DollaTek M.2 A+E 2.5Gb Network Adapter RTL8125BG Chip M2 KEY A/E to RJ45 COM Port 2.5G/1000/100Mbps Gigabit Ethernet LAN Network Card for Desktop, PC, Office Computer

Having just brought a new UDR7 Router with 2.5gb Lan ports its was time to upgrade the proxmox device to be able to utilise 2.5G Lan instead of good ole 1G. As this is hosted on a Dell Micro PC the only option was this or USB dongle which im not a fan of.I removed the unused Wifi card and plugged this in, ran the cable over the 2.5 inch ssd popped out the extra blanking port on the device and then fixed the network port with a few screws. Install took less than 2 minutes.Booted the device into the BIOS, under Wifi unticked the bluetooth option and then rebooted.Using lspci proxmox correctly displayed the adapter and as i was not using the 1G port i knew i had to change the network configuration file so the bridge pointed to this new Lan. Once saved and rebooted proxmox was live on the network again no updates requiredSo very impressed with how easy it was to get this card installed and up and running.

I bought these thinking they were cheap enough to write off if they didn't work, how wrong I was. Fitted in to a couple of Dell 7010 2024 MFF PCs. Installation took only a couple of minutes. Make sure you download the latest drivers from the Realtek website for best performance. It's also worth noting that if you are fitting this in to a press out on the back of a MFF PC you will need suitable screws for fixing, this should be a problem however if you are replacing an existing accessory that is screwed in. I have 2gbps broadband and I was receiving speeds in excess of this via these ethernet adapters (my broadband provider is generous!). I wouldn't hesitate to recommend, don't bother buying the higher priced options on here as I don't see what they could possibly do that these don't.

Added this to a Dell 5070 mini PC and it worked straight away. The card uses a Realtek 8125b chip which allows for speeds up to 2.5gbps. Windows 11 picked up the NIC without any additional drivers. PFSense 2.7 did require adding the latest Realtek drivers to the OS (FreeBSD) before the NIC would pick up.

No drivers needed, easily available in Windows and Linux

This runs on my Proxmox server on a Dell Optiplex 3050 Micro. The second LAN on this machine opens up many possibilities, such as running Opnsense, Pfsense, and more.