English Electric 8Switch

Nice set-up, bit similar to mine in my study.


If you look closely - well not that closely - you can see where I had to remove a skirting board to route cable and haven’t got round to fixing it, but a refurb is due so will leave for now I think.

Anyway, in the Audiophile Switches forum, we’ve been having a discussion on bend radius, and yours are more bent than mine!

One other thing I notice is you have a cable connected to the far right port. Is that the same as every other port? Although my Cisco is newer, I’ve not used the equivalent ports; is there some difference?

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Yes, exactly. With that the ER is more stable and cables are free hanging.

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The bend radius is fine on the cables I’m using, gently curved and not pulled tight. It’s a mix of Cat5e and Cat6 generic cables so they are quite flexible. Yours look pretty hefty - what are they ?

I don’t think it matters what port is used apart from the uplink port being Gigabit capable. I just used it for convenience of connection.

If this is an Ethernet cable I would be a little concerned about the bend.

Regarding Ethernet ports, the one or two on the right are usually dual purpose, so that you can use either a regular RJ45 plug, or an SFP if you want to use fibre. Also they are normally GB ports even if the main 8 ports run at 10/100. You would normally use one as an uplink port, maybe to connect to a router, where the traffic will be heavier from multiple devices.

It’s deceptive, it looks like this from a different angle. Heck if this infringes the bend radius we are all doomed!

My Cisco is a GB version so all ports are the same.

@james_n, it’s Catsnake 6a. It’s quite flexible though. The software you are using to interrogate your device, where did you get that from? I feel I’m missing out not having it!

It’s the Device manager web interface on the switch - i followed the guide here posted by @Simon-in-Suffolk to set it up. Handy for checking out the port stats for anything untoward. Follow the Express Setup section and that should allow you to set an IP address for the switch and then access it with a web browser.

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Chris, I really wouldn’t worry … Ethernet cabling is quite robust … and a short distance of non compliance is unlikely to be problematic … if you are really worried you can ask your managed switch to provide diagnostics on the port with the suspect cable… if you are not seeing errors ratchet up when in use your are fine.

I tried it and got almost to the end. Then it said something about subnet masks and the switch potentially not working, so I bailed out at that point.

It is actually my cable, although the picture is misleading and it’s not got much of a bend or kink in it.

I just left the subnet mask as is and put in the relevant gateway and chosen switch address

Agreed, I have never had an Ethernet cable fail, even awful, kinked things of unknown origin from ebay. Still, if I was burying one in the wall I wouldn’t want to take any chances.

Or the case is the heatsink.

Seriously, Don, do you think it was developed with stockbrokers in mind, or maybe fishing enthusiasts? :grin:

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No. But precisely what did “insert name of arbitrary company” do during development and production, that specifically justifies that sort of statement.

Those words do not explicitly guarantee that anything was done. Simply that they had audiophiles in mind, and were figuring out how to maximise their financial return - perhaps add a little badge and whack the price up !

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Yeah, at £450 with power supply, cable, dealer margin, manufacture and distribution they must be coining it. Oops, forgot VAT…

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Coining or not, you don’t appear to be able to identify precisely what has be done, or by whom, to justify the marketing text.

That is exactly the er… case. Although there are also 3 heat sinks inside. You can see pics on the Uptone site.

My unifi switches operate in the same way, case gets hot to disappate heat from the components inside and is designed this way nothing to worry about.

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There was one left in New Zealand, so I’ve ordered it. All new hi-fi is going to become hard to get here after the local stock is run out. We’ll see if it’s worth it, a fellow customer had one and was very enthusiastic about the results.

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They key thing is that the components themselves must be equipped to dissipate the heat they are creating … typically in switches without forced cooling this will often involve attaching finned heat sinks to said components to increase the surface area of the component casing.
So if worried about heating, whip the top off, and attach a heat sink to any components excessively hot… but yes hot components will have a shorter life.

The inside of my Cisco 3560 PoE Catalyst I use to feed my streamer. The back case fins are for the PoE regulators, and the heat generating ASIC processors have heat sinks on their cases. The whole external case under full utilisation gets modestly warm.

image

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