I've yet to really beat on it but it's quiet for its size with a typical laptop like fan sound under load. The dual port 10Gb intel nic doesn't seem to add much

I've yet to really beat on it but it's quiet for its size with a typical laptop like fan sound under load. The dual port 10Gb intel nic doesn't seem to add much heat though I purposefully went with an SFP card in order to use cooler running fiber SFP's (A copper SFP runs burning hot vs a warm fiber SFP). A brand new dual port 10Gb SFP card costs like $100 USD. Used is far less. I also wound up realizing that when it comes to 10Gb, copper can be more costly than fiber and uses more power per port. So I only buy SFP+ gear so I can use one of many interfaces: copper, fiber, DAC, etc. Fiber and DAC cables are cheaper and use less power. I have a ~$250 USD 8 port Mikrotik 10Gb SFP+ switch and also bought a few cheap 10Gb mellanox SFP cards for my server, desktop and work bench PC for like $30 each off ebay (I use them in Linux and FreeBSD.)