# What is the point of two Ethernet ports on my motherboard?



## Phusius (Jul 13, 2012)

If I hook two lines up from my router to both ports does that mean my internet and download speeds will be faster?


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## _JP_ (Jul 13, 2012)

No.
It means that if your motherboard (and your router) supports double-teaming for those ports, bandwidth will be almost doubled.
If not, it just means you have two ethernet ports on your motherboard which you can plug both to the router and have them that way.
At best you can specify what goes trough which port.


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## Phusius (Jul 13, 2012)

How do I know if it supports double teaming.  Can you help me?  

My mother is the Asus Z68 Deluxe NON-gen3 version, and my router is the Belkin N600 DB, and I pay for a 24mbs fiber optic internet each month.


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## mlee49 (Jul 13, 2012)

Surely your motherboard came with an owners manual, have you referenced there?

The manufacture may have details to benefits as to why they placed multiple ports on your board.


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## lindy (Jul 13, 2012)

> What is the point of two Ethernet ports on my motherboard?



Networking...



> If I hook two lines up from my router to both ports does that mean my internet and download speeds will be faster?



Nope...

And, yes I can be a real smart ***


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## Frag_Maniac (Jul 13, 2012)

Dual LAN MBs are more often used for dual network connectivity and/or daisy chaining network connections, as per in an office or home office environment.

Your bandwidth is going to be limited by the ISP speed you have. Having a dual LAN MB can't really change that.

If none of the above applies to you, the only actual use you may get out of the 2nd LAN port is redundancy, meaning having a backup in case the first fails for some reason.


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## The Von Matrices (Jul 13, 2012)

I learned this recently, but teaming does not exactly double bandwidth.  You can transfer data at only 1 Gb/s to each IP address, but if you transfer to more than one IP address simultaneously, then the aggregate bandwidth can exceed 1Gb/s.  This means it's great for servers that serve many clients simultaneously but is less useful for home users who usually only transfer to one client at a time.

Before you even do this, you need a router or switch that supports teaming.  And it won't speed up your internet connectivity unless you have a fiber line to your residence that supports over 1000Mbps (most likely not).


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## _JP_ (Jul 13, 2012)

Eh, I was in doubt that it was something like that...wasn't too far off. And I should have said the doubled bandwidth was theoretical.
Still, his download speeds are still limited first by his ISP (in this case, 24Mbps) and second by the server from where he is downloading, be it either by rule or distance.
The fact that the motherboard has two ethernet ports won't improve that.


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## ThE_MaD_ShOt (Jul 13, 2012)

Back in the day we used to put 2 Ethernet cards in one rig. We would hook the cable modem up to one and the other to a network switch. Fast easy router. Guess you can do the same and instead of hooking the modem to one nic you can hook it to the router and the other to a switch and share the net connection to allow access to more rigs.


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## AlienIsGOD (Jul 13, 2012)

i knew having 2 ports on my old Gigabyte EP45 DS4P were pretty much useless for the regular user.


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## phanbuey (Jul 13, 2012)

so that you can have two Ethernets. duh. 

That's like asking why have two women in bed... don't ask - just stick your cable in there and envy your router for all of the action it's getting.


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## Mussels (Jul 13, 2012)

to keep it simple, your two network ports are for the use of connecting to two networks at the same time.


there is no purpose to them for 99.9% of home users.


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## Elmo (Jul 13, 2012)

You can set one for upstream and the other for down stream or both to way. You can double your Lan throughput but you wont double your wan throughput


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## phanbuey (Jul 13, 2012)

or you can double your mint.


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## brandonwh64 (Jul 13, 2012)

mussels has the main use for it. At work we use these to connect a PC to its own private network then the other would be for a VPN connection to allow third party venders to remote control and fix the machine in times of need.


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## v12dock (Jul 13, 2012)

You will love it someday when one of them dies


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## The Von Matrices (Jul 13, 2012)

Elmo said:


> You can set one for upstream and the other for down stream or both to way. You can double your Lan throughput but you wont double your wan throughput



The ports are already full duplex, so one of them can simultaneously transmit 1000Mbps up and 1000Mbps down; you don't need two to do that.


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## Frag_Maniac (Jul 13, 2012)

v12dock said:


> You will love it someday when one of them dies



Redundancy is the least plausible reason to go dual LAN by far. Chances are one port will outlive the life of the upgrade cycle. They don't easily die with heavy use like disc burners do.


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## Deleted member 3 (Jul 13, 2012)

Phusius said:


> How do I know if it supports double teaming.  Can you help me?
> 
> My mother is the Asus Z68 Deluxe NON-gen3 version, and my router is the Belkin N600 DB, and I pay for a 24mbs fiber optic internet each month.



Not relevant, your router is very unlikely to support it, and even if it does there is no reason to connect to your router faster.


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## Jetster (Jul 13, 2012)

Is it just me or is it obvious its for two networks. Two cat5 cables to a router is just not logical. You would have to have SSDs to use that speed at both ends. Besides routers are only 1000Mbs the same a one cat5, right?


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## TIGR (Jul 13, 2012)

Frag Maniac said:


> Redundancy is the least plausible reason to go dual LAN by far. Chances are one port will outlive the life of the upgrade cycle. They don't easily die with heavy use like disc burners do.



True, however I was just saved by having two ethernet ports when one on my one of my servers failed. This is not statistically significant but it's true that if it does, you'll be glad to have two.


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## Aquinus (Jul 13, 2012)

At work I use two NICs. One is on the internal network which is where some of our servers are, the other goes right to the internet using a static ip for testing. That external IP is setup so I can test and develop SAML 2.0 SSO with Google without impacting anyone else (netmasking on just that ip) and so I can tell if a slowdown is actually our network and not the ISP. The internal IP gives me access to everything without having to use tunnels or use web traffic when I could be working locally.


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## Frag_Maniac (Jul 14, 2012)

Jetster said:


> Is it just me or is it obvious its for two networks.


Already been said in so many words, but that's just one of the normal uses. Daisy chaining would be another common one.


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## baggpipes (Jul 14, 2012)

Easy manual loopback test? :troll:


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## Delta6326 (Jul 14, 2012)

I always thought you could have one from router to PC then other port go to something like an xbox.


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## Aquinus (Jul 14, 2012)

Delta6326 said:


> I always thought you could have one from router to PC then other port go to something like an xbox.



You can, that's call a network bridge.


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## Phusius (Jul 14, 2012)

That is neat, I didn't know that thanks Aquinus and Delta for asking.  I might do that with my PS3 instead of using the wireless now.  xD


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## Kreij (Jul 14, 2012)

I have one NIC port set for local LAN subnet and the other set for 192.168.1.x
That way if I need to replace a router or other device that comes with the default network set to 192.168.1.1 (which many of them do), I don't have to change settings on my machine to reconfigure the device to work with the existing LAN.


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## Aquinus (Jul 14, 2012)

Phusius said:


> That is neat, I didn't know that thanks Aquinus and Delta for asking.  I might do that with my PS3 instead of using the wireless now.  xD



If you don't know how, this might help: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/Create-a-network-bridge


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## Mussels (Jul 14, 2012)

Phusius said:


> That is neat, I didn't know that thanks Aquinus and Delta for asking.  I might do that with my PS3 instead of using the wireless now.  xD



you cant do port forwards, and your PC would need to be on for the PS3 to get internet. theres a reason its not commonly used.


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## Aquinus (Jul 14, 2012)

Mussels said:


> you cant do port forwards, and your PC would need to be on for the PS3 to get internet. theres a reason its not commonly used.



I don't know about your rig, but mine is always on.


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## Mussels (Jul 14, 2012)

Aquinus said:


> I don't know about your rig, but mine is always on.



waste of power and heat, constant source of noise, etc.


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## Aquinus (Jul 14, 2012)

Mussels said:


> waste of power and heat, constant source of noise, etc.



That is why my machine lives in my home office, noise isn't that much of an issue because the AC is louder. Also I would rather know that I can access my rig at any time from anywhere since I develop off of it weather I'm home or not. So for my purposes, the convince factor outweighs noise, heat, and power consumption. Also just because no users are on a server, doesn't mean you shut it off.


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## Mussels (Jul 15, 2012)

Aquinus said:


> That is why my machine lives in my home office, noise isn't that much of an issue because the AC is louder. Also I would rather know that I can access my rig at any time from anywhere since I develop off of it weather I'm home or not. So for my purposes, the convince factor outweighs noise, heat, and power consumption. Also just because no users are on a server, doesn't mean you shut it off.



my home server is an 11W netbook. also, wake on lan.


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## swellhunter (Mar 31, 2013)

*VM use.*

Not to revive the thread, but the number one reason there are two of these (if not) more is that the vast majority of users running a single guest OS or virtual machine want a dedicated ethernet port for that machine.

The number two reason is to run a proxy on your own network, (for safety or packet sniffing your set top boxes to hack later).

Out of band KVM over ethernet is very much a server function, and in that case the port is dedicated or becomes dedicated after an add-in module is plugged in.

This is not intended to be a necro post but nobody answered the question ? .. and people may want to know....


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## Aquinus (Mar 31, 2013)

swellhunter said:


> Not to revive the thread, but the number one reason there are two of these (if not) more is that the vast majority of users running a single guest OS or virtual machine want a dedicated ethernet port for that machine.
> 
> The number two reason is to run a proxy on your own network, (for safety or packet sniffing your set top boxes to hack later).
> 
> ...



Hello, welcome to TPU!

I highly recommend starting a new thread since this one has been dead for several months. New problems should be posted as new threads. There is no shame in starting a new thread. 

Since you are responding to a dead thread, I will just say yes. You can dedicate single network adapters to a VM like how you can dedicate a full hard drive or partition to a VM as opposed to just providing it a virtual disk.

I think this depends on implementation because more often than not a VM shouldn't be using that much resources and if it is, you may not want to be running a VM.


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## Darr247 (Jan 15, 2014)

Frag Maniac said:


> Redundancy is the least plausible reason to go dual LAN by far. Chances are one port will outlive the life of the upgrade cycle. They don't easily die with heavy use like disc burners do.


 
At least one of the dual LAN ports has died before the motherboard on every dual port ASUS board I've bought over the last 8 years. Last summer, the second one died in my AMD 3GHz quad core machine and I had to use its only open PCI-e x1 slot (the other one's blocked off by the graphics card in the PCI-e x16 slot) for a gigabit NIC card.


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## Mussels (Jan 15, 2014)

Darr247 said:


> At least one of the dual LAN ports has died before the motherboard on every dual port ASUS board I've bought over the last 8 years. Last summer, the second one died in my AMD 3GHz quad core machine and I had to use its only open PCI-e x1 slot (the other one's blocked off by the graphics card in the PCI-e x16 slot) for a gigabit NIC card.



i'm glad they were useful to you, but you must have some bad wiring or bad power for them to die so often :/

also, check the dates for this thread. last post was march last year.


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## broken pixel (Jan 15, 2014)

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation


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## FreedomEclipse (Jan 15, 2014)

broken pixel said:


> http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation



Bit of a waste of time, your hub or router also  needs to support this feature also to work afaik. Also makes no difference to stardard consumer general usage. So unless you have a server that needs a lot of throughput dont bother


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## Mussels (Jan 15, 2014)

FreedomEclipse said:


> Bit of a waste of time, your hub or router also  needs to support this feature also to work afaik. Also makes no difference to stardard consumer general usage. So unless you have a server that needs a lot of throughput dont bother



and it only works if you have multiple transfers at the same time, and then its choked past the router/managed switch anyway.

so its great if you need to download two 1Gb/s links simultaneously, but kinda useless for anything that isnt multiple high speed file transfers.


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## Ja.KooLit (Jan 15, 2014)

I have tried this dual nic teaming and i didnt really see much difference...

My current MOBO supports dual teaming. I didnt see much difference because i have only 1 ISP provider. If I got two ISP's then definitely it will boost connection as NIC teaming can use two ports simultaneously.

dual LAN is also useful for file sharing within your local network wherein you can assign your one NIC for internet and one NIC for local file sharing. done that but I dont do much file sharing. but it works


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## Mussels (Jan 15, 2014)

night.fox said:


> I have tried this dual nic teaming and i didnt really see much difference...
> 
> My current MOBO supports dual teaming. I didnt see much difference because i have only 1 ISP provider. If I got two ISP's then definitely it will boost connection as NIC teaming can use two ports simultaneously.
> 
> dual LAN is also useful for file sharing within your local network wherein you can assign your one NIC for internet and one NIC for local file sharing. done that but I dont do much file sharing. but it works



its no good for WAN connections. its only useful for lan.

it doesnt do load balancing or anything fancy like that, it just offers two routes for data - so instead of two 50MB/s connections you could have two 100MB/s connections, assuming they're fast enough to actually saturate two gigabit links.

this is not going to be useful for anyone on residential connections, it is NOT designed to speed up internet use and downloads.


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## Ja.KooLit (Jan 15, 2014)

Mussels said:


> its no good for WAN connections. its only useful for lan.
> 
> it doesnt do load balancing or anything fancy like that, it just offers two routes for data - so instead of two 50MB/s connections you could have two 100MB/s connections, assuming they're fast enough to actually saturate two gigabit links.
> 
> this is not going to be useful for anyone on residential connections, it is NOT designed to speed up internet use and downloads.



? where did I mentioned about WAN?

oh it will be useful for residential connections. if you have two ISP provider and your dual NIC supports teaming, you can speed up your internet and downloads, etc etc....

by speed up means it will use the two different ISP provider's connection.


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## Mussels (Jan 15, 2014)

night.fox said:


> ? where did I mentioned about WAN?
> 
> oh it will be useful for residential connections. if you have two ISP provider and your dual NIC supports teaming, you can speed up your internet and downloads, etc etc....
> 
> by speed up means it will use the two different ISP provider's connection.



you said you could use it with two ISP's. thats WAN, and it wont work for that. you cannot use this to speed up an internet connection for the simple fact that programs (including windows) are coded to use one connection, and one connection only.


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## JunkBear (Jan 15, 2014)

Just saying that the Compaq Evo D510 P4-478 had the functionality of aggregated card. You could put another Intel PCI 100 Mbps and mix them together. Not new stuff.


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## Ja.KooLit (Jan 15, 2014)

Mussels said:


> you said you could use it with two ISP's. thats WAN, and it wont work for that. you cannot use this to speed up an internet connection for the simple fact that programs (including windows) are coded to use one connection, and one connection only.



hmmmm thats where the link aggregations comes into place.....

i think you misunderstood my meaning about "speed up" internet connection.....

assuming you have proper hardware for it, you can configure to have one connection for download and one connection for upload.......

you can do that with NIC teaming. in that way, a normal one NIC can ease off the load because it is working as 2 ways. upload and download. with dual NIC teaming, you can configure the NIC to work together. one for upload and one for download. in the end, it will be still one connection as you mentioned that windows are coded

i dont know about internet connections in other country but here in korea you can choose how much upload and download speed.

I have the option to get lets say a 50 mbps as minimum upload with 1 mbps download. then i will subscribe to another provider where its the other way around.....

in that way, with dual NIC teaming, i will have a 50mbps both download and upload. but why would a normal user do that? too costly plus if your other NIC stopped working, then you are Fucked......

I am happy with my connection at the moment, so didnt bite that option....


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## remixedcat (Jan 15, 2014)

PFSense

Also on windows server releases you can use something called Routing and Remote Access services to make a "winrouter"


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## Mussels (Jan 15, 2014)

so lets say for ease of use, you have two 10Mb by 10Mb fiber connections in a perfect world where neither one ever slows down, every download and every upload runs at maximum speed.

if you set one to up and one to down you still have... a 10/10 connection. the only way that would be of use is if you could get a 1/10 and a 10/1 connection for less than a 10/10, and link them as you mentioned.

even then things wont work right because lets say you load up a webpage and login - your upload (login) and download are going to have different IP addresses, and its not going to work. HTTPS for example will get very unhappy.


the only way this works is if you treat it like two computers on two internet connections - each program/PC can be locked to one connection and theoretically get higher maximum speeds, but in that case why are you doing it on one PC?

this is why earlier i said it makes sense for a large file server that may need multiple connections, but only for very specific scenarios - for enterprise use you'd just get 10Gb or 100Gb fiber ethernet and skip all the problems associated with one device having multiple IP addresses.


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## Ja.KooLit (Jan 15, 2014)

what im saying is that theoritically it will and if there is a problem, there is always a solution.

its too complicated that i dont even want to bother. A normal internet user like me would not even care about.


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## Mussels (Jan 15, 2014)

night.fox said:


> what im saying is that theoritically it will and if there is a problem, there is always a solution.
> 
> its too complicated that i dont even want to bother. A normal internet user like me would not even care about.



it is very complicated, and i've actually tried it. its a nightmare to setup and use. you can basically lock one port per network adaptor, and the rest is just prayer. if it worked effectively, it'd be used far more widespread than it is.

feel sorry for the OP, hope he finds out what his problem actually was.


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## Ja.KooLit (Jan 15, 2014)

Mussels said:


> it is very complicated, and i've actually tried it. its a nightmare to setup and use. you can basically lock one port per network adaptor, and the rest is just prayer. if it worked effectively, it'd be used far more widespread than it is.
> 
> feel sorry for the OP, hope he finds out what his problem actually was.




i do agree with you. although I havent tried but i did extensive reading about it for like a week and then i just gave up the idea cause meh, not worth the hassle....

right now, my rig has still 2 connections. same provider. one that is connected directly to modem and one connected to router. cause if i play online games, i just disable the NIC connected to router cause i observed that the one connected to router gives additional latency.

but if I need secure connection, then thru the router for built in firewall.


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## Jimbocous (Jan 19, 2014)

I guess maybe I have a slightly different take on this, and I'd be interested in any feedback on it. Let's say I want to host some dedicated services on my PC, such as 1) an HTTP Server, 2) an FTP server, 3) a Telnet server, 4) an SMTP server, 5) a printer server or LPD, or whatever. In each case, I'm going to use Port Forwarding on my router to send that traffic to a static IP address on my home LAN. So I could set the first NIC to DHCP on the home network as usual, set the second NIC to a static IP that the incoming server traffic described above is pointed to, and I'd be segregating at least inbound traffic to the one NIC and minimizing any impact to my normal usage by anyone hitting my servers. One would think that doing this might make providing these services less disruptive to my normal usage across the home network. Obviously, it does nothing for the throughput on the WAN side of the router, but at least if I'm moving data to other devices on my home network, don't I gain something? Also, it would be an easy way to down those services. Disable the secondary NIC and I've flipped the off-switch very easily and I'm still doing my thing.
Thoughts?


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## Mussels (Jan 19, 2014)

Jimbocous said:


> I guess maybe I have a slightly different take on this, and I'd be interested in any feedback on it. Let's say I want to host some dedicated services on my PC, such as 1) an HTTP Server, 2) an FTP server, 3) a Telnet server, 4) an SMTP server, 5) a printer server or LPD, or whatever. In each case, I'm going to use Port Forwarding on my router to send that traffic to a static IP address on my home LAN. So I could set the first NIC to DHCP on the home network as usual, set the second NIC to a static IP that the incoming server traffic described above is pointed to, and I'd be segregating at least inbound traffic to the one NIC and minimizing any impact to my normal usage by anyone hitting my servers. One would think that doing this might make providing these services less disruptive to my normal usage across the home network. Obviously, it does nothing for the throughput on the WAN side of the router, but at least if I'm moving data to other devices on my home network, don't I gain something? Also, it would be an easy way to down those services. Disable the secondary NIC and I've flipped the off-switch very easily and I'm still doing my thing.
> Thoughts?



yes, by locking a program/service to one network port you can isolate it. the catch is you cant do it dynamically, so if your FTP port was choking it cant split off half of the work to the other port.


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## jcgeny (Jan 19, 2014)

Phusius said:


> How do I know if it supports double teaming.  Can you help me?
> 
> My mother is the Asus Z68 Deluxe NON-gen3 version, and my router is the Belkin N600 DB, and I pay for a 24mbs fiber optic internet each month.


the big bug is :
LAN
Intel® 82579, 1 x Gigabit LAN Controller(s)
Realtek® 8111E , 1 x Gigabit LAN Controller(s)

you can not team them ; intel does it with its drivers but only ,at least , with 2 cards of intel . asus should have plugged the "LucidLogix® Virtu™ Technology" on the lan ;']
or simply used two chips from same manufacturer


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## Repete (Mar 9, 2015)

I need one more internet connection than my router provides. My motherboard has two NICs. Can I daisy chain the internet through my computer to get the extra port? I think I will have to bridge the two NICs together. Thanks.


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## Jimbocous (Mar 9, 2015)

Repete said:


> I need one more internet connection than my router provides. My motherboard has two NICs. Can I daisy chain the internet through my computer to get the extra port? I think I will have to bridge the two NICs together. Thanks.


It may be possible to do this. Two things. First, look at the second port in software, and see if there's an option for pass-thru. If so, you'll need to enable that. Second, you may need to have an ethernet cross-over cable, depending on what you're hooking. You would want to do this to support a device that doesnt' want much traffic, as understand that you are now adding a new traffic load to the host PC. finally, DHCP may be an issue, and if so you may need to give that external device a static IP.
Failing all that, 10/100 hubs are pretty cheap these days ...


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## Repete (Mar 9, 2015)

Thanks for the reply. I just tried this: I went to the computer with the two NICs, bridged the NICs together, and so far, I have wired access on both computers. I'm crossing my fingers! The two computers are connected with an ordinary internet cable.


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## Jimbocous (Mar 9, 2015)

Sounds like a winner.


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## Aquinus (Mar 9, 2015)

jcgeny said:


> the big bug is :
> LAN
> Intel® 82579, 1 x Gigabit LAN Controller(s)
> Realtek® 8111E , 1 x Gigabit LAN Controller(s)
> ...


Both controllers only need to support it but I can team both network cards from different vendors on my tower. The controller just has to support it.





Look at what you made me do. I replied to a necro'd thread.


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## DinaAngel (Mar 14, 2015)

Mobile USB broadband sticks can be grouped too and make your connection faster. bridged with cable internet.

I'm not tht good at networking


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## FreedomEclipse (Mar 14, 2015)

DinaAngel said:


> Mobile USB broadband sticks can be grouped too and make your connection faster. bridged with cable internet.
> 
> I'm not tht good at networking



Troll level: over 9000


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## Atomic77 (Mar 14, 2015)

Maybe its just there to make the computer more sexy lol.


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## Cybrnook2002 (Mar 17, 2015)

Was bored at work, figured I would make laugh....


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## remixedcat (Mar 18, 2015)

Server 2012 has an awesome nic teaming!! Even can use wired and wireless as a team


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## REAYTH (Mar 18, 2015)

Obviously one is for uploading and the second is for downloading.


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## rtwjunkie (Mar 18, 2015)

Of course there is another reason to get motherboards with more than one nic also, assuming you dont want to team. If one breaks, you still have another one.


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## Aquinus (Mar 19, 2015)

REAYTH said:


> Obviously one is for uploading and the second is for downloading.


Troll much? Most ethernet adapters support *full duplex operation* which means that 1Gbps ethernet can both send and receive 1Gbps for an aggregate of 2Gbps of bandwidth.

Teaming is more often used for redundancy so it can fall through to a backup network link so if one connection fails, it won't interrupt network traffic. For servers, particularly in data centers, such functionality is important. However, if you really need more bandwidth, it's more sensible to invest in 10Gbit in the form of RJ-45 or SFP transceivers via optical.


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## Tatty_One (Mar 19, 2015)

Necro'd thread, painful to watch, easy to close..... thank you.


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