NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-5 MCX516A-CDAT

The NVIDIA Mellanox MCX516A-CDAT is a dual-port 100 Gigabit Ethernet network adapter from the ConnectX-5 Ex EN family, built on the MT28808A0-FCCF-EV controller and interfacing to the host over a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot. The PCIe 4.0 host connection doubles available host bandwidth compared to standard ConnectX-5 PCIe 3.0 cards, letting the two QSFP28 ports sustain close to full line rate simultaneously — a key advantage for bandwidth-hungry NVMe-oF storage targets and dense virtualized hosts. With hardware-offloaded RoCE v2 RDMA, the card delivers low-latency, low-CPU-overhead data movement for cloud, storage, and HPC workloads. The MCX516A-CDAT is also shipped under OEM part numbers 01FT742 and 01FT740 for IBM server platforms, reflecting its broad qualification across enterprise server vendors. As a mainstream, widely deployed member of the ConnectX-5 generation, it remains a cost-effective, field-proven choice for 100GbE deployments requiring the extra host-side headroom of PCIe 4.0.