25GbE NIC Card for Mellanox MCX4121A-ACAT, PCIe 3.0 x8 25Gb Ethernet NIC with Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx Chipset, Dual SFP28 Network Card Support RDMA

Used two of these to connect between my NAS and desktop PC. Both machines are running on Windows and neither had an issue working as soon as the network card was installed. My devices are relatively close so I am currently using DAC cables.In testing a file share in between my NVMe drive on the NAS and local PC I was able to get a transfer speed of 2.24GB/s, around 2,240 MB/s or ~19Gbps without any network adjustment or tuning whatsoever. The NVMe drives should be a bit faster than that but this was good enough for me, until I get more remote NVMe storage only a fraction of my data is available at these speeds anyways.HardwareIDs below as reported from device managerPCI\VEN_15B3&DEV_1015&SUBSYS_006915B3&REV_00PCI\VEN_15B3&DEV_1015&SUBSYS_006915B3PCI\VEN_15B3&DEV_1015&CC_020000PCI\VEN_15B3&DEV_1015&CC_0200

Installed and worked perfect.

One of the few 10GB variations that works natively in Proxmox. I bought 3 of these.

This review is for the 25GbE NIC Card for Mellanox MCX4121A-ACAT, PCIe 3.0 x8 25Gb Ethernet NIC with Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx Chipset, Dual SFP28 Network Card Support RDMA.I ordered this card for my home lab network, which runs on Ubuntu 24.04. I would say that this card is non-trivial to install but not super difficult; you just have to download the drivers. The card is a rebranded card under the name Vogzone. Nvidia now owns Mellanox, so that’s where you will go to get drivers.To save time, search for NVIDIA OFED or ConnectX-4-lx-ethernet to find the drivers and manual. Follow the instructions in the manual, and you’ll be ready to roll. The instructions from Nvidia cover installation for most of the major Linux distros and Windows and VMWare. If you are using Ubuntu, ensure your system first sees the card using the “sudo lspci -v | grep Mellanox” command. Download and install the drivers. The default network manager should pick it up automatically and two ethernet ports should show up in the list of devices. If it doesn’t, or if you are using netplan, like I am. Issue the “sudo ibdev2netdev” command to find the interface names and add them to the netplan yaml file. I can’t speak for other systems or Windows, so your experience may differ. The installation isn’t terrible, but it may be difficult for the uninitiated.I didn’t get a chance to test performance since I’m connected to a 1Gig port, but the card supports up to 25Gb SFPs. I put a couple of off-brand 1Gig and 10Gig SPFs in the card, and it had no issues seeing them.Regarding value, it’s about on point with other off-brand labels for this card, but it has much better value than most known brands. I’ve never heard of Vogzone, so if cybersecurity, supply chain, and country of origin are of concern, then that is something to consider with this card.

My first purchase was made on Aug 2024, it was a decent product with a nondescript package. The confusion comes when I was updating the firmware. The site claims the model to be MCX4121A-ACAT but I found it was detected as MCX4121A-ACUT, U for UEFI. This card has worked fine although I could not figure out how iscsi wouldn't work in BIOS. It works fine in windows but that is a different story. The speed in iperf3 comes at around 19.2-23.4 Gbps.I purchased the second time just recently in Mar 2025 and found that packaging and construction have become all different. Now it is clearly labelled as an ACAT model while still claiming UEFI functionality which caused further confusion. I ended up returning the second item without testing and switched to something different.

Currently running this with both ports 10 gig and in a Lag configuration.This being used in a server, I was able to plug and play without installing any specialty software on a linux based system.Love that it has the adapter to allow me to use it in the smaller slots, that I took advantage to allow me to save the other spots for GPU's.I would love to run in 25 gig ability but currently the switch is only 10 gig. I will say for a house server I don't think I would ever need the speed that this provides, but glad I have the ability if the future needs.

The Vogzone 25GbE PCIe 3.0 x8 NIC Card for Mellanox, allows for the headroom to grow for the future. This card is perfect for the setup I'm building, and the sustained transfer speeds are a welcome improvement from what I've had before. The Vogzone 25GbE PCIe 3.0 x8 NIC Card for Mellanox is a 5-star product that I highly recommend for those with a need for speed.

Works great to give my server 10gbps capability. Time Will tell if it is reliable