sh The autorun.sh file is included with the Realtek driver, in case you're curious. It's not part of Linux. After the autorun.sh file finishes the driver will be installed. Be patient. After it's done installing then the card may take a few seconds or a minute to get an IP address. In my experience a reboot of the computer was not required. It just started working on its own. The DOWN side to this is that the driver is only installed for the current kernel, so when an update to a newer kernel happens you'll have to do these steps again. (Unless the driver is in the new kernel.) There is a way to automatically compile and install the driver whenever the kernel is updated and that is called DKMS. I'm not familiar enough with it to provide notes on its use. But if you want to investigate on your own I encourage it. Gotta try to learn, right? I also have found a way to test speed of Ethernet ports using two computers. It is preferred, but not required, to connect both computers to a switch for the test, but it is possible to direct connect between two computers, assign IP address to each card, and test that way. SPEED TEST Speed test (both computers running Linux. Probably any version of Linux or even FreeBSD as nc and dd are usually already present) We will presume the first computer's IP address is 192.168.1.100. Step 1: If using a firewall open a port to test with. I use 12345 in these steps. Use what you prefer. Open a port on both computers (presuming firewall is on both) because you may want to test in both directions. This test only tests one way at a time. Sometimes I get different speeds (on other adapters, specifically USB Ethernet) so it is good to test both ways. Step 2: On first computer that will be the "server" type this at the command line nc -vvnlp 12345 >/dev/null After pressing enter the computer will sit patiently waiting for something on that port. Step 3: On the second computer that will be the "client" type this at the command line dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1K | nc -vvn 192.168.1.100 12345 The test will begin but you will not see a status until the test is done and it will report the speed. Be patient. This tests throughput of a 1 gigabyte data stream. If you want more change the count to a higher number like 2K or 3K or less like 250, 500, 750. Doing a longer or shorter stream has not, in my experience, resulted in any better or worse speeds than a gigabyte of data. Once the test is done and the speed is shown (1 gigabit is usually about 118MB/s) you will need to press Ctrl-C to break out of the command and it will return the terminal prompt on both computers. To do the test the other direction, just run the server command on the other computer and vise versa. Note, you'll need to know the IP address of the other computer and use that instead of 192.168.1.100. After I get a 2.5Gb switch I'll test with that and show results here.

This is the only only 10Gb PCIe x1 NIC I could find but it works great so far. This works out of the box on Windows 11. I was pleasantly surprised to see a significant decrease in my loaded upload latency compared to the onboard NIC I've been using. It dropped from around 50ms down to 3ms. For some reason my loaded download latency increased from around 3ms to 11ms with this card but that's a trade-off I'm happy to make. With this I'm finally able to take full advantage of my 5Gb fiber internet.

Was able to get this working for pfSense 2.7. You have to install the Realtek package. Try to do this prior to installation of the card or it’ll be impossible to get the packages (you need a working WAN port). 1. Enable secure shell in Advanced settings and SSH as admin to your firewall management address 2. Select 8 for shell and run “pkg install realtek-re-kmod” (the package installer will instruct you to do the following) 3. Edit boot “ee /boot/loader.config” 4. Add the two lines if_re_load=“YES” if_re_name=“/boot/modules/if_re.ko” 5. Save file by pressing ESC and answering leave editor and save 5. Reboot by typing reboot