I would love for me to tell you that you were joking, but this sounds just crazy enough to be probably true. A cursory search confirms that the NIC seems to hav

I would love for me to tell you that you were joking, but this sounds just crazy enough to be probably true. A cursory search confirms that the NIC seems to have a rather active role in DASH implementations: "To support out-of-band management, a client system typically requires a Network Controller that supports out-of-band management tasks, such as the Broadcom 5761." https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/out-of-band-client-management-overview.pdf https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/out-of-band-clien... (out-of-band management is the "it works while the machine is supposedly off" stuff) But it also needs to talk to the system BIOS / UEFI, so I guess something else needs to be running as well? "DASH functionality requires a communication channel between the hardware platform features, system BIOS, and the Broadcom NetXtreme™ Gigabit Ethernet Controller." (http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01944865 http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01944865). I mean, the PCIe interface is useless if the other end is actually off (and not just supposedly off).