Performance Wired (SX10 10Gige Switch)

Performance Wired (SX10 10 GigE Switch)

Right, we quickly move away from the router as, hey, we have this really cool switch as well. Yes, we divert quickly from that router and move onwards to the SX10 Multi-Gigabit switch. I decided to add this into the review to get you a nice impression of what is up and coming in the years to come Ethernet (LAN-LAN) wise. Don't you just get a nice big smile on your face when you can see this in your device properties?:

LAN-LAN Throughput 5 Gbps

No 10 Gbps you noticed and wonder about? Well, currently I have just one 5 Gbit and one 10 Gbit ethernet card available here in my lab. However, 5 Gbps is still five times faster than your Gigabit connection (!) Oh my, how things are moving eh? Five years ago everybody was still using 100 Mbit/s LAN connections.

The one 10 gigabit network card we had did connect properly at 10 Gbit/s

So I had a peek at throughput performance, and it is ridiculously fast. We ran our test thus based on a 5 Gbit jack, I used Cat 5e cabling. The 10 Gbit jack to the switch connected at a proper 10 Gbit (see above). The secondary NIC used on the client PC has a 5 Gbit jack, at 5 Gbit. Both network adapters are Aquantia based. Anyway, have a peek below:

So, here's a throughput test. This is 60 seconds full-on data throughput at maximum capacity. On average on the 5Gbit/s link colored in red, we pushed 4761 Mbit/s. Divide that by 8 bits and you are looking at almost 600 MB/sec (!). The blue line below is a Gigabit jack. Do you guys understand now why I have been pushing for faster Ethernet for over a year now? Honestly, enthusiast class motherboards should all have at least a 5 Gbit ethernet port. Combine that with a 5 or 10G NAS and a switch and you can finally move around your files with speeds in the hundreds of megabytes per second. Check out this LAN-LAN performance chart:

The irony here is that I have only been able to test 5 Gbps, I really need to get my hands on a second 10 Gbit ethernet adapter. And yes, then the numbers again would double up. But that is pretty impressive stuff, right? So there you have it, the SX10 switch throughputs at 5 Gbit/s, 4791 Mbit/s to be precise. The same SX10 switch at a 1 Gbps connection reached 945 MBit/s, which again is pretty much as good as it will ever get for Gigabit connectivity. But man, that 5 Gbps result, that's just freakishly awesome!

When that LED turns purple you'll be in for a nice Multi GigE surprise.