Any experience with Winyao Broadcom 5715 ?

nicolaj

I'm very close to buying a Winyao Broadcom 5715 from here http://www.ebay.com/itm/Winyao-Broadcom-5715-Dual-Port-Gigabit-PCIe-NIC-Ethernet-Network-Card-Adapter-/132018667500

The main reason being it's a pcie x1 card, which is the port i have available. All the other nics are pcie x4 which is a different port. But i'm wondering if any of you guys have any experience with these cards?

Or mod a pcie x4 card and remove 14 pins so it fits in a x1 port and in theory it should then run x1. But i don't know if that is actually legit.
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/dual-nics-on-pcie-x1-slot-recommendation.471/

Any PCIe card should work in x1. Keep in mind that x1 has a limited amount of bandwidth and may not be cable to saturate the network ports. Other than that, check for driver support on the FreeBSD site.

nicolaj

I found out that cutting the back 14 pins of a x4 card to make it x1 does work. It should be noted it is a pcie 2 x1 port. So 5gbit and it's dual nic, so it should be fine bandwidth wise.

Don't cut the card! Just open up the back bit of the slot. Unless your motherboard has a lot of stuff in the way at the end of the slot, cutting the card is way to destructive.

Also, there are riser and adapter cards that may very well allow you to not destroy either and just use them as-is (but still in x1 mode).

nicolaj

I actually did cut the card. Used a small version of a band saw for finer cuts, worked like a charm. Opening up the back of the slot actually seemed more difficult to do, it's rather thick and cutting the board was just a lot easier.
Watched a 2 year old video from linus where he tryed this and almost ruined one of the pins in the sokkel. Cutting seemed better.

w0w

If somebody wants to buy Winyao PCI-E x1 then I suggest WYI350T model, it's Intel I350 chipset based card with igb driver.
I have two of them working about year without any problem.

I usually get those random I2xx and I3xx dual/quad cards from amazon or eBay, so far only one of them turned out to be a bad knockoff.

whosmatt

@nicolaj:

I'm very close to buying a Winyao Broadcom 5715 from here http://www.ebay.com/itm/Winyao-Broadcom-5715-Dual-Port-Gigabit-PCIe-NIC-Ethernet-Network-Card-Adapter-/132018667500

The main reason being it's a pcie x1 card, which is the port i have available. All the other nics are pcie x4 which is a different port. But i'm wondering if any of you guys have any experience with these cards?

Or mod a pcie x4 card and remove 14 pins so it fits in a x1 port and in theory it should then run x1. But i don't know if that is actually legit.
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/dual-nics-on-pcie-x1-slot-recommendation.471/

I'm not familiar with the 5715, and it's not listed specifically with the bce or bge drivers in FreeBSD as far as I can see.

That said, if someone can confirm that one of these two drivers supports it then I suspect it would be fine. I have one remaining hardware pfSense implementation (as opposed to the other 6 or so, which are all on ESXi) and it uses the bce driver and has been rock solid.