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Are two gigabyte ethernet lan better than one

C

count5by5

Member
I am looking at the gigabyte boards for my first build,and all but the one,which is the one I liked has only one lan . Could someone tell me because it's killing me if I buy the one without the extra lan. ,And why would you have two lan's anyway. Easy on me now!
 
You're not going to be using both (simultaneous) most likely if you're wondering. The only "advantage" I would see is if one failed, you could use the other one as backup.
 
There is no real reason to have two NICs in a consumer home system. There are some technologies that let you aggregate the bandwidth, which would increase the total number of connections (but not double the bandwidth, as you might think), but they are generally reserved for high-end, enterprise equipment.

In short, forget that your motherboard even has two NICs on it.
 
The only real useful thing is that you can set up internet connection sharing between the two and use the pc with two nics as a psuedo switch. It is sorta useful when you are at a friends house lanning and are out of long ethernet cables or switch ports.

it would look like

internet----router----pc1 nic1----pc1 nic2 (shared)----pc2
 
dual onboard ethernets work well for server 2008 with hyperv. in a windows 7/visita/xp environment, they are all but useless.
 
I find it useful if you use a virtual machine, like Virtual PC or VirtualBox to have a dedicated ethernet port for the Host and a Client OS.
 
count5by5 said:
I am looking at the gigabyte boards for my first build,and all but the one,which is the one I liked has only one lan . Could someone tell me because it's killing me if I buy the one without the extra lan. ,And why would you have two lan's anyway. Easy on me now!
Click to expand...

Yap, they are useful in creating a None functional Dilemma like that one that you experience now.

Otherwise.

drebo said:
There is no real reason to have two NICs in a consumer home system. There are some technologies that let you aggregate the bandwidth, which would increase the total number of connections (but not double the bandwidth, as you might think), but they are generally reserved for high-end, enterprise equipment.

In short, forget that your motherboard even has two NICs on it.
Click to expand...

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ccbadd said:
I find it useful if you use a virtual machine, like Virtual PC or VirtualBox to have a dedicated ethernet port for the Host and a Client OS.
Click to expand...

That's how I use my second ethernet port too (client/server engaged in co-operative processing)! The client only needs to talk to the server. There's no reason to load my main network with traffic from the client, so a second ethernet port on the server works out well. Generally I would say, if your build ever gets pressed into server duty down the line, the ability to simultaneously connect to two, different networks may prove useful.

Sure, you'll probably still have a PCI slot available to add a NIC card. Having two ports available on the motherboard however is a bit easier and maintains flexibility.
 
drebo said:
There is no real reason to have two NICs in a consumer home system. There are some technologies that let you aggregate the bandwidth, which would increase the total number of connections (but not double the bandwidth, as you might think), but they are generally reserved for high-end, enterprise equipment.

In short, forget that your motherboard even has two NICs on it.
Click to expand...

I usually disable one in the bios unless the other one craps out.
 
Having dual gigabit lan on your motherboard lets you turn your desktop into a router 5 years from now. 😛
That was the fate of my old desktop with dual gigabit lans.
 
Along this topic... i could of sworn if you have two of the same intel gigabit nics, on two computers (one sending one recieving) and a supporting switch, you could do intel "teaming" with intel software, which would let you send and recieve files on the lan at 2 Gbps, provided your storage hardware on both ends can read and write at that speed.

I've been considering putting an intel dual-port pci-e gigabit nic in both my file server and my i7, but i'm not sure if it would work like i think it would, any input?

I'm currently maxing out gigabit over copper @ 98% and my storage on either end isn't maxed at all.
 
kithylin said:
Along this topic... i could of sworn if you have two of the same intel gigabit nics, on two computers (one sending one recieving) and a supporting switch, you could do intel "teaming" with intel software, which would let you send and recieve files on the lan at 2 Gbps, provided your storage hardware on both ends can read and write at that speed.

I've been considering putting an intel dual-port pci-e gigabit nic in both my file server and my i7, but i'm not sure if it would work like i think it would, any input?

I'm currently maxing out gigabit over copper @ 98% and my storage on either end isn't maxed at all.
Click to expand...

Only if it's multiple computers or sessions to the single host. It depends on the switch on how it distributes them and even with muliple computers or sessions it can go over only one link. It doesn't do load balancing, it does a XOR operation on the mac, ip or layer4 ports to select which link to use.

It doesn't combine them into a single link, just a logical single link with multiple physical paths. Very common misconception with link aggregation, folks think it is just a bigger "pipe" but it's not.
 
I use the onboard NICs for internet with nothing but IPv4 bound to the adapter. Then I've got Intel NIC's in each box for my small network with IPv4 and file sharing bound.

I love my Intel NICs.
 
spidey07 said:
Only if it's multiple computers or sessions to the single host. It depends on the switch on how it distributes them and even with muliple computers or sessions it can go over only one link. It doesn't do load balancing, it does a XOR operation on the mac, ip or layer4 ports to select which link to use.

It doesn't combine them into a single link, just a logical single link with multiple physical paths. Very common misconception with link aggregation, folks think it is just a bigger "pipe" but it's not.
Click to expand...

So there's no way to go faster than gigabit on a ethernet lan for a single file transfer?
 
spidey07. You mean that if I put 4 Intel Giga Cards in one computer, and 4 Intel Giga Cards in a second computer.

Then connect each NIC with a cable to an NIC in the other computer. I can not get Transfer of 4Gb/sec. (500MB/sec.). Wow single 1GB file in 2 sec.

I do not get it, it works when you connect 4 pipes between two water Towers.
 
JackMDS said:
spidey07. You mean that if I put 4 Intel Giga Cards in one computer, and 4 Intel Giga Cards in a second computer.

Then connect each NIC with a cable to an NIC in the other computer. I can not get Transfer of 4Gb/sec. (500MB/sec.). Wow single 1GB file in 2 sec.

I do not get it, it works when you connect 4 pipes between two water Towers.
Click to expand...

i really thought that's how it would work too. It wouldn't do this even if for instance i had 4 cross-over cables without a switch it still won't do that?

I do have two dual-port intel Pro-100 cards here at home, i should try it with the cross-over later and see what happens, just for fun.
 
You can get 2 separate internet connections for each port; just like having a RAID HDD setup.
On xp and Vista, it didn't really work well but with Windows 7, it works quite well. That's at least what I heard from a guy on 100mb x2 connection.
 
Cattykit said:
You can get 2 separate internet connections for each port; just like having a RAID HDD setup.
On xp and Vista, it didn't really work well but with Windows 7, it works quite well. That's at least what I heard from a guy on 100mb x2 connection.
Click to expand...

Networking (and TCP in particular, let alone IP) doesn't work like that.
 
drebo said:
There is no real reason to have two NICs in a consumer home system. There are some technologies that let you aggregate the bandwidth, which would increase the total number of connections (but not double the bandwidth, as you might think), but they are generally reserved for high-end, enterprise equipment.

In short, forget that your motherboard even has two NICs on it.
Click to expand...

I disagree, but i run a router/firewall on my home server so i need 2 NIC's. lots of people run home servers nowadays.
 
i found that when the system was loaded with traffic (50meg of ip video, 75 meg of hdhomerun) plus other apps like media center running. one nic would start having issues. could never figure it out, but adding a second nic to the hdhomerun settled the problem. speed didn't matter (had it all at 1000, then 100).

could be interrupt overloading or buffers were being saturated by so much going to one boxen.

or just some screwed up drivers.
 
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