Multi-gig networking

How to add 10GbE to your PC for under £100

Damian Krzyzanowski

Ten gigabit Ethernet has a reputation for being expensive. That reputation is about five years out of date. A single 10GbE connection between two machines, a NAS and a workstation, say, now costs less than a mid-range graphics card cooler. The catch is that "10GbE for under £100" means one specific shopping list, not any 10GbE setup you can imagine. This guide is that shopping list, plus the two chipsets worth knowing by name before you buy.

What under £100 actually buys you

Under £100 buys a single 10GbE link between two machines: a card in your PC, a card in your NAS, and a cable between them. It does not buy a 10GbE switch. Even budget switches with a couple of 10GBASE-T or SFP+ ports still sit above that £100 line on their own, before you've bought a single network card. If you only need two machines talking to each other at full speed, that's not a problem, you just skip the switch entirely and run the cable direct (more on that below). If you need three or more machines on 10GbE, budget for the switch as a separate purchase and treat this guide as the per-machine card cost.

The two budget chipsets: AQC113 and RTL8127

Almost every affordable 10GbE card sold today is built on one of two controllers, and which one you get changes what you should expect from it.

Aquantia AQC113 (now a Marvell part) is the more mature of the two. It's been shipping in consumer and prosumer cards for several years, so driver support is broad: in-kernel on Linux, supported by TrueNAS and Unraid out of the box, and Windows picks it up without hunting for a driver. It runs a little warmer than the alternative and needs active cooling on most card designs, which is why AQC113 cards usually ship with a small fan bolted to the heatsink. Expect to pay somewhere in the £35 to £50 range for a PCIe card.

Realtek RTL8127 is the newer entrant, and it's why 10GbE got this cheap. It runs cooler than AQC113, sometimes passively on lower-profile card designs, and undercuts it on price. The trade-off is driver maturity: check your OS and kernel version support the RTL8127 before you buy, particularly if you're running an older NAS operating system or a Linux distribution with an older kernel. If your OS is current, this is the cheaper of the two with no real downside.

Both chipsets negotiate down to 5GbE, 2.5GbE, and gigabit automatically, so neither one locks you out of your existing network while you're only halfway through upgrading it.

Check your PCIe slot before you buy

This is the step people skip and then wonder why their new card runs at a fraction of its rated speed. Ten gigabit Ethernet needs roughly 1.25 GB/s of bandwidth, more than a PCIe 3.0 x1 slot can deliver on its own. Budget 10GbE cards are built for a PCIe 3.0 x4 electrical connection (some are physically x4, some are x1 or x4 physical with x4 wired underneath), and dropping into a slot with fewer lanes than that will cap your real-world throughput well below 10 gigabit. Check your motherboard's manual for which slots are wired for how many lanes, particularly if you're using a secondary slot below the graphics card. A card that's technically "installed and working" at 3 Gbps instead of 10 Gbps is a common and entirely avoidable disappointment.

One more thing worth connecting before you buy: chipset choice and slot availability aren't independent decisions. If the only free slot on your board is a short x1 (common on small-form-factor boards, or once a graphics card has taken the main x16 slot), you're already capped below 10 gigabit regardless of which chipset you pick, and the RTL8127's lower price stops mattering as much as the AQC113's wider driver support if you're feeding a NAS running an older TrueNAS or Unraid build. Match the card to the slot first, then to the operating system, then worry about price.

Skip the switch: direct NIC to NIC

If the only two machines that need 10GbE are a NAS and one PC, you don't need a switch at all. Put a card in each machine, run a single cable between them, and set up the direct link (this needs a little more network configuration than plugging into a switch, since there's no DHCP handing out addresses on that link). We've written the full walkthrough for this separately, because it deserves its own guide rather than a rushed paragraph here.

If you do want everything on 10GbE eventually

The realistic budget path to a fully wired multi-gig network is a 2.5GbE switch with one 10GBASE-T or SFP+ uplink port, not a switch where every port runs at 10 gigabit. Put the NAS on that single 10G uplink, since that's where the bandwidth actually gets used, and leave every other machine on 2.5GbE, which is already a four-times improvement over gigabit and costs next to nothing per port. This is exactly the switch shape that keeps turning up in UK home-network searches (the TP-Link TL-SX1008 and similar boxes), and it's the sensible middle ground between "everything gigabit" and "everything 10GbE", which is rarely worth paying for.

The under £100 shopping list

  • One AQC113 or RTL8127 PCIe card for your PC (roughly £25 to £50 depending on chipset and brand)
  • One matching card for your NAS or second machine, if it doesn't already have 10GbE built in
  • A Cat6a (or better) patch cable rated for 10GBASE-T, long enough to reach between the two machines directly or via a switch
  • No switch, if you're doing a direct two-machine link; budget separately for one if you need three or more devices on 10GbE

That's a complete, working 10GbE link for well under £100, and every chipset in it is named up front rather than buried behind a model number.

Every network card we stock names its controller (AQC113, RTL8125B, RTL8127, and the rest) right in the product title, so you know exactly which chipset and which driver you're getting before you buy. See what we stock, or ask us which card fits your build.