MCX416A-GCAT Mellanox ConnectX-4 50GbE CX416A Dual-Port PCIe NIC Card

Product Overview

The Mellanox ConnectX-4 EN (MCX416A-GCAT) is a high-performance, dual-port 50Gb/s Ethernet adapter card utilizing a PCIe 3.0 x16 host interface. Designed for enterprise data centers, high-performance computing (HPC), Web 2.0, cloud infrastructure, and large-scale storage platforms, it provides sub-microsecond latency, outstanding bandwidth capabilities, and hardware-based offloading engines to maximize CPU efficiency.

Key Technical Specifications

Parameter	Specifications
Brand	Mellanox (by NVIDIA)
Model / Part Number	MCX416A-GCAT
Product Line	ConnectX-4 EN
Data Transfer Rate	Up to 50 Gb/s per port
Port Count	Dual-Port
Connector Type	QSFP28 (Supports copper and optical cabling)
Host Interface (Bus)	PCI Express 3.0 x16 (SERDES @ 8.0 GT/s, backwards compatible with PCIe 2.0 & 1.1)
Form Factor	Low-Profile Adapter (Shipped with a tall/full-height bracket installed by default)
Physical Dimensions	2.71 in. x 5.6 in. (68.90 mm x 142.24 mm)

Advanced Feature Set

1. Protocols & Standards

• Ethernet Support: IEEE 802.3by (25Gb/s and 50Gb/s supporting all FEC modes), IEEE 802.3ae (10GbE), and IEEE 802.3ap based auto-negotiation.

• Link Aggregation: IEEE 802.3ad, 802.1AX.

• VLAN Tagging: IEEE 802.1Q, 802.1P VLAN tags and priority.

• Quality of Service (QoS): End-to-end congestion control and priority-based flow control.

2. CPU and Storage Offloads

• RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet): Low-latency, high-throughput remote direct memory access over standard Ethernet networks.

• Stateless Offload Engines: TCP/UDP/IP stateless offloads, LSO (Large Send Offload), LRO (Large Receive Offload), Receive Side Scaling (RSS), and Transmit Side Scaling (TSS).

• Storage Offloads: T10 DIF (Data Integrity Field) Signature Handover offload to reduce CPU cycles during storage sector verification.

• Overlay Networks: Hardware-based encapsulation/decapsulation offloads for NVGRE, VXLAN, and GENEVE traffic.

3. Virtualization & GPU Acceleration

• SR-IOV: Single Root I/O Virtualization allowing multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) to share the physical PCIe resource directly.

• Mellanox PeerDirect: Direct communication path between the NIC and GPU memory (GPUDirect) or other PCIe devices, bypassing host CPU and memory completely to eliminate latency bottlenecks.

Power, Environmental & Reliability Specs

• Operating Voltage: 12V, 3.3V

• Power Consumption (Dual-Port Passive Cable):

  • Typical Power: 9.9 W

  • Maximum Power: 12.5 W

• Supported Port Power budget: Up to 3.5 W maximum power available per QSFP28 port (for active optical/transceiver connections).

• Temperature Range:

  • Operational: 0°C to 55°C

  • Non-operational: -40°C to 70°C

• Operating Humidity: 10% to 85% relative humidity (non-condensing).

Operating System & Driver Compatibility

Supported across major enterprise operating systems and hypervisors:

• Linux: RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, etc.

• Windows: Windows Server (with WinOF-2 drivers)

• Virtualization: VMware ESXi, Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer)

• Other UNIX: FreeBSD, Oracle Solaris