sitheris
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2004
- Messages
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I've seen a lot of these new motherboards that have 2 on-board NICs...just wondering what the purpose of this is? Is there someway to get 2x the bandwidth?
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Hoof said:Isnt windows vista supposed to support multiple internet connections
{NcsO}ReichstaG said:lol,
I originally thought people use them to connect to two internets. Like you order one DSL (SBC) and one cable (Comcast) and connect them both up in order to allow you to do more things at the same time. Like, use the DSL to download files while playing internet games on the Cable connection
paintb4707 said:redundancy
Format _C: said:I have two Nics I my Motherboard A7N8X Deluxe 3Com or Nvidia (Reatek) Which one is better to use?
ChingChang said:I use both of them on my comp. Internet connected directly to my computer, then my other computer to this one with a crossover cable.
HHunt said:edit: I don't like nVidia NICs, btw. I've seen or had assorted kinds of trouble with them, so I'd recommend 3com instead if you already have both.
HHunt said:edit: I don't like nVidia NICs, btw. I've seen or had assorted kinds of trouble with them, so I'd recommend 3com instead if you already have both.
Met-AL said:The nVidia one on the NF2 is better. Uses virtually no CPU where as the 3com one does. It's also autosensing so you do not need a crossover cable if you are connecting two PC's together. The 3Com was put on there for brand recognition for the corp market. Too bad it never panned out that way.
More info here: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=1731&p=4
1) The 3Com MAC supports IP, TCP and UDP Checksum offloads while the NVIDIA MAC does not.
2) The 3Com drivers include diagnostics software for DOS and Windows (a huge plus with the corporate community) while the NVIDIA drivers do not have that functionality yet.
3) The NVIDIA MAC supports interrupt moderation resulting in lower CPU utilization, the 3Com MAC does not.
HHunt said:It makes it very much neater to make a router, since you can get away with no cards at all.
I use two ISA 10 Mbit-cards in my router right now (and a PCI graphics card). Having everything integrated would make it much smaller. The ideal hardware would be a fanless Via mini-ITX - board with two NICs, but my trusty P2-300 will do for a while longer.
edit: I don't like nVidia NICs, btw. I've seen or had assorted kinds of trouble with them, so I'd recommend 3com instead if you already have both.
Orinthical said:Others have stated this already but the most common use for dual NIC's is teaming, not ICS or routing. Most big brand NIC's, Broadcom, Intel, even some realtek based cards support Adaptive Load Balancing or some form of fault tolerance.)
YeOldeStonecat said:How common is that with consumer based boards? The statement "most common use for dual NICs". We're talking about consumer based boards here, not Compaq Teaming or Cisco teaming enterprise gear. And based on the manufacturers advertisements for these consumer boards, even they say "2x NICs for ICS", and many of them such as the nForce boards have NAT/Router features built into the BIOS...the usual web admin almost like a DStink/Stinksys/Nutgear router.
sitheris said:Another question - what's the point of turning a PC into a router...why not just buy an actual router?
sitheris said:Another question - what's the point of turning a PC into a router...why not just buy an actual router?
/network noob
Whoever gets the motherboard can do all they want, but the manufacturers didn't really have a purpose set in mind (as least I don't think)... If they did, it CERTAINLY wasn't teaming or load balancing, because these boards are totally not marketed towards the server crowd. Dead horse, though.Orinthical said:Very common, especially when the board has dual intel or broadcom nic's. If they are mismatched then you may still be able to do something with them depending on the type of NIC they are.
And from experience with intel cards on consumer level switches you don't necessarily need a cisco or compaq/hp switch to notice a marked improvement in bandwidth.
I'm simply answering the question - "Dual NICs on motherboard - purpose?" - the most common use for them is load balancing or just plain failover redundancy. Period. I'm looking at the large picture of the purpose for having dual NICs on a motherboard, not just what the latest consumer fad may be.
And the last line of my post said, "It's yours... do with it what you want." If you want to use them for ICS, go for it.
Orinthical said:I'm simply answering the question - "Dual NICs on motherboard - purpose?" - the most common use for them is load balancing or just plain failover redundancy. Period. I'm looking at the large picture of the purpose for having dual NICs on a motherboard, not just what the latest consumer fad may be.
And the last line of my post said, "It's yours... do with it what you want." If you want to use them for ICS, go for it.
YeOldeStonecat said:I guess that's were we can agree to disagree.
I've done a few "teaming" setups on servers, (IE Compaq and Cisco) but that's more on the enterprise level. Having been exposed to the enterprise/business, and small business network market for quite some time as a consultant/VAR, I've yet to see failover redundancy for NICs even take off in popularity.
I'd say the % of dual NIC boards sold out there have been sold to the consumer "do it youself" market..IE nVidia chipset mobo's, etc. And certainly AMD CPU rigs are not a high percentage share in the enterprise workstation market.
From nVidia's own website describing their DualLan technology.
"Connectivity: With DualNet, the industrys only dual networking architecture to support simultaneous local-area network (LAN) and wide-area network (WAN) connections"
Also taking a peek at the web admin of the Active Armor firewall technology (part of DualNet/DualLan) nVidia implemented, it's geared at running as a router, WAN/LAN NICs.
Bottom line, I certainly don't use ICS, I hate software methods of sharing, unless it's Microsofts ISA Server.
What evidence do you have for this? And what purpose would the average user have for Ether channel operations?Orinthical said:Others have stated this already but the most common use for dual NIC's is teaming, not ICS or routing. Most big brand NIC's, Broadcom, Intel, even some realtek based cards support Adaptive Load Balancing or some form of fault tolerance.
But regardless - you can do whatever you want with your two NIC's... they're yours. =)
feigned said:It's for connecting to different networks, no more no less.
You don't magically gain more bandwidth by plugging both into the same network either. You may seperate the connections but 100Mbps or 1Gbps twice over is still just that...
HHunt said:Right. As I would probably run FreeBSD on it if I did anything that generated a lot of traffic, the tables might shift a bit. IIRC the 3com drivers support polling (as opposed to interrupt driven mode), which negates 3). The nv drivers are, to be nice, "less mature" as well.
Assuming that there aren't any notable bugs left in the chipset (they mention fixing one), it should be enough to make the 3com chip the better choice.
Assuming windows, however, you're probably right.
(Did nvidia get over the bug where enabling some offloading caused abysmal performance in WoW?)
sitheris said:Another question - what's the point of turning a PC into a router...why not just buy an actual router?
/network noob