I agree on what you said…the really good sweetspots aren’t there yet. The 12 port Mikrotik one is really nice though,. Price makes this unattractive to the masses esp. for entry level 10G. And I doubt we’ll see a lot of movement as long as most boards and products still ship with 1G networking with some slowly adopting 2.5G. People around me have faster WAN than LAN nowadays.
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I wholeheartedly agree with your points about power consumption; I wasn’t aiming to discuss efficiency. Based on the context of the conversation I made some assumptions about the needs of the OP.
I acknowledge Mikrotik’s impressive value, a testament to our evolving market. While I might not be completely updated on the most recent equipment, I delved into this subject about five months ago with a friend who is a network engineer. We struggled to find alternatives with similar capabilities at Mikrotik’s price.
I managed to repurpose a switch from an older-generation dual Xeon system, which was part of an old CFD solver, free of charge. I have also offloaded similar motherboard and CPU sets at such minimal prices that the effort to list them hardly seemed worthwhile. This led me to believe that for moderate switching loads, a DIY solution could be viable.
Moreover, I find that building and configuring your own system offers a fun learning experience. If you haven’t done it before or are in the learning phase, I would highly recommend trying it.
edit: I just read your second post, and some of those options were unavailable at my time of research or are still unavailable in our market (Japan) or are significantly more expensive than your market, so apologize if I misled anyone as a result.
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Amen, but depending where you live (and how much you pay for power) recommending repurposed old hardware has gotten less and less an option … a 10 year old server that you get for free or less than 100USD will consume 250w at idle and 350-400w when pushing packets, and while it is a wonderful learning platform (if only to teach you patience waiting for the damn thing to boot, and to think twice before triggering a reboot 
) it wil draw 8KwH/day, that means 120USD/month-1400USD/year at current power prices here in Italy …
Even in cheap markets the move can be worhtwhile.
I am slowly decommissioning all my DDR3 based equipment and moving over to DDR4 based Tiny Mini Micro systems specifically to reduce heat, noise, and power. while I wont have as much ram, or as many threads as I used to I should at minimum net similar performance overall.
I find that Mikrotik is perfect for most homelab and SBE installs because it has a robust feature set, reasonable support and documentation, great value, and it honestly works.
The low power aspect is just a bonus. I have a mix of reused enterprise and new equipment and Mikrotik is by far the bit I am happiest with. Now if only they could make reasonable full rack 2.5g POE switches…
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Oh but you can buy one from Ruckus right now only 10K …:
Ruckus ICX 7550-24ZP Switch
ICX 7550-24ZP Switch - 12-port 10/100/1000/2500 Mbps 802.3bt POE - 12-port 100/1000/2500/5000/10000 Mbps 802.3bt POE- 4-port 10GbitSFP+ - 4x40 or 2x100Gbit QSFP28 -
99W idle,1100W full poe load
Support license required
I want this, in 2.5g
My ideal would be a 2.5g switch with POE and 25g uplink
and a 10 or 25g SFP+ switch.
I have about 10 SFP+ 10g devices, as well as 1x 10gTx that I can slap a cheep RJ45 converter into a normal cage with some extra cooling.
Then I have 4x 2.5g devices, and 10 POE devices, but I expect that will go up.
a POE 2.5g x 48 port switch + a 16-24port SFP+ switch would be amazing for meeting my current needs and growth.
Marvel released a newer generation switch chip than the one that switch unit uses about a year ago, so Id expect products to start releasing that use it soon.
The 98DX3520 chip is the model with 24 ports of 2.5g
98DX3530 is a 48 port switch chip, and both models have 25gb uplinks in the chip as well.
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If you just want cheap switching on 10g with a decent number of ports before I did a faster network, I had a quanta LB6M from ebay for about $250. It was ex amazon gear, probably from 2009 ish still had their maintenance labels on it. Are there things out now that outperform that on cost performance? I went completely Infiniband after this which is on a totally different price scale, very cheap per bandwidth.
I cut open the top case to adapt 120mm PWM fans. Used a lot of power and made a lot of heat but it was cheap. Solved the noise problem and tested at full load without issues.
I think it was with the Brocade firmware hack that it even supported RDMA.
How about:
64-Ports of QSFP+ 40GB for $250.00 +sh
Or 48x 10GbE SFP+ & 4x QSFP for $80 +sh
That is crazy, wow.