[monster_truck]

Absolutely not. It's another layer of throughput/compatability bingo on top of the already often quite annoying SFP bingo.

If you are unfamiliar, the reality of the situation is quite bad. Slight hardware revisions of adapters/switches, which if you are lucky can be differentiated by manufacture date or serial number sequence, will not recognize known good modules, and if they do you then have to actually test if they can establish link, then let them burn for 24+ hours to see if they can maintain it without dropping (often, because of forward error correction, you will not start to see flapping until enough correctable errors have accumulated and the buffer overflows). Then there are firmware updates where this process must then be repeated.

You would think with how expensive all of this shit is you would simply be able to buy the officially listed as compatible components but my experience with them has been that a shotgun approach is best for your sanity and deadlines, buying sample kits of each module and trying them all, and then once you find the ones that play nice, buying as many of them as is reasonable and testing all of them.

If I had a dollar every time two modules from the same brand, that came in the same box, from the same production run, did not work with one another, I would be able to test your theory for free. Network Engineering is Fun

[simoncion]

Perhaps the situation with 25gbit modules is way worse than 10gbit, but I have twelve 10gbit 10GTek fiber modules and haven't had a problem with them. Though, perhaps this would be a lottery that I'd inevitably lose if I were populating a great many TOR switches and associated server NICs?

It also sounds like you're not saying that OP cannot "...just put a real PCIe NIC in an eGPU enclosure with a fan", but rather that regardless of where that NIC is situated, it's your experience that SFP quality is poor. Do I correctly understand what you're saying?

Edit: FWIW, I've had no problems with the ~two foot PCI-E riser cable that connects my graphics card to my motherboard. [0] I expect this OCuLink thing [1] will work fine, too.

[0] Taking up several PCI-E slots just for a damn graphics card is really dumb. IMO, mid-grade and better cases should have off-mobo mount points for oversized devices and offer riser cables to connect said devices to the installed motherboard.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express#OCULINK>