The D-Link DGE-550T is a 32/64-bit PCI 100/1000Mbps NWay Gigabit LAN adapter. The DGE-550T provides extremely fast data transfer rates up to 2000Mbps at full duplex mode for high bandwidth usage in areas such as network servers, workstations, Storage Area Networks (SANs), Network Attach Storage (NAS) and high-speed video streaming.

The DGE-550T adheres to IEEE 802.3, 802.3u and 802.3ab, which specify 100BASE-TX and 1000BASE-T Ethernet technologies. The DGE-550T also supports both Half and Full Duplex operations at 100/200 Mbps data speeds used in conjunction with 802.3x flow control. With the auto-negotiation support, connection speed is negotiated at the highest speed to a compliant switch.

Through the aid of a VLAN membership, the DGE-550T adheres to the 802.1Q for multiple VLAN support, and 802.1P for packet prioritization. With 802.1Q support, server resources can be shared with multiple VLANs when used in conjunction with any 802.1Q-enabled switch. With the 802.1p support, the DGE-550T allows a range of Ethernet packets to be prioritized from a critical to a non-critical designation through a priority tag.

The DGE-550T supports Full Duplex operations at 200/2000Mbps data speeds used in conjunction with 802.3x flow control support. With 802.3x flow control; the DGE-550T uses both asymmetric and symmetric functions via the MAC control pause function. Any participating 802.3x flow control node can be controlled by initiating a pause control to stop incoming network traffic, to further reduce network congestion.

By default the DGE-550T supports the standard 1518 Byte frame size. In addition, the DGE-550T can also be configured to use a maximum Jumbo frame size of up to 9000Bytes. The DGE-550T's Jumbo frame support provides the ability to reduce system-level packet processing overhead by one third than that required to process standard frame sizes.

Also, being PCI 2.2 compliant, the DGE-550T works with 33 Mhz/32 bit or 66Mhz/64 bit PCI busses. This compatibility provides users with an easy migration path to increase performance between servers and workstations for large file transfer, video editing and server clustering for data intensive applications.