You can get a brand new Mellanox card for $210 from their website, shell out $215 and you can get 25G ethernet. It's not really that much to pay once you consid

You can get a brand new Mellanox card for $210 from their website, shell out $215 and you can get 25G ethernet. It's not really that much to pay once you consider it an expensive component (like a NVMe drive) rather than something that's virtually free (like a 8GB flash drive). The sad truth is that a 10G NIC is something that requires a reasonable amount of modern silicon to produce, so it's not going to be cheap (yes they were producing them back in the 130nm era but that was an act of insanity).