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Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio

Facing exorbitant costs for 25Gbps Ethernet on his Mac Studio, an intrepid user meticulously documents his journey to create a custom solution using a repurposed server NIC. This deep dive into overcoming thermal challenges with 3D printing and careful wiring resonates with the HN crowd's appreciation for technical problem-solving. It's a testament to the pursuit of performance and efficiency, even when the practical gains are marginal but the technical journey is fascinating.

20
Score
4
Comments
#4
Highest Rank
4h
on Front Page
First Seen
Jul 31, 5:00 PM
Last Seen
Jul 31, 8:00 PM
Rank Over Time
5477

The Lowdown

The author chronicles their technical endeavor to upgrade a Mac Studio's network connectivity from 10 Gigabit Ethernet to 25 Gigabit Ethernet, driven by a desire for more speed than the built-in option provided. Frustrated by the prohibitive cost of commercial Thunderbolt-compatible 25GbE adapters, they sought a more economical, DIY approach.

  • Discovered an inexpensive 25G Thunderbolt adapter kit, originally priced at $160, which utilized a server-grade OCP 2 NIC with a Thunderbolt 3 adapter board.
  • Encountered two primary issues during initial testing: an outdated iperf3 version on the NAS limiting bandwidth, and severe overheating of the passively-cooled NIC enclosure.
  • Resolved the iperf3 issue by compiling the latest version, pushing performance to 20 Gbps, near the Thunderbolt 3 chipset's bidirectional limit.
  • Addressed the critical overheating by designing and 3D printing a custom fan duct for a quiet Noctua 80mm fan, which was powered by soldering directly to the adapter PCB.
  • Achieved stable operating temperatures below 36°C with the active cooling solution.
  • Final performance tests showed 20-25 Gbps, translating to 1.4 GB/sec read and 1 GB/sec write for Samba file transfers, a modest improvement over 10GbE.

While the performance upgrade proved only marginally better than the existing 10GbE and involved significant effort and cost, the author reflects on the value of the technical journey and the resulting detailed blog post. This project exemplifies a common enthusiast's drive to push hardware limits, even if the practical benefits are sometimes overshadowed by the joy of the challenge itself.