The real questions are how good is aquantia regarding driver support? What about total latency, DPC latency, etc Intel usually much better in those regards than the likes of broadcom, realtek, etc

The real question is, who is gonna pay 600+€ for a corresponding switch ? I evaluated it and came to the decision to wait another year or two, tho I redid the cabling in the house already to accomodate 10G, once it's mainstream and supported from HighEnd Macs ( iMac Pro does ) to mainstream Asus boards, without the need of an add-in card it will drop in with new devices by itself. No reason to force it for that much money imho unless you benefit in your workflow and make money with it, that's a different story and money is waged against performance and time. This is not the case with my gaming rig that occasionally fires up some VM machines.

FlyBy:

The real question is, who is gonna pay 600+€ for a corresponding switch ? I evaluated it and came to the decision to wait another year or two, tho I redid the cabling in the house already to accomodate 10G, once it's mainstream and supported from HighEnd Macs ( iMac Pro does ) to mainstream Asus boards, without the need of an add-in card it will drop in with new devices by itself. No reason to force it for that much money imho unless you benefit in your workflow and make money with it, that's a different story and money is waged against performance and time. This is not the case with my gaming rig that occasionally fires up some VM machines.

Well look at it from this point; until recently that kind of a card costed 600+€, at least it is starting to become somewhat affordable.

Right now my 1gbit LAN is more than sufficient. Sure, it is nice if your ISO has finished after some seconds, but be honest: How many of your devices could possibly USE the full amount of 10gbit (~1,25GB/s)? Wouldn't 1gbit (~125MB/s) be more than sufficient, even if you live at your house with your whole family and everybody uses at least one device simultanously? For the use in a private household I really see no gain in anything, most households (gurus aside ;-) ) even run their devices with traditional HDDs or probably one small SSD. And if your harddrive only manages 50MB/s it doesn't matter if you use 1gbit or 10, the bottleneck is the harddrive. Sure, if you have to renew all your cabling, I would invest in a CAT7 setup with decent shielding, so the "base" is done and you don't have to do the same work / invest twice in the near or far future. But right now, where internet speeds still are crappy as hell, fiber does not cover the whole country and most (German) people don't even get more than 16mbit ADSL (16 down, 1 up), I do not see any need to get one of these chips or invest in a whole 10gbit setup (cards, switches, cabling, routers/firewalls, etc.) Remember the times where you had to pay hundreds Euros or more for a single 10mbit LAN card? Now gbit cards cost almost nothing, you get one for less than 10 Euros if you like. Wait a few years and the same will happen to the 10gbit cards.

386SX:

Right now my 1gbit LAN is more than sufficient. Sure, it is nice if your ISO has finished after some seconds, but be honest: How many of your devices could possibly USE the full amount of 10gbit (~1,25GB/s)? Wouldn't 1gbit (~125MB/s) be more than sufficient, even if you live at your house with your whole family and everybody uses at least one device simultanously? For the use in a private household I really see no gain in anything, most households (gurus aside ;-) ) even run their devices with traditional HDDs or probably one small SSD. And if your harddrive only manages 50MB/s it doesn't matter if you use 1gbit or 10, the bottleneck is the harddrive. Sure, if you have to renew all your cabling, I would invest in a CAT7 setup with decent shielding, so the "base" is done and you don't have to do the same work / invest twice in the near or far future. But right now, where internet speeds still are crappy as hell, fiber does not cover the whole country and most (German) people don't even get more than 16mbit ADSL (16 down, 1 up), I do not see any need to get one of these chips or invest in a whole 10gbit setup (cards, switches, cabling, routers/firewalls, etc.) Remember the times where you had to pay hundreds Euros or more for a single 10mbit LAN card? Now gbit cards cost almost nothing, you get one for less than 10 Euros if you like. Wait a few years and the same will happen to the 10gbit cards.

One word NAS. Imagine situation where all of your files meaning movies,music and game ISO's are on the NAS box with spinning rust ,you put box somewhere where you can't hear disk's spinning like basement or some dark corner where it's not in your way and all that you have in your system is nice little m.2 SSD that doesn't make noise and you don't have to buy some large multi TB ssd to hold your files because all that you want just stream from nas.

Why anyone would need more than 1gbit in da house ? In EU you can't get internet above 500mbit anyway( some big cities etc). Still speeds like this are totaly unnesesary yet. i have 100mbit connection and i can stream 4k content no problem and i could have 200-300mbit no problem.

kapu:

Why anyone would need more than 1gbit in da house ? In EU you can't get internet above 500mbit anyway( some big cities etc). Still speeds like this are totaly unnesesary yet. i have 100mbit connection and i can stream 4k content no problem and i could have 200-300mbit no problem.

NAS - network attached storage, basically you make your own "cloud" in the basement.That way you can get rid off the noise HDD's are making and just keep small m.2 in system for everything else listening music watching movies you just stream from nas . Essentially you buy just some small m.2 for system and keep everything else on relatively inexpensive hdd's no need to buy high capacity and very expensive ssd's (both m.2 and sata)

kruno:

One word NAS. Imagine situation where all of your files meaning movies,music and game ISO's are on the NAS box with spinning rust ,you put box somewhere where you can't hear disk's spinning like basement or some dark corner where it's not in your way and all that you have in your system is nice little m.2 SSD that doesn't make noise and you don't have to buy some large multi TB ssd to hold your files because all that you want just stream from nas.

I indeed own a NAS (8x 2TB HDDs at 7200rpm currently), but even that is connected "only" through Gbit LAN. The 2 Raids I have setup (2x Raid5 of 4 HDDs) manage about 300MByte/s each in theory, but I consider myself a techfreak; you obviously won't find this kind of NAS in a private standard household. But again, where do those speeds matter --> in a private standard household without any techfreaks around <-- ? I got enough IOPS to deal with HD content (I did not try 4k yet, prices are too high for the benefit I would get) on my TV or any< computer / laptop. I got enough bandwidth to copy a movie, some MP3s or anything I like with decent speeds from A to B (1Gbit/s -> gets me about 100Mbyte/s transfer speed). My wife uses wireless (833Mbit/s) and does not complain about speeds. My kids watch Youtube and the like almost every day without any problems, some time while my wife or I are surfing the web or doing other things on the LAN. I do backups of important files on all machines which are copied / stored on my NAS (about 200GB every week, differential backups with less every day) without any failure in the last eight years. If I connect by VPN and open Excel files stored on the NAS, I notice some delays, but that comes from Excel and does happen even with small Excel files (say less than 100kbytes) if they are opened from a network share. Even with a total of 4 mobile phones, 3 laptops, 4 user computers, 1 NAS, 1 domain controller, 1 hardware firewall and some guests in the house, nobody complained about the speed of my network. They only complained about the fact they don't need to make a can of coffee until the download has finished (200mbit cable, getting an upgrade to 400mbit soon). TL;DR: Even after you told me about your basement cloud, I still cannot imagine a scenario where this would give me a reason to go 10Gbit. Please don't get me wrong. As I said before, I agree there are situations where this COULD make sense, but I have ruled out the ones I know (speaking of a standard private household). If you run the IT of a company, it could make sense to upgrade your core network to 10Gbit to ensure every user gets almost the full speed of what is possible with the Gbit chip in the computer. But on the other hand I would use fiber for that, no copper cables. And one last thing: If I place my NAS on the basement level, I do not care about any noises, I do not live there. ;-) Have a nice day! 🙂 386SX

386SX:

I indeed own a NAS (8x 2TB HDDs at 7200rpm currently), but even that is connected "only" through Gbit LAN. The 2 Raids I have setup (2x Raid5 of 4 HDDs) manage about 300MByte/s each in theory, but I consider myself a techfreak; you obviously won't find this kind of NAS in a private standard household. But again, where do those speeds matter --> in a private standard household without any techfreaks around <-- ? I got enough IOPS to deal with HD content (I did not try 4k yet, prices are too high for the benefit I would get) on my TV or any< computer / laptop. I got enough bandwidth to copy a movie, some MP3s or anything I like with decent speeds from A to B (1Gbit/s -> gets me about 100Mbyte/s transfer speed). My wife uses wireless (833Mbit/s) and does not complain about speeds. My kids watch Youtube and the like almost every day without any problems, some time while my wife or I are surfing the web or doing other things on the LAN. I do backups of important files on all machines which are copied / stored on my NAS (about 200GB every week, differential backups with less every day) without any failure in the last eight years. If I connect by VPN and open Excel files stored on the NAS, I notice some delays, but that comes from Excel and does happen even with small Excel files (say less than 100kbytes) if they are opened from a network share. Even with a total of 4 mobile phones, 3 laptops, 4 user computers, 1 NAS, 1 domain controller, 1 hardware firewall and some guests in the house, nobody complained about the speed of my network. They only complained about the fact they don't need to make a can of coffee until the download has finished (200mbit cable, getting an upgrade to 400mbit soon). TL;DR: Even after you told me about your basement cloud, I still cannot imagine a scenario where this would give me a reason to go 10Gbit. Please don't get me wrong. As I said before, I agree there are situations where this COULD make sense, but I have ruled out the ones I know (speaking of a standard private household). If you run the IT of a company, it could make sense to upgrade your core network to 10Gbit to ensure every user gets almost the full speed of what is possible with the Gbit chip in the computer. But on the other hand I would use fiber for that, no copper cables. And one last thing: If I place my NAS on the basement level, I do not care about any noises, I do not live there. ;-) Have a nice day! 🙂 386SX

i was thinking more in line of playing games on remote disk.Did you look at the size of recent games?? That is some lets say like this insane s**t 60+ 70+ GB freshly installed game and it doesn't look like they are planning to stop anytime soon. In my mind scenario is like this : you install system on relatively small m.2 drive (drive is just for system and little bit of caching ), and everything else meaning all the programs ,games etc.. you install on nas partition.that way you can avoid paying high (relative to hdd) prices for solid state drives and you can put large inexpensive HDD's to bear the brunt of system operation. Off course caveat is that you need to do that kind of a thing with consideration of latency (both network and disk), with some trial you can mask (possibly) latency with some caching on ssd and memory