With 802.11ac and WLAN standards getting faster by the day, wired Ethernet is going the way of the dinosaur, at least in case of home (domestic) markets. ASUS is betting against this trend, and believes that if marketed properly, there’s scope for 10 Gbps Ethernet (802.3ae-2002) to dominate domestic markets such as high-end gaming networks and home-studios. To this effect, the company launched two new products styled for the home – the XG-U2008 switch, and the ROG-10G add-on 10 Gbps Ethernet card included with certain ROG motherboards, which could probably also be sold separately.
The XG-U2008 is an unmanaged or plug-n-play 10-port switch with two 10 GbE ports, and eight 1 GbE ports. In full-duplex mode, this works out to 20 Gbps per 10 GbE port; and 2 Gbps per 1 GbE port. This should let you plug-in NAS servers with 10 GbE to one of the ports, your desktop to the other, and a WLAN router or other desktops to the 1 GbE ports. The ROG-10G card, on the other hand, sits across a PCI-Express gen 2.0 x4 host interface, and features a Tehuti Networks TN9710-class single-port 10 GbE controller. It comes included with the Maximus VIII Extreme/Assembly motherboard for now, although one can’t discount the possibility of ASUS selling it separately.
