Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio
6 hours ago
- The author upgraded from built-in 10GbE to 25GbE on their Mac Studio using a budget Thunderbolt adapter with an OCP 2 NIC, inspired by a blog post.
- Initial iperf3 tests were limited to 15 Gbps due to an outdated version and overheating of the passively cooled NIC enclosure.
- The overheating issue was solved by designing a fan duct, adding a Noctua 80mm fan, and splicing power from the adapter PCB, achieving stable temperatures below 36°C.
- Real-world file transfer speeds reached about 1.4 GB/s read and 1 GB/s write over Samba, marginally better than the built-in 10GbE.
- The project required significant effort (fiber pull, custom cooling, component cost ~$200) for only modest performance gains, limited by Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth and NAS CPU performance.