How does DUAL ETHERNET benifit me?

i have a ex58-extreme motherboard, and it has dual ethernet ports, so i am just useing one, but how would somebody use the second one..

does it want me to take two ethernet wires from the same router and plug them both in? i cant see how this would increase speed or anything

No

The second ethernet port is there so that you have the option of connecting to more than one network at a time. Some computers, like the ones I use at work have the primary NIC connected to the regular internet and the second NIC connects to switch that connects other devices together so they can communicate with each other over a private 10. network without being connected to the buisness network.

You could, connect the regular internet to the switch and then use a port from the switch to run to your PC but then everything connected to the switch is exposed to the internet (this upsets the IT people) and your PC has to let the switch traffic the communication which will make things slightly slower.

You can't run the NIC's in parallel like you were asking.

Edit: I like having two NIC's because they do fail some times and its nice to have a backup

King107s said:

You can't run the NIC's in parallel like you were asking.

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Well, you can, but it is a pain to get working.

didn't AMD try to simplify teaming with a "feature" on one of their chipsets?

edit: quick search found this: http://www.amdplanet.it/tag/schede-madri/news/19438/dfi-lan-party-ut-nf680i-lt-sli-t2r.html

Teaming function for Gigabit LANs
The I/O provides 2 teaming LAN interface on the 680i. For gamers, the biggest benefit of Teaming technology will occur in LAN Games. When transferring large data files between computers, this technology effectively doubles the original Ethernet bandwidth. When gamers are battling each other across a LAN equipped with Teaming technology it will provide them with fast, bottleneck-free gaming. DFI's new LANParty UT NF680i LT-T2R motherboard is provided with Teaming technology equipped GbE LAN interfaces controlled by the high-performance VITESSE VSC8601 x 2 GbE phy.

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splat said:

didn't AMD try to simplify teaming with a "feature" on one of their chipsets?

edit: quick search found this: http://www.amdplanet.it/tag/schede-madri/news/19438/dfi-lan-party-ut-nf680i-lt-sli-t2r.html

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That's kinda interesting. Wonder how well it works out and if it's actually necessary.

I used to use the teaming feature before and there is no benefit to it during normal usage.

what it can do is balance high network traffic between the 2 nics and it can double the bandwidth but if your the only PC on the network with a 2Gb link its a waste.

Most ISP don't offer cable or DSL that can handle 2Gbit or even 200Mbit anyway.

Unless you need to run 2 separate networks or have a very high speed internet and can have both NIC at the same time for double bandwidth, I'd have the second port disabled in BIOS to free up system resource a bit.

antipesto93 said:

i have a ex58-extreme motherboard

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Me too!

King107s said:

Edit: I like having two NIC's because they do fail some times and its nice to have a backup

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One of mine failed a couple weeks ago. I was very thankful to have a backup ready to rock

I think this should be made a sticky, it comes up more often then no these days.

An additional use would be if you wanted to use the system as a network firewall/router/bridge. But it's not likely you'd do that with a gaming rig, or any sort of desktop PC, for that matter.

Redundancy? When you accidentally cut the traces to one of the ports while doing something stupid involving a folding knife and a CPU cooler, you'll still have one working Ethernet port..