I've yet to really beat on it but it's quiet for its size with a typical laptop like fan sound under load. The dual port 10Gb intel nic doesn't seem to add much heat though I purposefully went with an SFP card in order to use cooler running fiber SFP's (A copper SFP runs burning hot vs a warm fiber SFP).
A brand new dual port 10Gb SFP card costs like $100 USD. Used is far less. I also wound up realizing that when it comes to 10Gb, copper can be more costly than fiber and uses more power per port. So I only buy SFP+ gear so I can use one of many interfaces: copper, fiber, DAC, etc. Fiber and DAC cables are cheaper and use less power. I have a ~$250 USD 8 port Mikrotik 10Gb SFP+ switch and also bought a few cheap 10Gb mellanox SFP cards for my server, desktop and work bench PC for like $30 each off ebay (I use them in Linux and FreeBSD.)
A brand new dual port 10Gb SFP card costs like $100 USD. Used is far less. I also wound up realizing that when it comes to 10Gb, copper can be more costly than fiber and uses more power per port. So I only buy SFP+ gear so I can use one of many interfaces: copper, fiber, DAC, etc. Fiber and DAC cables are cheaper and use less power. I have a ~$250 USD 8 port Mikrotik 10Gb SFP+ switch and also bought a few cheap 10Gb mellanox SFP cards for my server, desktop and work bench PC for like $30 each off ebay (I use them in Linux and FreeBSD.)