Intel PRO/1000 Pt Dual Port Server Adapter

I also built an ESXi-5 based server. A successful ESXi server just about requires Intel NICs (Network Interface Card), otherwise you're likely to be jumping through all sorts of esoteric ESXi installation hoops, which is not my cup of tea. My motherboard (an Intel BOXDG43GT LGA) has an embedded Intel NIC and I needed a couple more network ports. This dual-port NIC is cost-effective, and ESXi recognized it immediately and transparently. I didn't have to do anything except plug the card in and turn the machine back on, yielding a total of three NIC ports instead of just the one.In my opinion, Intel NICs are the best NICs on the market, being robust, fast, reliable, and they can handle heavy loads and large file-transfers (> 4GB) without getting stuck/hung; something that many other brands have trouble with. If you don't have an Intel NIC, try it yourself - move a 10GB file across your LAN and see if it doesn't hang or greatly slow-down. If you have another brand of NIC, you may be disappointed by the results. For this reason alone, I highly recommend Intel NICs, whether it's this particular card, or some other NIC by Intel. In fact, when I buy motherboards, I always try to find one where the embedded NIC is by Intel, regardless of ESXi or not.

This card is awesome. I installed it into my pfSense router and it was recognized right away without installing any special drivers. The performance is rock solid and I couldn't ask for a better card. The seller I purchased from was AMTECH. They were great and very fast shipping this card to my door. This card ships with the standard height bracket and I needed the low profile version for my rack mount case. I contacted AMTECH and asked about the low profile bracket and they replied back later in the day and told me they'd send me the low profile bracket at not extra cost. That was really cool of them and saved me the trouble of having to research and find just the low profile bracket elsewhere. At 42 dollars this card is a steal. I see it retailing on other sites for a lot more. I'll be buying more of these cards to install in my other machines and run nic teaming later.Great card! Great Price! and Great service from AMTECH.

This was installed on a Windows Server 2012 R2 machine. The installation went OK, but it caused a boot agent failure warning during the computer start-up. The computer would eventually boot up, but this was not an ideal condition. Obviously, the driver and firmware were too old.Thanks to the information provided by another reviewer Blair Fritz, I manually installed the latest Intel driver for i350-T2 (which is listed as incompatible, but you go ahead and do it anyway), and the problem was fixed. But that was a lot of trouble. Had I known Blair's information beforehand, it could have taken less than 15 min. But in reality it took me hours, because I had no idea what was going on in the beginning. From discovering the problem, diagnosing, searching and discovering a solution, to finally fixing the problem, it was a lot of work. To me, it kind of defeated the savings on this cheap card.But that was on a Windows server. It is likely that you might not have the same problem on a desktop environment. (But why would one need a dual port card on a desktop?)If you are prepared for what you're getting, and know exactly what you're going to do, this is a great deal. Otherwise, stick with the more expensive and supported Intel version.

I have a specific need - my system has a single gigabit port and an SSD drive. I do audio recording, and, as the nature of audio recording (lots of writes) and SSD's main weakness being that it can't handle TONS of writes before they eventually burn out, and, sometimes they have catastrophic losses....well, I have a Synology DiskStation, and, it does iSCSI.Well, if you try and pull off standard networking and iSCSI the result is that something has to give. I was having issues with either the files sharing from the diskstation dropping, or the iSCSI drive dropping. I was able to work around it by using the Realtek diagnostic software, which allows one to create virtual network cards, and assigning vlans to the virtual cards/switch, but that's just...fake.This does is just what the doctor ordered. Two gigabit ports. One for standard network, one for iSCSI, and it seems to perform even better than the Realtek NIC. So, at least with this system, I've disabled the realtek NIC.I have an identical system that I use as a home-server, and, when I need to, I shift both of those systems into a 2node cluster. Previously, I did it with the realtek diagnostic driver creating a heartbeat, live migration, iscsi, and data networks all to create a hyper-v cluster - it'll be interesting when I need to do this again to see how it goes as I could omit the live-migration network...Anyway...works great.