The switch and NICs from SMC have similar box designs and have been the same for years now which is fine. The front of all the boxes has basic information about the hardware and the back has a basic network diagram.
The front and back of the switch looks pretty similar to most other switches, and basically identical to other SMC 5 port switches. The biggest, and possibly only difference with this switch is the 1000M LEDs on the front. The switch is also pretty large in comparison to other 5 port switches which can be much smaller. The main reason it is larger is so that it can be rackmounted.
Because this switch is designed so that it can be rackmounted there are holes on the side for you to mount the brackets to. If you are going to use this switch in a rackmount environment it’s perfect and would be a nice addition of course. You also get 4 rubber feet if you are not going to put it into a rack. These will keep the switch in place and prevent your surface from being scratched.
The network cards provided to compliment the switch are SMC’s EZ Card 1000 (SMC9452TX). This card is a 32-bit 10/100/1000Mbps PCI card which makes it backwards compatible with your current 10/100 Ethernet network. The back of the card is almost identical to every other 10/100 NIC however because this is a gigabit NIC there is a 1000 LED to indicate the 1000Mbps speed.
This network card (left) uses a Marvell 88E8003 32-Bit Gigabit Ethernet Controller for Network Adapters. This integrated device combines the Marvell Alaska transceiver and a gigabit Ethernet Media Access Controller (MAC), with a 32-bit PCI interface and 128 KB packet buffer. Within the switch (right) are 5 single-port Marvell Alaska 88E1111 transceivers that perform all of the physical layer functions. There is a large F3 FSG5 chip which is a 5 port switching fabric with an embedded packet memory. This F3 chip FSG5/8 has an internal packet buffer memory of 768 Kbits in size and an address database memory that may hold up to 8K unicast addresses.
