Netgear nighthawk sx10 review in Spanish (full analysis)

Now that 1 Gigabit connections are starting to fall short for the most demanding users, especially in the era of UHD movies and wireless connections that are beginning to demand more and more bandwidth from the cable infrastructure behind them. It is interesting to see that finally, very little by little, the 10 Gigabits begin to leave the company and enter our homes. Netgear is not the first manufacturer to have ventured into this market with its Netgear Nighthawk SX10, but we are looking forward to testing this switch, because it is the first domestic model that, in addition to integrating 10GbE ports, is manageable.

Will it deliver on what it promises or will it stay halfway? Let's start!

We thank Netgear for trusting the product for its analysis:

Netgear Nighthawk SX10 technical specifications

Unboxing and design

On the front of the box we see an image of the product and the most interesting points of the product are highlighted: 10G connection, ideal for gamers, RGB lighting system and a metal design.

In the rear view you can see the back of the Netgear Nighthawk SX10, a brief explanation of the connectors and LEDs that are visible from that point, and two views as an example of what we can see in the "gaming dashboard" of the web interface.

In the accessories section we find a quick installation guide, with separate diptychs for each language. Spanish is one of the available languages, brief but well explained.

The exterior of the router is completely metallic, giving very good feelings in terms of robustness, and showing that we are facing a product that really corresponds to the high range. In operation it can feel warm, but never at the level of being annoying or preventing it from being placed on wooden furniture. There is no cooling slot, they become unnecessary with the consumption and design of this appliance.

It is evident that this switch has been specially geared towards the gaming market, with its aggressive design and RGB lighting, which, unlike other peripherals, can make sense here, since we can customize the LEDs according to the connection speed or the state of the port, that is, they provide us with useful information without opening the configuration , and not simply aesthetic as in other cases (I think of you, RGB motherboards).

I do not know to what extent this sharp segmentation is a good thing for the device, since I think that the user who will get the most out of a switch like this is the "prosumer" who wants to move movies and computer backups to all speed, or the small business that needs an especially fast channel for users working in big data without a big budget for professional network equipment.

From Netgear we have been informed that there is a version similar to this switch, manageable and with 2 10GbE ports, aimed at this market, specifically it is the GS110EMX, without RGB lighting or dashboard gaming, which we hope to be able to test in the future, and seems to fit very well into this more professional profile.

With this we do not want to say that it is not a suitable switch for the gamer public. Of course the Netgear Nighthawk SX10 is a very good switch to play with too, with numerous options to minimize latency and prioritize traffic, even if only "at gigabit speed, to the ports from which it is played. Uncompressed video management, common among content creators looking for the highest quality, is greatly accelerated if we upgrade our network equipment to 10GbE, although this currently has a considerable economic cost. But if our only need is low latency in games and streaming at maximum quality, the limitation will be the speed of our internet connection much more than that of our internal network. This is your perfect environment if we combine video games with other more demanding tasks.

In the back we find a total of 10 ports. From left to right in the image, the top 8 are Gigabit, and the other two are 10GbE. They are easily distinguished by the color of the LEDs, depending on the speed at which you are operating. By default, blue for gigabit, purple of different shades for 2.5, 5 and 10Gbps.

Detail of the two fast ports and the power connector. The Netgear Nighthawk SX10 works with a 12V / 2.5A (30W maximum) power supply, with enough margin for regular consumption.

The essential reset button is hidden at the bottom.

Aesthetically it is a router that draws attention. Even though I am sure some users prefer something more sober, it is an elegant device with a rather groundbreaking design.

Inside and digging a little deeper

Disassembling the housing of the Netgear Nighthawk SX10 we can see a very careful design of the plate, as well as a fairly good welding quality

Not much stands out on this face other than that. At the bottom of the image you can see an Altera Max V 5M240Z programmable chip.

In the upper part of the plate the great majority of relevant components can be seen. We can also see pins in the central area corresponding to a diagnostic / programming port.

The transceivers responsible for the 10Gbps ports are two Marvell Alaska 88X3310P, a relatively recent model with support for all intermediate speeds, i.e. 5 and 2.5Gbps over existing cabling and with fewer restrictions than the 10 Gigabit.

We also see a 1Gb Nanya DDR3L memory chip, not accessible by the user .

The main part of the Netgear Nighthawk SX10 is handled by a Marvell Link Street-88E6390 chip, which is the one that provides the 8 Gigabit links, the 2MB of packet memory, and two 10Gbps links for the missing ports.

Testing equipment

To make the performance measurements we will use the following components:

• Netgear Nighthawk SX10 Switch Kit 1, with Intel 540T2 network card (2 10GbE ports) Kit 2, with Aquantia AQC-107 network card (integrated in Rampage VI Extreme, 10/5 / 2.5 Gigabits) NAS Synology Diskstation DS414 (2 ports GbE network with 802.3ad support) Iperf version 3

performance

First, we tested the performance of the Netgear Nighthawk SX10 under light- duty conditions, using only the 1 Gigabit ports. Unsurprisingly, it has excellent performance, which could probably be slightly increased by using jumbo packets, i.e. an MTU greater than 1500 bytes.

We can check below the result of IPerf with 10 threads:

Another more direct way to check the transfer speed is simply to copy a large file over the network, with a margin of 100MiB / s for both sending and receiving, as expected (the theoretical maximum is 1000 / 8 = 125MiB / s)

But obviously the most interesting thing about this switch is not to work at 1Gbps, but to use the 10Gigabits connections for the fastest computers, or to join network segments without the bottleneck that would entail using a single gigabit connection.

We do a quick check that the connection is working at the speed it should (at high speeds over copper, poor quality cables or too long can cause problems)

Since we obtained results that varied considerably compared to the reviews of other media, we have decided to carry out the tests again, with an Intel 540T2 network card, measuring the bandwidth of one network interface to another through the switch. The results corroborate what we obtained at first, placing this switch at the level of various business models.

MTU 9000 (jumbo packets)

MTU 1500

Normally we use 10 threads in the iPerf tests, since especially in WiFi the results can vary significantly, to take full advantage of MIMO when using multiple streams, however the performance in this case was identical, so we have chosen to use one stream, to make it more readable.

The result with MTU 1500 (by default) is already quite good, with 7.10 Gbits / second. However, using jumbo packets (MTU 9000) the performance increases more than 15%, reaching up to 8.37 Gbits / second and approaching quite closely the technical limitations of this type of connection.

We note that, just as 5 and 2.5Gbe connections do not necessarily require Cat. 6 cables, 10GbE connections do require cable of this category or higher, although it can be used if the length is short.

Firmware and configuration

The fastest way to connect to the router is by following the steps in the quick guide, that is, if we are on a Windows computer, we will use the icon available in the "network" section of the Windows explorer.

An equivalent procedure for Mac is explained in the guide.

Of course we can also configure the Netgear Nighthawk SX10 with all its capabilities from GNU-Linux systems, since all the configuration is done from a complete web interface that we will show later. However, this case is not covered in the guide, since we will have to obtain the IP of the switch manually, and this step varies substantially depending on the equipment we have. The easiest thing in this case, probably, will be to review the list of DHCP clients of the router, and enter the one corresponding to the SX-10 in our preferred browser.

The default password, as specified in the quick start guide, is "password". We recommend changing it as soon as we log in for the first time, to make it more difficult for unauthorized people to access it.

The web interface is simple and quite intuitive. The options are organized in several sections:

• 

• Home, for an overview of the state of the network and shortcuts to change various Gaming settings, where we can adjust some options related to QoS and traffic prioritization, as well as see graphs that indicate the traffic and use of each port it incorporates. Switching, for typical manageable switch options, such as Link Aggregation, with up to 4 groups, both static and dynamic (802.3ad) Diagnostics, from where we can do some generic tests, such as the state of the network cable, the approximate length, and whether It is suitable for the speed we want Settings, where there are several general settings, when the switch is visible, power saving, and firmware update.

The LEDs are fully configurable, an interesting option that gives them practical utility beyond simple aesthetics, since they will indicate the speed and status of the link. If they bother us, we always have the option to turn them off completely, both from the firmware and from the dedicated button.

We also have two memories that store all the relevant settings, to have two totally independent profiles that we can select according to our needs, thus being able to have, for example, the switch ready to use in two locations with different network topology, or that two users configure it to prioritize your computer when the other is not making intensive use of the network.

Link Aggregation Configuration with NAS Synology

This process can be quite useful for any switch that supports link aggregation, not just this particular model. However, by having 10 Gigabit links, we are more likely to take advantage of link aggregation. With a gigabit switch the process is similar, however we would only see improvement if several clients were accessing the NAS at the same time, or if we made another link aggregation connection to a team.

To do this, we first connect our NAS to the Netgear Nighthawk SX10, with a single cable, and access through the browser (in synology, it is done by default with http: // : 5000, or better, with a secure protocol, https: // : 5001)

Once there, we go to the control panel, network, network interface tab. The "Create Bond" option is visible using the Create button:

As it supports it, we choose the option that gives us the most advantages (performance gain and fault tolerance, if a cable becomes loose or breaks), 802.3ad. The Balance XOR option can be interesting in some cases. Adaptive and active / idle mode work with unmanageable switches but do not offer much functionality compared to having only one cable.

In the next tab it may be interesting to increase the MTU size if all our network equipment supports it. This option is sometimes known as “jumbo packets”, and it allows you to use larger-than-standard packages to gain performance when sending large files, in exchange for slightly worse latency.

With our particular test setup we have not noticed much difference, so we leave the default MTU (1500 bytes).

At this point, we go into the switch configuration and create a Link Aggregation Group (LAG) with the two ports that we want. In our case, for simplicity, we have chosen the last two (9 and 10). We remember to mark the switch in LACP in the switch configuration, and activate it.

It is not usually necessary to restart, if everything went well after a few seconds we should see the following in the NAS configuration:

As a final note, we want to mention that this switch supports link aggregation also on 10Gigabits ports, giving a theoretical maximum of 20Gbps under ideal conditions. Likewise, due to the limitation of having only two 10 gigabit ports, it does not make much sense, since the communication channel from a pc to the switch would go to 20Gbps, but the bottleneck would be in the switch, which even doing link aggregation with the 8 gigabit ports it would not be enough to even reach the top of a 10-gigabit link.

It is also interesting that they include the possibility, even if only for having fault tolerance, which is an interesting addition to using LACP.

Final words and conclusion about Netgear Nighthawk SX10

We are facing a switch model that was really needed in the market. The main reason that we find the Netgear Nighthawk SX10 interesting, apart from the excellent performance that we undoubtedly expected from a product in this range, is that it integrates two 10GbE ports, and at the same time is manageable.

This is something that we were missing in very good products, such as the Asus XG-U2008, since with only two high-speed ports, we cannot have more than two devices connected at 10 Gigabits per second (although we add more switches, because one of the two ports we will always have to dedicate to connecting switches to each other). That is, outside these two devices at the beginning and at the end of the "chain", all other transfers are limited to 1Gb / second, unless there are several simultaneous connections taking advantage of the tunnel.

With a manageable switch like this, we can take advantage of the benefits of, for example, link aggregation using 802.3ad, to give a good boost to the performance of a NAS that has two network cards, keeping the same tunnel at 10Gigabits / second but with less bottlenecks in other devices. Also very interesting is the possibility of prioritizing traffic as it suits us.

The price is considerable, although it does not seem particularly high considering what the cheapest manageable switches with a 10GbE port were worth so far (about € 800 for the simplest models), all oriented to the business market, with high noise and size rack normally. The reality is that the price of having the technology that in a couple of years we will have in our soup, but today falls significantly. However, we understand that for many users it can be an important barrier to invest so much money in a switch, which is not usually valued as a main component of a setup.

To cap it all, this Netgear Nighthawk SX10 switch also supports intermediate standards, 2.5GbE and 5GbE, which we hope will finish taking off with the new Aquantia chips that are making this technology cheaper. With these two standards we will be able to see quite high speeds without the need to replace Cat 5E cables or invest as much money in new equipment.

ADVANTAGE	DISADVANTAGES
+ 2 10GBE PORTS IN A DOMESTIC SWITCH	- THE GAMING AESTHETIC MAY NOT BE OF THE PLEASURE OF EVERYONE
+ MANAGABLE SWITCH, SUPPORTS LAG AND QOS
+ NO FAN, SILENT
+ FIRMWARE REALLY COMPLETE AND EASY TO USE
+ METALLIC, ROBUST AND STRONG BODY
+ CONFIGURABLE LEDS (INCLUDING COMPLETE OFF)

For his excellent performance and being the first to dare in his segment, the professional review team awards him the platinum medal

Netgear Nighthawk SX10

DESIGN - 95%

PERFORMANCE - 95%

FIRMWARE AND EXTRAS - 95%

PRICE - 88%

93%