Asus Dual Lan question

[chilidog]

Can anyone point me in the direction of some more information on using a dual lan set up? I have an Asus Crosshair board which has dual gigabyte lan connections. The install manual references pages that aren't in the book. I am currently using a hard port off of my Netgear Rangemax router and am wondering if I should be using two ports...

[Lespaul20]

You only need to use both ports if you have two different networks.

[dannowon2]

Not necesserily, Its more useful for LAN Parties with the High bandwidth requirement but it can be used at home or work, But using the two wont really make much of a difference at Home, But its great for LAN Parties

[Lespaul20]

I've never been at a LAN party but how would two jacks help anything.

[mojo]

Some of the newer motherboards with 2 jacks like that will let you trunk them together to get more bandwidth, but it's really of very limited use. To take full advantage of it the other machines in the network would need to setup the same way.

[Lespaul20]

I did some reading and I see what you mean. I think it's marketing crap. The doubling up of bandwidth just doesn't make sense to me. If you have a 2Gbit connection to 1Gbit router/switch/hub you still will only have 1Gbit worth of bandwidth. That's the way I see it.

[dannowon2]

Unless of course you wanted to run a server on it, Then the dual nics would be very useful, My server I use for my LAN Parties has 2 Dual Headed Nics in it and I can copy and install stuff on more client PC's at once.

[Lespaul20]

I only see that being useful if you were connected directly to the other PCs via crossover and not though a switch or router.

[mojo]

No, his situation works. You would use one switch port for each port on your computer. The aggregate bandwidth of a gigabit switch is 1 gigabit multiplied by the number of ports, not divided, so as long as the trunked server and the multiple clients are all connected to the same switch, you can take advantage of the additional bandwidth. That said, I still say that there are very few situations where this will actually do you any good and it's mostly marketing crap.

[Lespaul20]

Ok, but the way I understand TCP/IP only one packet is transmitted on the network at a time. Which is the reason for CSMA/CD. Therefor even if you had a 2Gbit virtual connection to the router/switch the router/switch could only process one packet at its rated speed at a time.

[mojo]

The answer to that question is honestly above my head, but I do know that modern switches have a fast enough backplane to allow for full duplex traffic through all ports simultaneously, meaning that an 8 port gigabit switch could theoretically have 16 Gb/s flowing through it if all conditions are ideal.

[Lespaul20]

Regardless of how it's supposed to work, I agree most of it's marketing.