When is consumer 10GbE going to happen?

I notice the new Asus AMD boards are pairing a 2.5g alongside a 10g port. Good to see but given my recent experience, good luck!
I seriously doubt anyone here is going to question your decision to upgrade from an FX5950 to a 1070.

 

not in the consumer grade market, no. anyone who wants and is actually prepared to pay for it isn't in the consumer market.

 

How on earth do they cope?
Sheiit, even spinning rust left gigabit ethernet behind nearly a decade ago.
Guess it's like hunting men for sport, having never experienced it the poor bastards don't know what they're missing.

 

Granted it isn't mainstream, but definitely in the consumer market. Plenty of home NAS running > 10G and bottlenecked by workstation connections. Absolute pain even for a hobbyist photographer or videographer living with a 1G connection to storage.

Media sizes have grown substantially - more megapixels, higher res video, HDDs have grown to store it, CPUs/GPUs have grown to process them, and ethernet is stuck in time. Bloody wifi will overtake it!

 

Interestingly broad statement.

Both the ASUS and MSI high-end motherboards have 2.5Gb & 10Gb ethernet as standard now and no 1Gb at all. There might be some more turn up at the upcoming ASUS event - https://www.asus.com/event/wow-the-world/

Edit: I forgot to add that there is even Thunderbolt 4 on an AMD based motherboard - so anything is possible!!

 

So I went to listen to how loud the CRS317 + Noctua fan replacement mod was in this video but I couldn't hear it because of the F#$%^ fan noise from the standard CRS317 fans!

This is from a switch that is already in a climate controlled environment and is passively cooled.

Before I get told off for replacing fans that don't have the same cfm rating, this isn't a normal rack router/switch with 40mm Deltas blowing through a heatsinks fin array, it's a passive switch! It is basically a bigger CRS309, so much so it uses the exact same passive heatsink that the CRS309 uses.
Anyway, cue the video.


Then there is the price of the 40mm NF-A4x20 PWM fan, followed up by the big canvas slam, Umart is out of stock
https://www.umart.com.au/Noctua-40mm-NF-A4x20-PWM-5000RPM-Fan_47107G.html

So after a bit of shopping around frustrated, I thought I would have a look and see what was what with the actual unit I had in my hands (there could have been a revision), so I popped the top.

The first thing I noticed was that I didn't have 2 x normal 1U PSUs, I had this thing below. I mean, yeah a different power feed as a redundancy is normal but not to the same PSU.


Moving on you can see what the twin 5000 rpm fans are cooling, not much.


So I thought it wasn't too hard to hard to swap in the low-power links and close it up to see if it affected the temps.


This is the STD setup health.


This is the health with the Noctua Low Power Harness + Mikrotik fans.


So there is nothing contraindicated there from dropping the fan speed, but was it any quieter? Nup - ergo I buy two new Noctua fans; or I could disconnect the STD fans and leave the top off.

Edit: Best price for the Noctua NF-A4x20 PWM was Newegg $49.48aud for 2 fans delivered.

 

my point is those needs are not those of the average consumer. they're specialised and well into the commercial realm.

 

What is the "average consumer"? You could say the average consumer doesn't even need gigabit then, or internet beyond 10Mb, or a dedicated GPU. The "average consumer" probably doesn't even own a desktop PC these days.

The products or the needs? The products I agree which is the failure. The needs, well "need" is an interesting term.

In my experience it always seems to be people with a networking/telco background that think 10G to workstations is complete overkill. Just because you have no need does not make that universal.

 

Absolutely have to agree here.

I'm hearing far too often these days about "average consumers". In a market of BILLIONS, there is no such thing.

The US Airforce learned a hard lesson about using "average" to do things back in the 1940s, making cockpits for "the average pilot" that ended up fitting exactly zero pilots:
https://www.thestar.com/news/insigh...ir-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html

Every time I have a discussion about pitiful Internet in this country, I get lectured ad nauseam about "average users", despite hearing endlessly on the daily from a wide variety of users that what we have just isn't good enough.

We need to stop arguing for the average. In consumer computing, the use case for home users is enormous. You've got all sorts - gamers, datahoarders, amateur data scientists, cryptominers, photographers, videographers, etc, etc. You've also got Facebook mums on iPhones and grandparents who just want an iPad to talk to their grandkids. You've got OCAU's Mac forum full of "Pro" users doing spreadsheets on their Gucci computers at 5K resolution. You've got all sorts of people doing all sorts of things.

Trying to argue that something doesn't have a market because "average" people don't want it is silly. There exist countless non-majority markets across all demographics, interests and industries, and at no time is there just one offering to satisfy the majority, with everyone else left out in the cold.

Gamers are a minority. Hardware enthusiasts are a minority. Hell, almost everyone on OCAU is a minority user of some sort, and definitely not the average. Yet here we all are, playing with consumer electronics made just for us.

Please, let's all stop talking about "average".

 

As a fellow hobbyist photographer I totally agree, trying to edit direct off my NAS is what started me on my journey to having 10G @ home. I now have a bunch of MMOF runs in my house to our desktops, works really well.

With more and more people relying on cloud storage with their iCloud, Onedrive, and/or Dropbox account along with subscription TV services and especially if they also work from home, the 'average' 40/20 NBN connection is no longer cutting the mustard. Especially with multiple VC sessions going.

 

I do agree, I would like to see the numbers of revenue per user group because there are a few computer part manufacturers that have whole product series designed for gamers/enthusiasts, the ASUS ROG range springs to mind. Sure maybe not the average product but she's a very fat pie to have your finger in!

 

This is my whole point. In a market of billions, you can have a customer count of millions, which is 0.1% of the total market, but still enough to make good money.

Just because something isn't >50% of a market doesn't mean there isn't a viable market, and doesn't mean there isn't profit to be made.

We've got NVME drives that can push gigabytes per second now that are home-user affordable. Similarly we've got USB and Thunderbolt ports that can move similar volumes of bits around appearing in budget machines. There's absolutely a need and a market for consumer network infrastructure that can keep up.

 

strange that a market that apparently could me making a profit supplying this theoretical market.... isn't.

so either they don't like making money, or the perceived demand isn't there. I know which I'm going with.

 

I'm very familiar with your opinion on the mediocrity that is Australian Internet.

 

as I am with yours. the difference being I have the numbers on the subject, so I know I'm right and not just speculating. as it the case here. the reality speaks more loudly than the postulation.

 

Cheap NVMe drives can now easily top 10g bandwidth. Top end units are pushing past 50g writes. USB is what - 20 gigs and Thunderbolt at 40 gigs?
Meanwhile in Caspian everyman consumer space: 1 measly gigabit network. Fuck, it's faster to sneakernet with a USB-SSD than use ethernet. Welcome to 1999.

Pop the EMI shield and there's two physically separate power supplies under there
With the massive great heat-pipe and sink for the CPU, I've assumed the fans are to pull a whisp of air in over the SFPs and stop them overheating - especially since the fans won't spin up for the CPU until it gets to 60 but the SFPs kick them in at 40.

There is a third option - marketing droids haven't realised yet so the little guys who can are making a killing?
Didn't Intel insist for damn near a decade that the "average consumer" only wanted/needed 4 cores and 8 threads? Hows that's going for them now, after their competition proved it wrong?

 

I'm well aware of that, but you can't just swap the failed PSU while the other one keeps the switch 'up'. Further, the cost is the dual PSU, not just one.

 

I doubt very much that big business has missed an opportunity to mass market something that people are willing to buy, regardless of perceived or actual need. also bearing in mind that one of the jobs of marketing droids is to convince you to buy something even when you may not need it.

the proportion of consumers who actually need gigabit is bugger all, let alone ten times that. yes, it might make a big video file transfer in 10 seconds instead of 2 minutes - unless you're doing it constantly, or dealing with really gargantuan file sizes, the addition minute and a half is just immaterial. most people who actually have to pay their own money for something won't pony up for something they don't need.

I know it's convention for everyone to think that they're "normal" but the reality is that anyone even discussing the subject has just proven they're not representative of the considerable majority of consumers in the market. what is being discussed here is essentially SMB gear. same reason why most people are running the router their ISP supplied, or one they got from JB Hifi, and not a Cisco. they just don't need more.

 

You don't even SSD's for this, an array of spinning rust can exceed 1Gb/s with a SOHO grade NAS.

 

I'm all too familiar with entities that take "no news as good news", rather than apathy from their customer base who have given up asking.

In fact, it's my whole job. I work as "contract shadow IT" to take a disillusioned workforce and help them get past their supposed "support" people who love to look at their empty ticket queue and treat that as a job well done.

It's not that your customers don't want better. It's that your customers do want better, but can't be bothered engaging you.