Dual NICs = Faster?

[LordFett]

I have an ASUS A8N-SLI Premium 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard and it has two NICs, a Yukon and nVidia for Dual 10/100/1000Mbps. If both are hooked up would it increase my connection? Such as allowing one for tx and one for rx? Or would it be used to connect one to the network and one to the internet?

[ripken204]

the main purpose is one to network and one to interent. if you had 2 separate internet connections then you could do that too, but that would yield much of a performance increase.

[redxii]

AFAIK with one NIC you already have 2 transmit and 2 receive pins.

A more practical use is setting up a router or Internet Connection Sharing where one NIC is the "internet port" and the other goes to a switch to connect other computers or just connect one.

[ripken204]

ya that is another possibility as well. but everywhere i have said is that the second one is meant for connecting to internal networks.

[rendrag]

I honestly don't know why these motherboard manufacturers are putting 2 nics on a consumer/enthusiast boards. You could technically bridge the network connections and that would "double" your throughput, but unless that computer will be a server, you will never soak a single gigabit nic enough to warrant a second. You're more likely to be limited by the hard drive in the device than the network it's connected to.

Most times dual nics are for redundancy, i.e. 1 nic goes to 1 switch, the other goes to a 2nd switch. That way if 1 switch goes down, the server's network connection doesn't go down with it.