X540T2 Dual 10GbE RJ45 Ports Converged Ethernet Adapter for Servers and Desktop PCs, Intel X540AT2 10GbE Converged Ethernet Controller, 2X 10GbE RJ45, for Virtualization, Storage and Gaming (X540T2)

My realtek based 1Gbps adapter keeled over in my home linux routing machine so I needed something pretty quick to get our network back up and running before my kiddos revolted and started plotting my demise. It had been a while since I'd had to buy a stand alone NIC so I went looking for what would probably work out of the box in linux. I read good things about this chipset and this was one of the more affordable NICs available featuring the chipset. It's been in service a little over 3 weeks now with some heavier than normal usage (I'm retrieving some collections from The Internet Archive) and it's working fantastically. No problem with bandying about 1Gbps across my home network.

I have bought two of these cards. I'm currently using it in 1GB Ethernet mode due to eventually upgrading to 10GB networking. Once you download the driver's from Intel for X520-T2. It worked perfectly. The price is also good for when I bought it. I would highly suggest this.

bought the LinksTek X540-T2 Dual 10GbE RJ45 card for my Proxmox/Linux server. Unfortunately, it is completely unusable. The system detects the card as an Intel X540-AT2, not as a LinksTek product. See attached screenshot (lspci -nn | grep -i ethernet). The driver (ixgbe) fails to load due to firmware/EEPROM errors (“EEPROM Checksum Is Not Valid,” “Adapter removed, error -5”). corrupted EEPROM/firmware. No usable interfaces ever appear (ip -br link show only lists my onboard NICs). Even after BIOS adjustments, rescans, and driver reloads, the card cannot initialize. This suggests the card has faulty firmware or is a rebranded/resold unit that doesn’t function properly. I’ve attached screenshots of the PCI output and driver errors as proof. Returning for a refund.

Quick drop in for improved LAN speed on a PC / server.

Only lasted eight months, but it was cheap

I just turned off my pc, put it in an open slot, turned it back on and it worked! No drivers to install on windows 11. Let’s see how long it lasts ….

I have done quite a bit of testing of boards based on the Intel 2.5GbE chipset over the last few months and I am using several of them in an OpnSense based router/firewall. Generally speaking, I have had very good luck with them and no issues. Based on a quick examination of this specific board, I verified that it is the SLMNG 3rd revision of the Intel 225V chipset, which is the one that actually works (Rev 1 and Rev 2 had a lot of problems). Doing a bit of testing, I put this board into my bench PC running Windows 11 and it was immediately recognized and configured. Once connected to my Netgear switch (GS110MX), it immediately detected it, and synced up at 2.5Gb with no problems. Running a quick LAN speedtest to back my main PC, I was able to get sustained throughputs of around 2300Mb/s, which is about what I would expect with typical overhead. Another good thing about the Intel chipset, which was obvious during my testing, especially as compared to a Realtek 8125B based board, is that it uses about half as much CPU overhead as the Realtek chips do. Essentially, this card worked well and performed pretty much identically to every other Intel 225V R3 based board I have tested. That was the good news, now for the bad. While I did not have any problems during my testing, this board runs way hotter than I like, which has been a common theme among all the 225V boards I have seen that don't include a heatsink. After about 30 minutes of sustained transfers, the chip itself was hitting surface temps of around 89C, which is HOT. This is actually hotter than the max temperature I have gotten on most other I225V boards I have tested, which is likely due to this board appearing to have less of a ground plane exposed on the rear of the board to serve with heat dissipation. Basically, any I225V board really needs a heatsink, especially if it is going to be under heavy usage or in a constrained case without much airflow. And, if you look at the board, it even includes the mounting holes that typically would be used for one. So, it was a conscious decision on the board manufacturers part to not include one. Overall though, while it does run hot, it seems to work well and I had no problems due to the heat, but it still gives me pause with regards to long term reliability. Unless I am able to locate some push pin mount heatsinks that are designed to fit this specific board layout, I likely will do what I have done on a couple of my other boards and just mount a Raspberry Pi 4 heatsink on it using thermal epoxy. In any case, this board performs well and the price is quite reasonable, just be aware it runs hot and I would be a lot happier if it came with a heatsink on it.

Plug and play operation. both interfaces are recognized and working

This card just arrived in the mail, and I'm immediately returning it. I installed the card and attempted to boot and my PC won't even POST, CPU fan spins for a second then goes dead - installed my old card again and PC works fine... Was attempting to install with pfsense which already has the ixgbe driver installed, so no reason for my PC not to boot after simply installing the card in the motherboard.

Card was recognized but not working. After some digging I found in dmesg | grep lxbge that there was a firmware fault during initialization. I just gave up and bought a similar intel 10G card instead of trying to flash firmware. The other card I bought went in and worked perfectly right away. I would look else ware for a linux server application.