NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-5 EN MCX516A-GCAT
Dual-Port 50GbE PCIe 3.0 Ethernet Adapter
Host Interface
PCIe 3.0 x16
Port Count
2-port
Port Speed & Connector Type
50G QSFP28
Form Factor
Standard PCIe card
Network Protocol / RDMA
Ethernet, RoCE v2
Product Description
The NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-5 EN MCX516A-GCAT is a dual-port 50 Gigabit Ethernet adapter in a standard PCIe card form factor, connecting through a PCIe 3.0 x16 host interface. Its two QSFP28 ports each deliver 50GbE connectivity with hardware-accelerated RoCE v2 RDMA, providing low-latency, CPU-efficient data movement for storage networking, virtualization, and compute-intensive workloads. The card supports NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) offload, SR-IOV network virtualization, and overlay network acceleration for VXLAN, GENEVE, and NVGRE traffic, along with advanced congestion management for lossless RDMA fabrics. The dual-port design allows redundant network paths or dual-fabric connectivity — separating storage and compute traffic, or providing link-level failover — making this adapter a versatile fit for enterprise servers, storage targets, and virtualization hosts that need dependable high-bandwidth Ethernet connectivity.