Dual Gigabit LAN - WHY?

J

JOSHSKORN

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 29, 2007
Messages
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Can someone tell me what the purpose for having a dual gigabit LAN would be? That is, having two LAN ports on your motherboard as I saw in a new MSI P67 model. I can see it for sharing your LAN through your computer if you don't have access to the router. Otherwise, is there another reason? Inform me. :)
 
Basically you can double your throughput of your LAN connection if your hardware supports (switch with 802.3ad or LACP) it and for redundancy (one port fails, the traffic is routed through the other port).

Example:

NIC 1-------------------------------> Gigabit Switch port 1 (same switch for both nics)
NIC 2-------------------------------> Gigabit Switch port 2

Now you have a 2 Gbps connection instead of a 1Gbps connection.

Here's a link for further info.
 
Thanks, TooEasy!. I will read up on this. Will this have an impact on gaming as a client? I can probably see where as a gaming server/host it might benefit in terms of load balancing.
 
I don't think it would make much difference on gaming for a client. But, if you're transferring data to a server it helps. I was able to move files around, and stream a blue-ray rip with no issues. Granted, my server also has dual gig NIC's.
 
JOSHSKORN said:
Thanks, TooEasy!. I will read up on this. Will this have an impact on gaming as a client? I can probably see where as a gaming server/host it might benefit in terms of load balancing.
Click to expand...

There will be zero affect on gaming, on a LAN or the internet. Gaming doesn't use that much bandwidth and your internet connection is the choke point anyway.

It is best used if that system is a server hosting media files. Multiple systems could stream high quality video without the server choking it's network connection.
 
Connect to multiple networks on different subnets.
 
Dual NICs are largely pointless at home. Streaming doesn't even come close to saturating a gig link.

Sometimes it's nice to have a dedicated LAN port for a VM or something though.
 
I still believe that putting dual NIC's on gaming motheboards is just an excuse to raise the price. There is no reason... none.. for it.
 
Keep in mind that NIC teaming does nothing for a 1:1 transfer. So let's say you have two teamed NICs in your workstation and two NICs teamed in your home file server. When you copy a file between those two systems you'll still max out at 1Gb. A connection gets hashed over one link..it's not true load balancing. It's what I call load distribution. Now..if you had two workstations talking to that file server at the same time the file server then you could use both NICs at once on the file server. So each client would see a max of 1Gb and the file server would see 2Gb. To speed up 1:1 connections you really need a faster link..like 10Gb or you have to get crazy with diff IPs on diff NICs and an app that understands all that and will do multiple connections from diff IPs or MAC address (depending on the switch/host hashing type).
 
So your saying that NIC teaming and link aggregation are two different things?
 
TooEasy! said:
So your saying that NIC teaming and link aggregation are two different things?
Click to expand...

Same thing, diff names USUALLY. Some people will say that NIC failover is also teaming. That's why normally I use link aggregation but not everyone does. Both do not help a 1:1 transfer.
 
I've used dual nics to extend the network to a laptop or another device when I didn't have a switch.

Switch -> Desktop -> Laptop.
 
It can be useful for many things, such as teaming like already mentioned. Mostly for servers. no need for gaming - your internet connection will be the bottleneck anyway, unless you have FIOS, and even then.

Another thing it can be useful for if in complex environments where you want a machine to have access to two different networks. Say you do lot of work with VMs, you might want to be able to access one of the private vmnets, for example. Or if that PC is turned into a firewall, then you need two nics. Lot of other stuff as well.
 
With dual NIC, you can use the PC as a router. Though generally you wouldn't need gigabit for the WAN port. If you are double NATing it to create separate networks then you might want a gigabit WAN port for your "inner" network to connect all the clients on it to the outer network.
 
All my desktops have at least two NICs in them, some have more.

Usually I run like this.
1 for LAN connection
1 for VMware Workstation / Player virtualization (having a single physical NIC has some advantages)
1 for my backup LAN (A gigabit network in my studio/office used to backup all PCs to a eSATA enclosure)
1 for my Work network (I have a VLAN setup that talks directly to a DMZ interface on my firewall that has a point to point VPN with my office, much easier then having VPN clients everywhere or logging into a terminal server).

So as you can see there are many reasons to have a dual NIC motherboard. There is also Teaming/Aggregation, however as stated before on a home network it isn't really needed. The only NICs in my house I have teamed are my servers as they serve lots of clients at the same time and need a larger pipe to be able to talk to everyone at the same time.
 
Most Motherboards come with two because they suck and the maker knows one will crap out in the not to distant future!

Other than that, teaming is an option lol
 
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