Dual Gigabit Ethernet?

Just curious... is dual gigabit ethernet going to be at all useful for a home gaming PC?

Obviously the answer is no if I'm connecting over the internet (since my DSL will be, by far, the limiting factor), however I'm planning a LAN party, so will have other people hooked up via a gigabit switch. I do have the fastest computer of the group, so I'll likely be hosting most of the games on my machine... but even so, is anything likely to bog down a single gigabit ethernet connection?

I know it's mostly for high end servers that need to handle hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of connections at a time... just curious if it's anything more than male reproductive organ waving for me to use up two ports on the ethernet switch. (not that I have anything against MRO waving... I may still do it for that reason alone... just wondering if there will be a benefit )

-Nate

Seeing as games are designed to work over as little as a dialup connection...gigabit is several orders of magnitude more than will even matter to it.

Well, it will also allow you to host a game and upload files to whatever your harddrive max out for transfer rates without a problem. Figure gigabit will hit about 100MB/s with tcp/ip overheard, even if a game requires, 1MB/s for 64 people, you should be set no problem and you can still share without an issue. So on that note it is useful, and not a bad thing to have.

It won't be that useful unless all the people who are at the lanparty have gigabit NICs. A 100mb connection is more than enough for a LAN. I believe all games are designed to run on a LAN connection of 100mb/s.

...Dan

Reasons I want dual gigabit ethernet:
1. If one dies or has problems, I have another port I can use. As is the case with my current rig (see sig)... I can't install nvidia's ethernet driver with out adding a ton of lag to my games.
2. I transfer mutiple gigs of files over my lan, over a gigabit switch to another gigabit machine. What used to take 40min to transfer, takes like 7min now. It's also nice when friends have gigabit, they can plug in and transfer much faster. One time, before gigabit, backing up my friend's harddrive took so long we had time to go out, eat, come back and it still wasn't finnished.

Want to see real dick waving, check this out: http://www.intel.com/network/connectivity/products/pro10GbE_SR_server_adapter.htm

Now if I had a server & switch that could handle it, I would think about getting one

I'd wave my dick right back at that thing...

You will not be bogged down by a single Gb adapter. Adding the second adapter in your case would probably have zero impact. If there was impact I think it'd be more likely a negative one by introducing complexity and additional routing choices for both your client and the switch. You'll still only host on one NIC unless you use some sort of load balancing, which is great for webservers, but I can't recall anyone ever saying doing so for gaming servers was a good idea.

In fact, from a gaming server's perspective I'll bet you couldn't tell the difference between a Gigibit vs. 100Mbit.

More likely is the notion that you will notice lag if you are hosting the game on a system that is actually being used to play the game. You'd be better off saving your money for a dedicated server box designed to host games. The good news on a dedicated server is that you don't have to buy an expensive video card. Built-in VGA is just fine. You also don't need much disk. Just a good CPU and sufficient memory is all that you need. You can build a dedicated server a lot more cheaply than a gaming machine.

Good luck.