ASRock Phantom Gaming Motherboards to Feature 2.5G Ethernet

Megalith

Megalith

24-bit/48kHz
Staff member
Joined
Aug 20, 2006
Messages
13,000
Originally announced by Realtek at this year’s Computex, ASRock’s upcoming Z390 motherboards, the Phantom Gaming 9 and Phantom Gaming 6, will be two of the first products to feature the new RTL8125 controller, which enables a 2.5x improvement in Ethernet bandwidth. ASRock says its new software package will allow users to intelligently shape traffic: "accelerate critical gaming network traffic ahead of other data to provide smoother, stutter-free game performance and give gamers the ultimate competitive edge."

ASRock's new offerings, currently listed as supporting Intel's 8th Generation CPUs, include the flagship Z390 Phantom Gaming 9 with 2.5G LAN with a pairing of dual Intel-based NICs to offer a total of three LAN ports on the rear panel. Along with this is 2T2R Wave 2 802.11ac Wi-Fi with support for up to 1.73 Gbps of bandwidth. Also included in the new line up is the Z390 Phantom Gaming 6 which features a cut down feature set to the Phantom Gaming 9, but still retaining a lot of the gaming-focused features, such as 2.5G+2x1G.
 
That's a pretty weird combination of wired ports. Why not just do 1x2.5Gb?

Or is the Intel ME "requiring" Intel NICs now? (Vendor lock in)
 
which will fail randomly along with your USB ports within 2 months of purchase, on multiple boards.
 
stutter-free game performance and give gamers the ultimate competitive edge."
Click to expand...

Sounds like a lot of work upgrading all of the network equipment between you and the server just to gain a slight decrease in latency.
 
This does nothing for WAN traffic. Useless feature is useless unless you upgrade everything on your LAN to take advantage.
 
Riccochet said:
This does nothing for WAN traffic. Useless feature is useless unless you upgrade everything on your LAN to take advantage.
Click to expand...

yup.
and useless LAN updates are also useless if you have a 50/5 circuit.




/edit.....
well, not entirely, but you get the drift.
 
I don't think how I phrased it quite came out how I meant it. I more meant, I wonder if Intel is negotiating with vendors to always have at least one Intel NIC installed, and they get kick-backs or it's a requirement, or something.

Seems really weird to have a 2.5gige Realtek NIC and then suddenly 2x1gige Intel NICs. Like, what the fuck? Are the Intel NICs magically going to be faster? No.

gxp500 said:
I thought ME always required an intel nic, no? Especially if you wanted to wake it up from slumber.
Click to expand...
 
O-M-G, saw "Phantom Gaming" in the title and nearly had a bad flashback... :eek::eek::D
 
Here I thought they were doing multi-gig, but it's just hacked LAGG...
Retraction, the original post and linked article are confusing; the Realtek NIC used can push 2.5Gbase-T multi-gig across CAT-5e. I blame Megalith.

Need to get the AQ-107 onto a modern process and mass-produced for consumer use.

sixpac said:
and no decent SOHO 10G switches available
Click to expand...

There's a few SOHO 10Gbase-T switches, but you're still looking at US$500+ unless you're buying used fabric SFP+ stuff off Ebay. The Ebay stuff is not a terrible route but it's not really feasible for your average SOHO, while the more accessible RJ-45 stuff is plug-and-play.
 
Last edited:
BloodyIron said:
That's a pretty weird combination of wired ports. Why not just do 1x2.5Gb?

Or is the Intel ME "requiring" Intel NICs now? (Vendor lock in)
Click to expand...

No, there is no vendor lock. Motherboard manufacturers can use whatever network PHY they wish with any Intel chipset based motherboard. While Intel's are common place on the higher end motherboards, Realtek and Killer NICs are used much of the time as well.

gxp500 said:
I thought ME always required an intel nic, no? Especially if you wanted to wake it up from slumber.
Click to expand...

Negative.

Riccochet said:
This does nothing for WAN traffic. Useless feature is useless unless you upgrade everything on your LAN to take advantage.
Click to expand...

True, but I do a lot of larger transfers over my local network. 10GbE would be nice for that. 2.5GbE will be useless without switches to support it and its basically a home standard only. It went from 1GbE to 10GbE in the datacenters and server markets. 10GbE is also very old technology at this point. Its also not really any more costly to implement than 1GbE stuff is. I'm expecting 2.5GbE to fizzle out like the Sony Minidisc, or Betamax.

sixpac said:
and no decent SOHO 10G switches available
Click to expand...

I haven't seen any. Wait until ASUS or someone starts putting out 2.5GbE switches that are "gaming" branded. They'll be red, black and covered in RGB LED lighting. :D

SolidBladez said:
It's actually independent of the hardware. More info here. All Intel boards have ME or TXE.
Click to expand...

Indeed.
 
Dan_D said:
I haven't seen any. Wait until ASUS or someone starts putting out 2.5GbE switches that are "gaming" branded. They'll be red, black and covered in RGB LED lighting.
Click to expand...

Netgear has 2 port 10g gaming switch now, with rbg and a router with a 10g sfp port, the Nighthawk Pro gaming line. The non gaming model is $179 on amazon with 2 rj45 10gb ports.
 
To be fair, two 10Gbase-T ports isn't really that useful; might as well just run a cable between the two potential devices and use software routing out to everything else. Very niche use case.

The SFP+ port would be useful for fiber to the home services- but an ER-X-SFP is pretty cheap too, and an ER-4 can do 1Gbps linespeed routing with NAT.

Mostly what the Netgear devices can bring is the SOHO-aware QoS for prioritization of consumer streaming and gaming applications.

But what we really need are <US$300 smart or managed switches with 4+ 10Gbase-T ports to really get things going.
 
Yeah it's the lack of switches that has made this all a non starter. I recently went the sfp+ way for 10gbit between my server and main pc. All in for two cards, two transceivers, and 15m of om3 cable it was about $75 through ebay.
Ranulfo said:
Now this looks promising, 4 port SFP+, 1 GBE: $149

https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in#fndtn-specifications
Click to expand...
Indeed it does. I suppose later on down the line if I picked that up, I could abandon the dual network I have going on (cat6 connected to everything else via 192.168.x.y, and the two fiber connections on 192.168.z.y.) Still wouldn't allow multiple gigabit connected devices to make use of the sfp+ speed, ideally I'd have a 2 port sfp+ switch with 4 or 8 gigabit ports.
 
Ranulfo said:
Ebay or Amazon. SFP+ cards are under $50, often for two cards.
Click to expand...

Ok well then you are comparing apples to ham in that case. First off talking about used, possibly sketchy, deals on Ebay is not what people are usually thinking about when comparing to a new product. Acting like 10gig is super cheap because You've seen it used cheap is a bit disingenuous. Realistically the cheapest you can get a new 10 gig card with base-t is around $200 for a white-label type card (10gtek sells cards with Intel chips on them for around that) or $250 for a major brand.

Second, that's SFP. You should know that is cheaper than base-t cards because there's isn't the modulators and transmitters for it, you literally buy those as plugins. That, of course, raises the price. If you use direct attach cables you are going to get maybe 12 meters at best, and of course you have to buy a preterm'd cable which is not easy to run in many situations. You can put in optics or a base-t converter, of course, but those are additional cost and even with cheap optics and cable your price isn't near as good anymore.


So cost aside, why would you want 2.5gig (or 5gig)? Two major reasons:

1) Less power usage. Look at your 10 gig NIC some time. Things still have bigass headsinks on them because the chips use a lot of power. That's fine in some cases but it is one of the reason 10 gig switches are so expensive, and tend to be noisy. Cutting the speed cuts the power budget for the processor and the PHY so you can get them on smaller, lower power chips (also why they can be cheaper).

2) Reuse of existing cable.This is why there's interest in 10g/5g/2.5g/1g switches for enterprise. Doing 10gig over any significant distance requires CAT-6a which is pricey, stiff, and almost nobody has deployed so you'd have to redo wiring. However you can get lower speeds over runs of lesser grade wire. 2.5gig seems to run quite well over Cat-5e out to 100m. So the idea is the switch and NIC would negotiate the highest speed both support, then test the wire and link up at the highest speed they can get without errors.

Now what this means at home is if you just have something that goes up to 2.5gig, it shouldn't cost that much more than a 1gig device, will almost certainly work over your existing wiring, and get you 2.5x the speed.

We are likely to see more and more devices in the 2.5 and 5 gig space as time goes on. They provide good intermediaries between 1 an 10 gig. The enterprise grade hardware is already out there, the consumer grade stuff is coming (as with this product).
 
Just upgraded to 1gbit and can only imagine how fast 10gbit is.. Apparently you can get 10gbit in Sweden for $33 monthly :eek:
 
Sycraft said:
because You've seen it used cheap
Click to expand...

Not 'seen', bought. This is an extremely popular homelab solution and it works very well.

Sycraft said:
Realistically the cheapest you can get a new 10 gig card with base-t is around $200 for a white-label type card (10gtek sells cards with Intel chips on them for around that) or $250 for a major brand.
Click to expand...

Aquantia makes them for US$80. Really. Their chipset also comes onboard the higher-end motherboards from the likes of ASRock, ASUS, Gigagbyte, and probably others, for the four main sockets (consumer and HEDT, AMD and Intel). I have both an Aquantia card, bought new, and a motherboard with the chipset, both connected to a SOHO 10Gbase-T switch.
 
Sycraft said:
Ok well then you are comparing apples to ham in that case. First off talking about used, possibly sketchy, deals on Ebay is not what people are usually thinking about when comparing to a new product. Acting like 10gig is super cheap because You've seen it used cheap is a bit disingenuous. Realistically the cheapest you can get a new 10 gig card with base-t is around $200 for a white-label type card (10gtek sells cards with Intel chips on them for around that) or $250 for a major brand.

Second, that's SFP. You should know that is cheaper than base-t cards because there's isn't the modulators and transmitters for it, you literally buy those as plugins. That, of course, raises the price. If you use direct attach cables you are going to get maybe 12 meters at best, and of course you have to buy a preterm'd cable which is not easy to run in many situations. You can put in optics or a base-t converter, of course, but those are additional cost and even with cheap optics and cable your price isn't near as good anymore.
Click to expand...

I picked up my Intel X540 T1 for around $225.

Sycraft said:
So cost aside, why would you want 2.5gig (or 5gig)? Two major reasons:

1) Less power usage. Look at your 10 gig NIC some time. Things still have bigass headsinks on them because the chips use a lot of power. That's fine in some cases but it is one of the reason 10 gig switches are so expensive, and tend to be noisy. Cutting the speed cuts the power budget for the processor and the PHY so you can get them on smaller, lower power chips (also why they can be cheaper).
Click to expand...

While not entirely wrong, I think this isn't a big deal. I don't think its that much power.

Sycraft said:
2) Reuse of existing cable.This is why there's interest in 10g/5g/2.5g/1g switches for enterprise. Doing 10gig over any significant distance requires CAT-6a which is pricey, stiff, and almost nobody has deployed so you'd have to redo wiring. However you can get lower speeds over runs of lesser grade wire. 2.5gig seems to run quite well over Cat-5e out to 100m. So the idea is the switch and NIC would negotiate the highest speed both support, then test the wire and link up at the highest speed they can get without errors.

Now what this means at home is if you just have something that goes up to 2.5gig, it shouldn't cost that much more than a 1gig device, will almost certainly work over your existing wiring, and get you 2.5x the speed.
Click to expand...

This is the reasons why I think 2.5GbE exists. Again, this is why its basically a home standard and not something that was ever done in datacenters or the server / workstation market.

Sycraft said:
We are likely to see more and more devices in the 2.5 and 5 gig space as time goes on. They provide good intermediaries between 1 an 10 gig. The enterprise grade hardware is already out there, the consumer grade stuff is coming (as with this product).
Click to expand...

We will undoubtedly see more of it, but I don't think it will take off the way are hoping it will. I don't think it will go over all that well. For people on 10GbE already, its useless. For others, it accomplishes nothing as all their infrastructure is 1GbE. Many, if not most homes probably lack any type of wiring at all and wireless is extremely popular in the home for that reason. I just don't see 2.5GbE going anywhere. As it is, I've seen far more integrated 10GbE solutions than 2.5GbE. Its basically a standard that will not go anywhere in the datacenter and that no one in the home asked for.
 
Dan_D said:
I just don't see 2.5GbE going anywhere.
Click to expand...

Not popular in the average home, but Ubiquiti's upcoming Unifi APs will have 2.5Gbase-T capability, while both the popular Aquantia ASICs and many/most 10Gbase-T SOHO switches support both 2.5Gbit and 5Gbit multi-gig specifications, which both autonegotiate over CAT-5e.
 
SvenBent said:
im so regrating only pulling Cat5a in my walls
Click to expand...

You shouldn't!

If you were doing it today, sure, you'd want CAT6a, but CAT5e is still good for 5Gbps. And in reality, the push to 10Gbps hasn't been because that was needed, but because 1Gbps was the only slower option and it was too slow.
 
Sycraft said:
but those are additional cost and even with cheap optics and cable your price isn't near as good anymore.
Click to expand...

You make fair points. I just assumed most here understood or would figure out what the obvious limitations are. I spent about $60 on Amazon to see if I could get two of my servers/NAS boxes (right next to each other) to have 10G between them for fast backups. Cheaper than buying the $80-100 nics that just started showing up last year with that Asus model and a $200 (for two ports only) or more on a switch. Wiring the whole house? Hah, no. Most wouldn't want or need that speed for the cost. That said, anyone wiring now should go cat6 or 6A.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
You shouldn't!

If you were doing it today, sure, you'd want CAT6a, but CAT5e is still good for 5Gbps. And in reality, the push to 10Gbps hasn't been because that was needed, but because 1Gbps was the only slower option and it was too slow.
Click to expand...

1Gbps is just barely enough for what im doing and really would love to hit 2.5 or 5gb without it beeing to expensive
 
IdiotInCharge said:
You shouldn't!

If you were doing it today, sure, you'd want CAT6a, but CAT5e is still good for 5Gbps. And in reality, the push to 10Gbps hasn't been because that was needed, but because 1Gbps was the only slower option and it was too slow.
Click to expand...

What are you guys doing that 1Gbps is too slow for in home usage? Streaming 3 4k movies to every room in the house simultaneously?
 
DNMock said:
What are you guys doing that 1Gbps is too slow for in home usage? Streaming 3 4k movies to every room in the house simultaneously?
Click to expand...

I set up a file server. Part of a learning kick, but one point of note is that even a single spinning drive can push data at more than double 1Gbps. Once you've set up an array or two, you can push a whole lot more.

As far as applications go, one purpose is hosting VMs. I'm also looking forward to moving somewhere that has symmetrical 1Gbit internet, and using my home system on the go as well as hosting stuff for friends and family.
 
DNMock said:
What are you guys doing that 1Gbps is too slow for in home usage? Streaming 3 4k movies to every room in the house simultaneously?
Click to expand...

Its not absolutely needed right now but when you end up backing up multiple systems, it gets tedious and time consuming.
 
DNMock said:
What are you guys doing that 1Gbps is too slow for in home usage? Streaming 3 4k movies to every room in the house simultaneously?
Click to expand...

When you have multiple devices its a lot esier to move files to a server and symlink it than to deal with syncronising among different devices
1gbits is still only around 115MB/s which is still a rather slow transfer of big files.

1gbpis is ok but faster would be nices. I would die if i had to work this way on a 100mbits networks
 
DNMock said:
What are you guys doing that 1Gbps is too slow for in home usage? Streaming 3 4k movies to every room in the house simultaneously?
Click to expand...

It has nothing to do with WAN/Internet type scenarios in most cases. It has to do with file transfer at the local level. In which case, I'd just go 10GbE and be done with it. However, there is a distinct lack of reasonably priced switch options out there for that. There is also the problem of wiring, which most homes aren't going to be wired to handle anyway. However, this is the issue with most homes anyway. Houses getting CAT 5e / 6e wiring as part of their build process has only been going on for the last 10-15 years. My house was built 17 years ago and has CAT 5e, but it was originally configured for phone use. I had to remove the phone bridge and install a patch panel / switch setup myself. Anyone who has a home built prior to the 2000's would need wiring anyway, so going 2.5GbE to use existing wiring doesn't seem like that big of an advantage to me.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top