I have an Asus A8N-SLI Premium Retail it has dual onboard NICs. My last Asus had the same thing, on both I have only ever used one. If I were to use both would it improve my connection speed? (Not that it is a problem now, but every little bit helps)

no. It does not support teaming of the two.

no. It does not support teaming of the two.

Then what is the point of the second? Ability to be on two different LANs at once?

[edit]Ok I just read about the dual NICs and they're to use as a gateway.[/edit]

Edited March 6, 200620 yr by LordFett

yes, two lans at once. i tired this yesterday on my dfi nf4 ultra-d b/c someone else had this same question. and only 1 of my nics was reporting usage in task manager.

Some NICs support methods of teaming, load balancing, and/or failvoer via the drivers (all Intel Server Adapters support these features). Using the Intel driver features it "teams" the adapters to make a single connection for the OS (think of a set of RAID'ed drives, you only get the one drive). The driver and application handle splitting up the traffic.

Server 2003 has features built in to support this with any pair of network cards. I've never used it but it supposedly works very well.

However, on a typical home network you're not going to notice any difference using either method. There are several reasons for this. One of those being that the PCI bus doesn't have the throughput for even a single Gigabit NIC. PCI Express is different, but you still won't notice the difference on a typical home network. And you most certainly won't notice the difference on a single cable modem connection because even a 10Mbit NIC is plenty fast enough for those.