What to look for when buying 2.5 Gbit/s PCI-based network card?

[King Mustard]

The cheapest ones according to skinflint.co.uk are currently:

• £26 Syba SD-PEX24065 (Realtek RTL8125)
• £28 Icy Box IB-LAN300-PCI (Realtek RTL8125B)
• £28 Akasa AK-PCCE25-01 (Realtek RTL8125)
• £30 Trendnet TEG-25GECTX (Realtek RTL8125)
• £35 QNAP QXG-2G1T-I225 (Intel I225-LM)
• £35 DeLOCK 89564 (Realtek RTL8125)
• £49 StarTech ST2GPEX (Realtek RTL8125)

For example, I presume all the RTL8125 cards will be the same, so would go for the cheapest? - or is there more to look for than just the chipset?

[AGTDenton]

I can't speak for the Realtek chip.

But I can say, I would avoid the I225-LM with first hand experience, it seems based on the following post that the i255# chip is flawed in it's default configurations. Considering that chip is put into high end expensive motherboards but out of the box you don't have full performance enabled and tweaking is required with mixed results. I'm acting with caution on whether the tweak that worked for me isn't going to have a knock-on effect else where in time.

https://community.intel.com/t5/Ether...s/td-p/1188301