Today, we are taking a look at the Cisco Catalyst C1300-12XS. This is a neat switch with twelve 10Gbps ports. There are ten SFP+ 10G ports, and two combo ports that support either SFP+ or 10GBase-T. That adds just a bit more flexibility to the switch. Cisco’s gear is far from the cheapest you can get in this segment, but it is from the most well-known vendor in the space. As a result, there are some neat features we do not see elsewhere. Let us get to it.
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Cisco Catalyst C1300-12XS Hardware Overview
The Cisco C1300-12XS is a 1U rackmount switch. We did not have the rackmount ears for it, but there is a lot going on.
Folks often ask whether switches have a “Cisco-like” CLI. Here, because it is a Cisco switch, it has various methods to get to a CLI.
Next, we have ten SFP+ ports which are ports 1-10. This is a solid number of 10Gbps ports. These days, we are seeing many more 10GbE devices, so having a good block of ports is always nice.
Next, there are ports 11 and 12. These are combo ports, so you can use either the 10GBase-T or SFP+ interfaces. That adds a bit more flexibility since we see a lot more 10Gbase-T devices, and that is a major theme of 2026, where we expect more client devices to support 10Gbase-T.
Something that we get on this switch, that we did not get on the Cisco Catalyst C1300-8FP-2G is the additional out-of-band management port. In some networks, this will go unused, but it is something we have come to appreciate as data center gear typically has its own out-of-band management.
On the side of the switch we get a vent.
On the other side, we get another vent.
On the rear, we get a Kensington lock port, a vent, the product label, and an AC power input.
This is something we do not see on all switches, a lock point to secure the switch.
We also get an internal power supply. This is a single AC power input, so if you wanted to provide A+B power to this switch, you would use an Automatic Transfer Switching ATS PDU.
On the bottom, another label, but then also mounting points.
Opening the switch, we can see a more complex layout than we probably would have expected. An example of this is that you can see airflow being guided through the SFP+ ports.
First, instead of a 40mm 1U fan, we get a blower-style fan. This is just something different that we were not expecting.
Then we have the internal AC to DC power supply.
Here is the switch PCB.
Here we see a Lattice LCMXO2-1200UHC, a Lattice MachXO2 FPGA.
Next, we found a Marvell 88E1512 which is a PHY.
There is Micron NAND.
Here is the Marvell 88X3310 10Gbase-T transceiver.
Nanya supplies the DRAM.
Unfortunately, the heatsink was glued onto the switch chip. Cisco told us they use Marvell Prestera in the C1300 series, but there are different SKUs used.
Next, let us reassemble the switch, power it on, and check the management.
