Cisco Catalyst C1300-12XT-2X Internal Hardware Overview
Here is a view you are unlikely to see elsewhere, as we opened up the C1300-12XT-2X.
This switch has an internal power supply. It is a Delta unit, so it is from a well-known manufacturer.
This is perhaps the most interesting photo of the entire review. Inside, instead of a 1U 40mm fan, there is a blower-style cooler. Almost every 1U server, switch, CPE box, and so forth that we review has 40mm 1U fans, but Cisco is doing something different here. That is really neat to see.
For the management function we have our NAND and DRAM.
We did not take this heatsink off, but underneath, it is the main switch chip. From what we understand, and from the ones we have gotten off, the Cisco C1300 line uses different Marvell Prestera chips. We did not get a list of all of the switches and which Prestera chip they use from Cisco’s product management, but they confirmed that they use different Prestera chips.
Since we have 10Gbase-T ports, we also have PHYs.
Here is the other one. Marvell has an entire PHY series, so there is a good chance these are Marvell PHYs under the heatsinks as well. Since this is a bit more expensive of a switch, we did not pop the heatsink since we need it to work after photos are taken.
There is also a Marvell 88E1512-NNP2. This is an Alaska line Ethernet transceiver from Marvell as well that looks to be driving the out-of-band management port.
We also saw a Lattice LCMXO2-640HC part of the MachXO2 series.
Next, let us move on the management.
Why is average latency always “N/A”?
OK, so it’s Cisco and it has some higher quality components, but is it worth 3 times the price? Where does the value proposition appear? 10GbE is becoming commodity now.
It’s no faster, no slower, it manages the same as its peers. The only question is does it last as long?
You don’t need to be a Cisco CLI god to use it.
If they still owned Linksys, the case could have been blue and have reduced the price by 25%
looks very simular to a Mikrotik switch….
This should have had the 2 spf+ ports also double as 25Gb ports, so you could redirect 3 of the 10GbE ports to 2 sfp28 ports, for connectivity to a server or other 10Gb switch. But that would mean this could live a long time instead of early end of life, as it would start as backbone and then later as edge connected to a 25Gb backbone.
I’m lovin’ STH actually doing switch reviews. It’s great that you’re doing all of this. Can you do FortiSwitch too?
Can you verify that the RJ45 ports fully support 2.5G/5G speeds as well as 10G? Cisco doesn’t confirm this in their specs. Thanks, and great review!
@Bryan Y: Spec sheet says 100M/1G/10G
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/catalyst-1300-series-switches/nb-06-cat1300-ser-data-sheet-cte-en.html
@spuwho I am aware but the last C1300 review they did showed that the combo ports indeed did support 2.5g/5g and was not listed on the spec sheet. Would prefer an official confirmation.
@world
indeed an excellent iNFOGAP about the NBASE-T …
well done!
Yep. Too few, too late and too expensive in comparison with MikroTik.