I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backups at around 1 GB/sec.

But... I want more . I upgraded my rack and my NAS to 25 GbE a couple years ago, and wanted to upgrade my main workstation, too.

I looked up 25G networking options for the Mac, and they're all crazy expensive:

Sonnet's Twin25G Adapter is $999

Atto's ThunderLink is $1,099

Raiden Digit's LightOne 25GbE Docking Station is $399 (which honestly, isn't bad)

The problem is Macs all require Thunderbolt adapters; you can't just plug an inexpensive(ish) PCIe card into a Mac (RIP Mac Pro).

I stopped looking until I saw this blog post . Christian Kohlschütter found a cheap 25G Thunderbolt adapter that uses a server-pulled OCP 2 NIC with a little Thunderbolt 3 adapter board. And it works on any computer with Thunderbolt.

Back in January, it was only $160, which was insta-buy territory for me.…