Today we have a fun one in our NIC review series. We are going to take a look at the NVIDIA ConnectX-7 OCP NIC 3.0 form factor card. This is a PCIe Ge

NVIDIA ConnectX-7 OCP NIC 3.0 Review 2-port 200GbE and NDR200 IB

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2024-05-12 04:30:04

Today we have a fun one in our NIC review series. We are going to take a look at the NVIDIA ConnectX-7 OCP NIC 3.0 form factor card. This is a PCIe Gen5 x16 card so it can sustain two ports of 200GbE or NDR200 InfiniBand. Moreover, instead of being a standard PCIe card size, this fits into an OCP NIC 3.0 form factor that most server vendors use. Let us get to the hardware.

As a quick note, we have been asking NVIDIA to get us cards for some time, and they finally arrived so we could do this piece. Thank you to the NVIDIA folks for making this happen.

Here are perhaps the big features of the Connect-X 7, the dual QSFP112 ports for up to 200Gbps networking. Since the CX753436M is a VPI card, these can carry either Ethernet or NDR200 InfiniBand traffic.

Our cards are the pull-tab designs, which is our favorite OCP NIC 3.0 format. Cloud providers tend to favor this format since it allows for easy replacement from the aisle without having to open the chassis. Many large legacy server vendors that charge premiums for service contracts will have different OCP NIC 3.0 locking mechanisms and faceplates for their cards.