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I have yet to find a use for two nics in a computer. My new 8RDA3+ has two onboard nics. Why would you need two of them ? Networking ? No, I have four comps on my network and each has one nic. Internet connection ? Nope, my four comps use a router to share the cable internet. I got it, they put two on it to confuse me.

if you were using that as a fire wall.. internet in and internet out. umm.. if it was a file server you can team the 2 ports to somewhat doubble your speeds.

My router has it's own firewall, plus I use Norton Internet Security on all my comps.
I transfer files between my comps at 2200+kbs via BulletProof FTP Server/CuteFTP Client. It's much faster than the old drag and drop from comp to comp.

If you did not have a router you would use one nic to connect to your cable modem and the second nic to connect to another computer to share your internet connection thru ICS. Since you do have a router I cant think of a good use for the second nic unless the other one fails.

yup, what was said above. servers use nic teaming to increase performance...or can be used to connect to 2 different networks (production and test, for example). each nic would have a static IP/subnet for each logical network. another use would be redundant failover. if one dies, the other may take over (like teaming).

Bridging. Say you have two subnets and one has the net and one doesn't. you can put a NIC on each and bridge em over or something like that. I know XP has a bridge feature.

I just got this DFI LAN party and it has 2 NICs. Great mobo! Trying to figure out how to disable one of the NICs tho as it shows that stupid tray icon saying "network connection unplugged". Any ideas?

Vid, go to the device manager and disable it. That's what I did and the icon went away.

I posted in the DFI forum at amdmb and a guy directed me to the shutoff for it in the BIOS. Thanks for the tip tho.

Those motherboards with dual NICs onboard usually are sub-par routers. I'd rather pick up a Mini-ITX board (The one designed for "network activities") and has dual NICs, but more importantly, dual network controllers.

As for teaming the 2 ports - Port Aggregation absolutely sucks on Windows. Trying to use it on an Adaptec DUO66, dual adaptec NICs, dual intel nics, Compaq dual nic, and a few other configs connected to a Cisco Catlyst 8x series absolutely sucked. Hook up the second cat5, and blue screens constantly - gave up on it all together.

Now, if your board supports it, the dual nics would be nice for port failover - but iirc, 99.99% of the consumer boards out there use a single net chip, which makes it useless if the NIC itself fails.

I've used dual NICs before though - 2 networks - one for normal internet use and one 10.x subnet reserved exclusively for gaming rigs where I used to work is one example. Don't have to worry about the game bandwidth sucking up internal bandwidth for our applications.

I have dual NIC's in 3 of my PC's



when the server is getting hit buy one PC, the other may access it as well, and that transfer will go through the other Nic, so it does speed things up for me

Geez, and here I am running a 4port NIC, and not thinking anything about it.




BC

Hey BC welcome to PCA !!!

Jordan

yea, i used to run a dual and a quad in my file server... but now im down to just the dual.. its fast enuff with just the dual... no need for 6 ports. i will however still be adding a third gigabit port for lans that support it.