ethernet ports

[D-Rocks]

Hey Everyone, I have a question. Why does some motherboards have 2 ethernet ports?

 

[peterhuang913]

Some motherboards have two Ethernet ports so they can share their internet connection if there is only a modem and no router. There are also other uses for it, mostly related to networking.

 

[turtile]

You can run them together to get twice the speed:

2x1Gb = 2Gb connection

 

[mikesgroovin]

There are also other uses for it, mostly related to networking.

NIC Teaming (in NVIDIA's world) ... but not for speed, it's mostly for fault tolerance and network load balancing . If you really wanted to gain the 2x speed benefits, then just one computer with "NIC teaming" active going into a 100mb or even 1gb switch would be pointless....

Let's face it... common gaming or other personal use motherboards are coming with 2 NICs for an idea of "practical use". companies aren't going to expect people to be running a 24 ported, layer 3 switch in their home thats capable of trunking 2 ports, therefore allowing this capable and theoretical "2gb" connection speed. They are thinking of more practical uses:

1) Sharing your Interwebs (ICS)
2) NIC Teaming

...............

Dump the "2x the speed"....it's just silly. Even if you had two computers side by side, had 2 NICs in each and had CAT6 going to each... data WOULD NOT travel at 2gb/s...it wouldn't even come close.

 

[peterhuang913]

You can run them together to get twice the speed:

2x1Gb = 2Gb connection

You're funny, but I like it.

 

[Drewser]

Sarcasm at its finest haha

 

[forest]

you could use it with smoothwall to provide a firewall for your house. (smoothwall is a linux distribution that provides many networking and security packages. it is geared for firewalls, and content filtering but it will also do dhcp and many other things.)