2 NICs better than one?

[Negative Decibel]

Would I get 2x the bandwidth if I use both of the onbord Gb NIC's on my motherbord?
I have a small home network (4-5 computers) with a shared DSL conection all conected to a 16 port hub. Would there be even a theoretical improvement atall? I cant thing of any other use for the extra nic, so why not run 2 cables to the hub??

 

[Dew]

If you were running *nix and the hub was a switch that supported port aggregation, yes.

Then again, your hub is probably not gigabit, you're not running linux, your hub doesn't support port aggregation, your internet connection is limited by your dsl, and your transfer speeds are limited by the slowest link(HDD+network stack on an all gigabit lan).

So in a realistic sense, no.

What you can do is upgrade to a gigabit switch, make sure that a gigabit NIC is in every computer. This way most of your lan transfers should average 160+ MBits (~20MBytes/sec) versus the 80-90MBits you max out at now going to a 100MBit computer.