lowlands

I use the Comfast CF-P100 AQC107 card which is $70 on AliExpress: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001050803452.html Worked perfectly in my Unraid server when I tested it. Updated the card to the latest firmware from the Marvell website without a hitch and use Windows 10 drivers from their website as well.

My current desktop machine is a 3950x on a Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro, using a AQC107 for 10G. I looked at the X570 "creator" class of boards, but they are way overpriced in what they offer in my eyes. 240 EUR for the X570 Aorus Pro vs 356 EUR for the Aorus Master with 2.5G or 730 EUR for the Aorus XTREME with the same AQC107 chipset, but onboard. I'm happy with the 60 EUR card If you want 10G just on your workstation and server it can be done cheap. Two Mellanox ConnectX-3 cards with a DAC cable is what I used to run here. Downside is you need to have the two machines recently close together. To change that I recently bought the newly released Microtik CSS610-8G-2S+IN switch (8x 1G + 2x SFP+) for less than 100 EUR. Which is excellent for my setup. It's the cheapest and most flexible way to get some 10G on your network and not have to use a different subnet between the server and workstation on a direct link. You can either use two DAC cables right to the switch or use MikroTik S+RJ10r2 SFP+ modules to hook them up on RJ45 with AQC107 cards to have some more flexibility in regards to distance. It's a big plus to be able to hook it all up to the existing 1G network and not have to fiddle around with a different subnet for the connection between workstation and server that I used before. My intention is hook it up to my main 24 port Unifi switch with 4x 1G and link aggregation so both my workstation and Unraid server can access all the other machines in the house and the 1G Internet connection without saturating the current 1G uplink.

If you want to go 10G in the future, why limit yourself finding a good motherboard that has 2.5G? A AQC107 card can be had for 70$/60EUR and will do 2.5G/5G/10G and you'd be more future proof.

Miktrotik recently released a very interesting switch for this use case. The CSS610-8G-2S+IN has 8 regular 1GB ports and 2 SFP+ ports for 10GB. It's really cheap, under a 100 EUR! https://mikrotik.com/product/css610_8g_2s_in