Two Ethernet Ports, Can I Use Both?

[demolaynyc 0]

Alright, it turns out I found an unopened ethernet PCI card somewhere around the house. I'm planning to install it on my computer and plug in an ethernet connection to it adding it on to my other ethernet connection. What I'm wondering is if I connect two cables to my computer, what will be the effect? Will it be faster? Will it lower my game ping down? Or it won't work at all.What will happen if I connect two ethernet connections to my computer?

[faulty.lee 0]

Alright, it turns out I found an unopened ethernet PCI card somewhere around the house. I'm planning to install it on my computer and plug in an ethernet connection to it adding it on to my other ethernet connection. What I'm wondering is if I connect two cables to my computer, what will be the effect? Will it be faster? Will it lower my game ping down? Or it won't work at all.
What will happen if I connect two ethernet connections to my computer?

Yen, you can use them both, but it will not speed up your game, if you're playing across the internet. Even LAN based game also won't benefit from this configuration.

Reason, first of all, how fast is your internet connection, assuming ADSL, in the order or 512Kbps to a few Mbps. But how fast is the Ethernet?? It's in the order of at least 10Mbps, common one are 100Mbps and even 1Gbps. So, with single internet connection and a 100Mbps ethernet, you're only utilizing less than 10% of it's capacity. Putting 2 NIC will not make it any faster, might even cause a bit slow down, due to the overhead.

If you're use 2 NIC to setup a server, be it file server or database server or any of those high bandwidth ones, it will help a lot. This is actually called load balancing, where the OS will distribute the transfer bandwidth across the 2 NIC to serve hundreds and thousands of request. Or as a way for redundancy, where when 1 NIC is down, the you still have another one to handle the traffics.

Another less common use for such configuration is to act as a router or bridge, to join up 2 diff networks or network segments

[Jeigh1405241495 0]

Haha were you thinking back to the old days where people hooked up two 56k modems to get a speed boost? I hope you were, as nostalgia is fun haha. Anyways yea, like faulty.lee said while it's a good idea in theory it would never be utilized anyways unless you were trasnferring huge files over your network all the time where it was actually beneficial to have them (and by huge files, I mean large numbers of gb). It's cool that you're thinking like that though

[unimatrix 0]

On an internal network, it would help if you were transfering large files. I deal with video files in uncompressed formats that can take up 100's of GB's for a project and we use a fibre channel card for several GB's/sec of transfer. In our render farm, every unit has 2 1GB/s NIC's, but mainly for redundancy. How much it actually helps in speeding up the distributed rendering projects is negliable, as far as I can tell. So for your usages, it's not going to help much. Even at home I have a 1MB/s symtric (meaning I get the same download and upload speed) so even an older 10MB/s card is going to be plenty.

Edited May 4, 2007 by unimatrix (see edit history)

[nightfox1405241487 0]

Since networking is my life, I'll get this somewhat cleared up.2 NICs won't make anything faster unless you have your software configured to do so. Like Novell NetWare can be configured to use 1 NIC for incoming traffic and the second for outgoing traffic or for redundancy, like if NIC 1 is loaded, NIC 2 can take some traffic.For the everyday home user, it really serves no purpose on a workstation. You just eat up another IP address on your network.[N]F

[demolaynyc 0]

aah so it will only be beneficial if I am to use it for local network? How about massive surfing on the web, would dual connection help?

[faulty.lee 0]

Since networking is my life, I'll get this somewhat cleared up.
2 NICs won't make anything faster unless you have your software configured to do so. Like Novell NetWare can be configured to use 1 NIC for incoming traffic and the second for outgoing traffic or for redundancy, like if NIC 1 is loaded, NIC 2 can take some traffic.

For the everyday home user, it really serves no purpose on a workstation. You just eat up another IP address on your network.

[N]F

That's actually not the job of the software, but it's the OS itself. In windows XP you can already configure 2 NIC to work together, just it doesn't have the more specific configuration comparing to those Server OS. If you bridge the 2 NIC, you only take up 1 IP address, that's the purpose of using it. If it's taking 2 IP, it can't be redundancy anymore

Alright, it turns out I found an unopened ethernet PCI card somewhere around the house. I'm planning to install it on my computer and plug in an ethernet connection to it adding it on to my other ethernet connection. What I'm wondering is if I connect two cables to my computer, what will be the effect? Will it be faster? Will it lower my game ping down? Or it won't work at all.
What will happen if I connect two ethernet connections to my computer?

That's exactly what Jeigh mention earlier about using 2 x 56K modem to speed up the internet, in the olden days. You could do the same nowadays with ADSL or Cable, but I've no seen anyone doing it.

If it's at my country, Malaysia, it useless to do so in peak hours. I'm not exactly sure how ADSL is installed here, but from what i understand, every area has sort of a small "hub", bout 10 or more ports to distribute the signal. Each of these hub has a fix bandwidth allocated from the trunk. If we're the only guy using it in the area, then we'll get maximum download as per our subscription. Well, if the ports is full, and everyone is using it at the same time, we'll get much much less. The total bandwidth allocated per hub is less than the total bandwidth of all the ports added up. Further more, the main trunk line into our country is so small, we can only achieve high download speed from local(within the country) servers. That's considering our country's broadband penetration rate is still less than 10%.

[HellFire121 0]

It is possible to do this but as someone said above it depends on how you configure it.For example you can have a downloading connection and a browsing connection, configured differently so basically you can browse at full speed and download at full speed. (Keep in mind though this will only work if you have 2 different connections, i'm talking 2 internet connections)I know someone that does this, though he runs a server on one and his normal stuff is on another one. It works quite well actually.-HellFire

[FirefoxRocks 0]

For most home users, you don't even reach the threshold of your 1st NIC. For example, my NIC is 10 MB/s. My lite cable connection is at about 30-60 kb/s (usually around 50kb/s). Therefore, even if I made the connection 200 times faster, my 1st NIC can still handle the traffic.Unless you have a connection in which the speed is higher than the speed on your NIC, 1 NIC is good enough.

[demolaynyc 0]

Aah I see. I guess there's no need to spend any time opening up my computer. Thanks a lot, I appreciate the help.

[hazemmostafa 0]

Hello , Found my question related so I will put it here if you dont mind What if my computer is connected to 2 networks and through one of them I connect to internet and the other will have an internet connection next week so I ll have 2 gateways How to use them both ?I use XP pro and thinking if I login with 2 accounts maybe will this work or not ?Thank You hazemmostafa

[vizskywalker 0]

What if my computer is connected to 2 networks and through one of them I connect to internet and the other will have an internet connection next week so I ll have 2 gateways How to use them both ?

Well, a lot of how that is used depends on the software using it. For example, I frequently run my computer with both a wireless internet connection and a wired internet connection. When surfing the web, using Firefox, it picks one connection and sticks with it. If one of the connections dies, it switches to the other automatically, but then it will stick with the other even if the first reconnects. When using AIM however, if both connections are active when I open the messenger program, it picks one connection. If only one is open, and then I add the other, it logs me in from two separate IP addresses. So for some applications you may see a boost in speed, such as downloading two different large files, but liekly you'll only see a very slight increase int he stability of the fact that you are connected to the internet. Although, if you still go through the same kind of connection, such as two modems from the same provider, you likely won't even see an increase in connectivity.

That's actually not the job of the software, but it's the OS itself. In windows XP you can already configure 2 NIC to work together, just it doesn't have the more specific configuration comparing to those Server OS. If you bridge the 2 NIC, you only take up 1 IP address, that's the purpose of using it. If it's taking 2 IP, it can't be redundancy anymore

That's not entirely true. Yes the operating system can bridge two connections, but essentially what that does is create a virtual connection that shares both of the real connections and only allows software to see the virtual connection. If you don't bridge the connections, however, software can still take advantage of the two separate connections on its own. So both the OS and the applications share the responsibility.
~Viz