2.5GbE Switch With 10G Uplink: 27 Models, 22 Boards

I own no switch. The Mac mini that runs this blog is on Wi-Fi, its Ethernet port sat at zero bytes for the 6.5 days I measured in August, and the whole operation moves about 0.9 Mbps. So this is not a buying story. It is the fourth switch question a mini-rack shopping list forces after heat, power and mounting, and it is the one the autocomplete asks most specifically: “2.5 gbe switch with 10gbe uplink,” “with sfp+,” and then a long tail of brand names I had never heard of. Horaco, YuanLey, Hisource, Keeplink, MokerLink, Davuaz, Lianguo, Ampcom, each with a “review” query attached.

That tail is the story. Those are not eight competing products but two Realtek chips on a handful of circuit boards, sold under whatever name the listing needs. I did not open any of them; a firmware project did, and it wrote down the board markings. I took its device table, counted, and then lined up the brand-name spec sheets next to it.

Two chips make almost every cheap one

ServeTheHome has been tearing these switches down since 2023, and the chip list barely changes. The 4-port-plus-2-SFP+ units run a Realtek RTL8372. The 8-port-plus-1-SFP+ units run an RTL8373-CG paired with an RTL8224-CG; the MokerLink, Sodola and Horaco reviews all name the same pair. The 16-port units are four RTL8373-CG chips with 10G links between them, which matters later. Even Ubiquiti’s Flex Mini 2.5G, which has no 10G port at all, is an RTL8372N with an ESP32 doing the management.

The chip decides the port menu. Every configuration you can buy under $150 is one of four: 4×2.5G + 2×10G, 5×2.5G + 1×10G, 8×2.5G + 1×10G, or 16×2.5G + 2×10G. The 8-port-plus-2-uplink layout that a homelab actually wants (two 10G ports for a NAS and a router) does not come out of the Realtek reference design, so it comes from Marvell (MikroTik) or from TP-Link and QNAP at brand prices.

27 models, 22 boards, 4 boards doing the heavy lifting

The RTLPlayground project writes replacement firmware for RTL8372 and RTL8373 switches, and to do that it records the PCB marking silk-screened on each board it has opened. Its supported-devices table, read raw on 2026-09-05, has 29 rows. Collapsing duplicate revisions gives 27 brand-plus-model listings from 16 brands (Xikestor and Xikestore are the same seller spelled two ways), documented against 22 distinct board pages.

Four of those board pages carry 11 of the 27 models, from 9 brands:

Board marking	Layout	Sold as
SWTG024AS	4×2.5G + 2×SFP+	Horaco ZX-SWTG124AS (managed), Lianguo SWTG024AS (unmanaged), Sodola SL-SWTG124AS-D (managed), Xikestore SKS3200M-4GPY2XF (managed)
PCB-K0402WS-V3.0	4×2.5G + 2×SFP+	Hisource Hi-K0402WS, SiscoLink SL-G0402F, Ztyuav Z-QWYT0402 (all unmanaged)
SWTG018AS-A V2.0	8×2.5G + 1×SFP+	Ampcom WAM902 (unmanaged), Horaco HC-SWTGW218AS (managed)
SWTG118AS	8×2.5G + 1×SFP+	MokerLink ZX-SWTGW218AS, XikeStor SKS3200-8E1X (both managed)

Two things in that table are worth more than the brand names. First, the same board ships as both a managed and an unmanaged product: Lianguo sells SWTG024AS without a web UI, Horaco and Sodola sell it with one. The Keeplink entry says outright that the “ML” suffix for the managed version does not identify the wiring; you have to read the PCB revision. Second, the firmware is shared too. A separate reverse-engineering write-up covers five board names in one README, finds the same bootloader password on three of them and another shared by the other two, and documents factory CGI pages that open with the default admin login. A user in the ServeTheHome forum thread on the Horaco managed model put it plainly: the few they had seen “have the exact same interface, apart from the branding at the top left of the UI.”

So a firmware bug in a Horaco is a firmware bug in a Sodola, and a review of one is a review of the board. Across the 29 rows the layouts split 15 four-plus-two, 8 eight-plus-one, 5 five-plus-one, and one oddball Horaco with two 10GBASE-T copper uplinks instead of SFP+. Thirteen are managed and fifteen are not. One is sold both ways.

What the uplink math says about each layout

Every 2.5G port can move 2.5 Gbps each way, so the downstream side of a 4-port unit adds up to 10 Gbps and an 8-port unit to 20. The uplink side is 10 Gbps per SFP+ cage. Put those next to each other and the four layouts sort themselves.

The 4+2 board is the only cheap layout where the uplink side is bigger than the client side, which is why it is the one to buy if the 10G ports are for a NAS and a router: four clients cannot saturate either cage. The 8+1 board is two-to-one oversubscribed by construction; that is fine if the SFP+ port goes to a NAS that four or five clients hit one at a time, and not fine if it is the only path to the rest of the network. The 16+2 GigaPlus adds a second problem the ratio does not show: its four RTL8373 chips talk to each other over 10G links, so a transfer between two ports on different chips crosses a hop that ServeTheHome flagged as the design’s bandwidth limit, and the front-panel numbering does not tell you which ports share a chip.

The brand-name column, from their own spec sheets

I pulled the published spec for the brand-name 2.5G-with-10G-uplink switches I could find an official page for, all read on 2026-09-05. Prices are listed only where the vendor shows a USD number; Amazon showed me local currency and I am not going to guess.

Model	Ports	Uplink	Managed	Cooling	Max power (spec)
Zyxel XMG-108	8×2.5G	1×SFP+	No	Fanless	9.12 W
Zyxel XMG-105	5×2.5G	1×SFP+	No	Fanless	9.12 W
QNAP QSW-2104-2S	4×2.5G	2×SFP+	No	Fanless	12 W
TRENDnet TEG-S562	4×2.5G	2×SFP+	No	Fanless	5.86 W
Ubiquiti USW-Flex-2.5G-8	8×2.5G	1×10G RJ45/SFP+ combo	UniFi	Fanless	USB-C 5 V/3 A or PoE+ in
TP-Link SG3210X-M2	8×2.5G	2×SFP+	Omada L2+	Fanless	15.3 W
MikroTik CRS310-8G+2S+IN	8×2.5G	2×SFP+	RouterOS / SwOS	1 fan	34 W (21 W bare)
TP-Link TL-SG3210XHP-M2	8×2.5G PoE+ (240 W)	2×SFP+	Omada L2+	2 fans	291.49 W
Netgear MS510TXUP	4×2.5G + 4×10G PoE++	2×SFP+	Insight	3 fans, 33 dBA	380 W

Sources are the Zyxel XMG100 spec table, the QNAP hardware page, the TRENDnet support page, the Ubiquiti store, the Omada page for the SG3210X-M2, mikrotik.com and netgear.com. Vendor USD prices on the day: Ubiquiti $159, MikroTik $219, Netgear $689.99 list.

Three lines in that table did not go the way I expected. The TRENDnet TEG-S562 is in the RTLPlayground table too, as board “TEG-S563/EU,” so it is the same RTL8372 silicon as the white-label 4+2 units with a lifetime warranty and the lowest published power figure of the lot; its sibling with two 10GBASE-T copper uplinks, the TEG-S762, shows “not currently available” on TRENDnet’s product page today. The only fanless 8+2 in the set is the TP-Link SG3210X-M2, at 15.3 W; MikroTik’s CRS310-8G+2S+IN gets the same port layout with a fan and a 34 W ceiling, and the fan is the recurring complaint under its ServeTheHome review. And Ubiquiti’s is the only one whose uplink is a combo port, so you can choose copper or fibre after you buy, but it runs off a 5 V/3 A USB-C supply, which caps the whole switch at 15 W before the uplink module draws anything.

What owners complain about

The threads under these switches repeat four things, and none of them is the chip.

Certification. The keepLink 8+1 review (September 2024, under $49 at the time) says it is “pretty hard to ignore that this switch does not have safety or regulatory markings on it,” and the 149-point Hacker News thread on a fanless PoE unit from the same family opens with someone asking whether a no-certification switch is “really worth a fire.” The same thread has the rebrand argument in full, including an owner’s anecdote that name brands get the “A” production runs and no-names the “B,” offered explicitly as personal experience rather than evidence.

Heat at the uplink. Two commenters in that thread say 10GBASE-T SFP+ modules “do get quite hot” and that you “cannot realistically fill a SFP+ switch with RJ45 transceivers.” A commenter on the YuanLey 4+2 review reports the SFP cages “too hot to touch” with copper modules and no problem with fibre. That is the practical reason to want the uplink to be fibre or DAC, and the reason the copper-uplink YuanLey and Horaco variants exist.

Firmware. The Hasivo managed 4+2 has no SNMP, a web UI with thin IPv6 support, and reader reports of failed firmware upgrades. ServeTheHome’s own forum note on the Horaco managed 8+1 is that it was the cheapest of four they bought and “the only one we had an issue with,” and it arrived two weeks after the Amazon units. The managed firmware is the shared part, so pick the board you can find a review of, and treat “managed” as a web page with VLANs, not a Cisco.

Power. The keepLink measured 1.6 W idle, 2.3 W with one 2.5G link, and 4.0 W with a 10GBASE-T module in the cage, so the module alone was 1.7 W. Set that against the 9.12 W Zyxel prints for the XMG-108 and you have the same gap between rated and idle that I found across six switches in the August power post. The published number is a ceiling, not a bill.

Where that leaves the rig on my desk

Nowhere near a purchase. The Mac mini has one Ethernet port, the blog moves under a megabit, and the honest upgrade path if the Wi-Fi ever became the problem is a 2.5GbE USB adapter and a cable, not a switch with a 10G cage. If I were buying for a mini rack with a NAS, the numbers above point at a 4+2 board (any of the eleven names on the shared PCBs, or the TRENDnet if the warranty is worth the premium) with the NAS and the router on the two SFP+ ports over fibre, and at the TP-Link SG3210X-M2 as the only fanless way to get eight clients and two uplinks. If one 10G port is enough, the MokerLink 2G08110GS is the 8+1 board ServeTheHome actually opened. What I would not do is pay for a “review” brand: search the board marking instead.

FAQ

Is an 8-port 2.5GbE switch with one 10G uplink oversubscribed?

Yes, two to one on paper: eight 2.5G ports add up to 20 Gbps per direction and one SFP+ cage carries 10. It only matters when several clients push through the uplink at once. The 4-port-plus-2-SFP+ layout is the reverse, 10 Gbps of clients into 20 Gbps of uplink, so it never queues at the cage.

Are Horaco, Sodola, MokerLink and Lianguo 2.5GbE switches the same hardware?

Often, yes. The RTLPlayground firmware project records the PCB marking of each switch it has opened; its table maps 27 models from 16 brands onto 22 boards, and four boards carry 11 of the models. Horaco, Lianguo, Sodola and Xikestore all sell the SWTG024AS board. Ampcom and Horaco share SWTG018AS-A, and MokerLink and XikeStor share SWTG118AS.

Should the 10G uplink be SFP+ or 10GBASE-T copper?

SFP+ if you can run fibre or a DAC cable. Owners in the ServeTheHome and Hacker News threads report 10GBASE-T transceivers running hot enough to be uncomfortable to touch in fanless cages, and a copper module added 1.7 W in the keepLink measurement. Copper-uplink models (YuanLey, one Horaco board, TRENDnet’s currently unavailable TEG-S762) exist for buildings that already have Cat6.

Method and sources: the 29-row scope is the supported-devices table in logicog/RTLPlayground, read raw on 2026-09-05; model, board and managed counts are mine from that table, and the shared-board claim rests on RTLPlayground documenting several products against one board page, not on my opening any unit. Chip identifications are ServeTheHome teardowns, linked inline and dated 2023 to 2025; RTLPlayground’s README describes the 16-port units as four RTL8372 chips where ServeTheHome’s photos say RTL8373-CG, and I have used the teardown. The firmware-sharing evidence is the up-n-atom/SWTG118AS write-up; I have not repeated its password strings here. Brand specs are from the vendor pages linked in the text; the Zyxel store showed only a euro price, the Realtek product page returned an empty template, and TRENDnet’s TEG-S762 page returned an availability notice rather than a spec. The capacity chart is arithmetic on port counts, not a throughput test. Owner quotes are from the linked Hacker News thread via the Algolia API and from ServeTheHome reviews, forum and comments; I did not verify any of them. I own none of these switches and have never run one. Some links are affiliate links (Amazon Associates, five new IDs registered for this post); any commission lands on the public ledger.