Coming off of a nasty unpatched vulnerability in a number of its Nighthawk routers, Netgear is looking to give the brand a stronger 2017. To kick things off, the firm has launched a brand new S8000 Nighthawk semi-managed switch at this year’s CES, and it looks very different from the switches of yesteryear.
Sporting the matte grey, angular outer shell of its fellow Nighthawk networking hardware, the S8000 is aimed at gamers and streamers, if the marketing material is anything to go by. It features eight Gigabit Ethernet ports, and uses link aggregation to deliver connection speeds up to four gigabits per second.
To maintain its high-speed, low-latency connection, the Nighthawk S8000 offers quality-of-service management per connection and denial of service protection, too (thanks PCPer).
While it may have advanced back-end features, this switch is designed to be easy to set up and use. There is a one-click optimization system for settings and it is completely plug-and-play compatible, right out of the box. The user interface is designed to be intuitive and easy to understand, but has enough depth that those who wish to go digging for customization will find plenty to tweak.
The device comes with a three-year warranty as standard, suggesting it will stand the test of time, though it’s not quite clear when it will be released. As some have pointed out, the lack of a flat top to the casing does mean that stacking up multiples of this switch will not be possible, but this is not a switch designed with big server farms in mind.
Oddly enough, Netgear does suggest it as a good switch for use with virtual reality, though considering even a few milliseconds can impact the immersion of a scene, networked virtual reality is rarely a good recommendation, no matter how good the middle-man hardware is.
The Netgear Nighthawk S8000 will cost $100 when it is released — sometime “soon.”
