HeyHey~

Trying to understand the point of having two ethernet ports on most mobos these days.

Soes anyone use both? How does it help? Is there a way to load balance? The only way I think this could be useful is if you could tell a browser to use port A and tell LAN traffic to use port B... Is this even possible?

does anyone have real world applications which take adavantage of having two ports? TIA

Do you mean aside from "If some is good more MUST be better!" type marketing think?

Using the box as a firewall, daisy chain connection sharing, ... Mostly jobs better served by dedicated router or switch appliance hardware, but occasionally useful none the less.

LOL- that's what I figured. thanks again- I was worried I was missing out on some cool application/usage for my extra port on my A7N8X

well and yes you can do load balancing, but you'll either need two switches or a managed switch that can do trunks. basically 90% of people will never need or use it.

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Well, 'most' may be hard to overcome, but there are uses. For desktop boards it is not all that common, but server boards can often want load sharing or failover. At work we also had a corporate LAN and a private engineering LAN with a separate address space. The computers would be dual homed. Before I went wireless at home, my myth box was my router for the wired windows connections.

As for choosing which port a LAN goes out. No, you cannot truly do this as easy as you say. Only one of the ports gets the default gateway to send all other packets. Separate subnets can always be controller with the help of 'route --help'. Windows or linux for that command.

My buddy has one cat5 line into his basement.....it goes into his gb ethernet port on his motherboard. The other is setup for internet connection sharing, and when i bring my laptop over to his house I plug into it to get online.....

Sure, a hub/switch could easily do the same, but it's another piece of hardware to purchase and for the once a month it gets used....not worth the price.

I'm sure this isn't what designers were thinking when they decided to double up the ethernet ports....but it works well enough for us.

I guess I had secretly hoped that someone had come up with some amazingly cool usage for that second port.

With the saturation of NAT'ing switches and routers out these days- it just seems like the aforementioned bell/whistle. I mean good lord my own mother has a 5 port switch in her house! (of course I bought it)

I could see the desire for fallback in the datacenter server scenario- but on someone's DFI game rig board? just seems a bit silly.

Did anyone mention the fact the parts probably cost 20 cents and it lets them market the board as 'Server' or 'Redundant' and sell it for an extra few bucks. Profit margins is probably your answer.