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Supercharge Your Network - Aquantia Multi-Gig Ethernet Adapters for Gamers Now Available

Raevenlord

Raevenlord

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Aquantia, a leader in Multi-Gigabit Ethernet, is pumping new life into networked gaming. Today the company announced the availability of a special gamer edition AQtion AQN-107 Ethernet adapter, available exclusively on Amazon for an introductory price of $89.99. The AQN-107 10Gigabit adapter takes high-speed Multi-Gig networking to the next level, and the gamer edition provides exclusive access to new Aquantia gaming prioritization software. The AQtion AQN-107 gamer edition hardware is clad in classic black and comes with both full-height and half-height powder coated black brackets for the gamer who wants a beautiful, fragging machine.





LK Bhupathi, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Aquantia:
"We listened to feedback from the gaming community - they want easy access to high-performance Multi-Gig Ethernet hardware at competitive price points. Amazon provides us with the customer-focused approach that gamers and PC enthusiasts demand. Aquantia decided to kick off our Amazon presence with a special gaming edition of our 10G AQtion Ethernet Adapter combined with the beta version of Aquantia's prioritization software so users can tightly control latency and lag."
Click to expand...

According to Jon Peddie Research's most recent worldwide report on pre-built and DIY gaming focused PCs - including upgrades and accessories - the market exceeded $30 billion for the first time in 2017. At the same time sales of PC games made up 28% of the overall global games market value of $116 billion. Selecting Amazon to reach this potentially lucrative market in North America was a simple choice. Amazon is responsible for 44% of all US e-commerce sales - or about 4% of all US retail sales. The most sales on Amazon - more than $8 billion - are created through the company's consumer electronics division, which includes PCs and computer components.

The combination of the gamer edition AQN-107 with the new Aquantia software will allow gamers to prioritize gameplay over other LAN activity. The reduction in lag and latency provides the reaction time advantage which can mean the difference between living on to play more and a "Game Over" situation. Twitch streamers, in particular, will benefit from dynamically controlling both the upload and download speeds through the prioritization interface.

About the Gamer Edition AQtion AQN-107
The Gamer Edition AQtion AQN-107 in classic black supports 10GBASE-T Ethernet in compliance with the IEEE 802.3an standard. It is also backward compatible with legacy cabling and Ethernet standards and supports 5GBASE-T and 2.5GBASE-T Ethernet per the IEEE 802.3bz standard. By supporting PCI Express x4 with a single RJ45 port, AQtion NICs can easily upgrade most existing tower PCs, supplanting outdated Gigabit Ethernet. It also fully utilizes the bandwidth capabilities of the latest CPUs and GPUs. Go here to learn more about the gamer edition of the AQtion AQN-107.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site
 
Gamer Edition ??? o.O
 
10gig is cool, but doesn't do shit for those people at home. When you're limited to, at best, gigabit download speeds that fancy 10gig ethernet adapter isn't going to get you anywhere. And that "gaming prioritization software" is useless as well. Something like it is built into my ASUS router, I didn't turn it on.

If you want to speed up your internet a little, run Steve Gibson's DNS Benchmark tool and take the top rated DNS servers on it as your primary and secondary (and put those into your router).

If you want pretty speedy, and pre-filtered websites (websites scanned as malicious and blocked on the DNS end) use Quad 9 (9.9.9.9 - https://www.quad9.com/)
 
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I saw this earlier on Amazon but I'm just happy to see a black PCB version. I know most don't care but I do. I'm guessing software is basically a router, just like the Killer NICs have; that's fine with me; don't need to use it if you don't want to. But again, I'm super stoked to have a black PCB version. I care a lot about aesthetics plus functionality. Plenty of other options if you don't. I actually bought their 5G NIC when it was on sale a little while ago. I'm going to be buying 6 of these for my homelab soon.

Slizzo, I can't believe you're totally ignoring anything LAN related at home. Lots of people have NAS's, workstations, etc. Plus these are backwards compatible and do can 100Mbps, 1Gbps, 2.5Gbps, 5Gbps and 10Gbps, etc. I'm guessing you don't do much with your computers.

https://imgur.com/WSWpISt
 
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CheapMeat said:
Slizzo, I can't believe you're totally ignoring anything LAN related at home. Lots of people have NAS's, workstations, etc. Plus these are backwards compatible and do can 100Mbps, 1Gbps, 2.5Gbps, 5Gbps and 10Gbps, etc. I'm guessing you don't do much with your computers.
https://imgur.com/WSWpISt
Click to expand...

Who exactly need more than gigabit lan at home?
 
Slizzo said:
10gig is cool, but doesn't do shit for those people at home. When you're limited to, at best, gigabit download speeds that fancy 10gig ethernet adapter isn't going to get you anywhere. And that "gaming prioritization software" is useless as well. Something like it is built into my ASUS router, I didn't turn it on.

If you want to speed up your internet a little, run Steve Gibson's DNS Benchmark tool and take the top rated DNS servers on it as your primary and secondary (and put those into your router).

If you want pretty speedy, and pre-filtered websites (websites scanned as malicious and blocked on the DNS end) use Quad 9 (9.9.9.9 - https://www.quad9.com/)
Click to expand...

You joking right? Ok, the gaming stuff is marketing BS, but a pair of the "regular" version of these that I got during their black Friday sales have really revolutionised the way I interact with my NAS. 10Gbps is no small upgrade over 1Gbps Ethernet, that's for sure, as I can access my NAS almost like it's a local drive now. I would never go back to plain old 1Gbps Ethernet for that usage.
Not everything is related to the speed of your internet connection when it comes to networking.

Doesn't seem like they have any "gaming" drivers though. You also pay an extra $10 to get it in black, but the upside is you get standard and low-profile brackets for that extra $10.
 
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I don't think this is actually targeted at normal consumers. The gamers thing, just marketing. Or at best an extra feature, as if saying "Yeah, not only your network may work faster, but online gaming will get an extra boost".

And no, I don't think it's a sensible idea to get this thing unless you have NAS, at least a gigabit-fast internet connection or something that really needs that much speed. Not to mention upgrading the rest of the network to take advantage of it.
 
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This is the performance I get towards a RAID-5 NAS using spinning rust. If I had SSD caching I guess it would be even higher.
Well worth imho, but obviously not everyone would see the benefit, as all your hardware needs to be fast enough to keep up with the speed of the network all of a sudden.

NAS-performance.png
 
This is great. Trying to put in a 10GbE network at home. Now I need some cheaper 10GbE switches.
 
"Gaming" .... right... k

Because marketing departments have found they can sell anything with the name Gaming on it. And any gamer that isn't a tech ge3k will see it and in their head believe that they are gaming better on their "gaming gear" but really have no advantage over the gamer/tech ge3k that spent half on their system because they didn't buy "gaming gear".

GO MARKETING!!!! WOOHOO!
 
Tartaros said:
Who exactly need more than gigabit lan at home?
Click to expand...

10Gb ethernet to a NAS. This enables the NAS to be used as a drive that otherwise would have required local storage, as its comparable in speed. Array of cheap hard drives is now as good as a local SATA SSD, with much more storage capacity. Main PC just has a boot NVMe drive.
 
Tartaros said:
Who exactly need more than gigabit lan at home?
Click to expand...


A single 8tb seagate 7200 rpm warrants a 5gbit connection.
Run your noisy drives elsewhere and ssd's in your computer.
 
10 gb for less than 100? I’m in. Screw the gamer stuff. As people said above. 10gb backbone home network is great. Just the switches need to come down now lol
 
That ASUS one uses the same Aquantia chip. It used to be the cheapest version (aside from the discount deal Aquantia had). But now the actual Aquantia NIC is cheaper.

Also, the 5Gbps verison is a bit cheaper. 5Gbps is still a decent upgrade (and backwards compatible).

Remember guys, you don't need a switch to if you want to just connect two computers together. You can absolutely use point-to-point with them. But ASUS has a cheaper 10G switch too: https://www.amazon.com/XG-U2008-Unm...id=1531331263&sr=1-1&keywords=ASUS+10G+switch


Tartaros said:
Who exactly need more than gigabit lan at home?
Click to expand...

Anyone that has more than one computer. 1Gbps is just 125 MB/s. Makes you realize how pathetic most of our internet service is (average being 25Mbps / 3.125MB/s). Even one decent newer HDD can beat that. I'm using all SSDs for my workstation, gaming rig and homelab.
 
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Dr_b_ said:
10Gb ethernet to a NAS. This enables the NAS to be used as a drive that otherwise would have required local storage, as its comparable in speed. Array of cheap hard drives is now as good as a local SATA SSD, with much more storage capacity. Main PC just has a boot NVMe drive.
Click to expand...

That is a great theory but I would have to see real world results to even care. not as if you can have a "shared NAS" of game files for more than 1 player because you wouldn't want more than 1 person writing to that share. Steam would go nuts over file integrity. again this is all in theory of "gaming" because they claim is this is "for gamers". maybe i am old school gamer but I want my game files to be local and accessed as fast as possible with little to no latency. And when I pick up to go to a LAN I don't want to carry a NAS.

I guess you could use it as a gamer that streams and stream to the NAS, that almost makes sense but again it seems like way less latency to just stream and then drop the file on the NAS after the stream is over, one added step I know but oh well not really a good enough case imo.
 
Slizzo said:
If you want to speed up your internet a little, run Steve Gibson's DNS Benchmark tool and take the top rated DNS servers on it as your primary and secondary (and put those into your router).

If you want pretty speedy, and pre-filtered websites (websites scanned as malicious and blocked on the DNS end) use Quad 9 (9.9.9.9 - https://www.quad9.com/)
Click to expand...

Cool, thanks. I was already on 1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1, but I ran those benchmarks and it validated that it was the fastest DNS servers.

Gasaraki said:
This is great. Trying to put in a 10GbE network at home. Now I need some cheaper 10GbE switches.
Click to expand...

I do too. For practical cost and connectivity, this is about as cheap as you can get:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075Q5C3Z...colid=2NDLCM3MIHHI6&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it&th=1
 
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If they really want to bring 10gbe to the masses (or gamers) then they should focus their efforts on affordable 10gbe switches. Thats the real barrier to entry, not the cost of the nics. This is why i continue to use sfp+ networking.
 
Said earlier, but I believe deserves repeating; today's 10Gb isn't quite like the costly, rigid, out-of-reach enterprise 10Gb of the last decade. The newest protocols are more a family of speeds: 100Mb, 1Gb, 2.5Gb, 5Gb, and 10Gb;

Do 10Gb switches seem needless? Well how about a switch that is 8 x 1Gb + 4 x 2.5Gb? Or how about a switch that is 10 x 5Gb? There are some options now, with many on the way.

In other words, we're not going to find 10Gb switches for cheaper any time soon -- we are going to find more mixed-speed options in the future.
 
Could you build an mITX NAS, use pcie bifurcation and run 4 of these NICs? Powerful enough CPU and you have a NAS/Managed switch in one.
 
Nephilim666 said:
Could you build an mITX NAS, use pcie bifurcation and run 4 of these NICs? Powerful enough CPU and you have a NAS/Managed switch in one.
Click to expand...

Maybe? From what I could grasp on a quick search, I think PCI-Express bifurcation needs to be supported by the motherboard, first of all. If the motherboard doesn't support it, it won't work at all, regardless of what you do or use. And it seems like only a few high-end motherboards may support it, going from fully supported out of the box to only supported if the manufacturer gives you specially designed firmware which may or may not be available to the public.

Besides that, current AMD and Intel platforms should give you enough PCIE lanes to do it...
 
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